>>48692623The key difference is that it was something you could entirely ignore by not using Amie until LGPE, where Affection and Friendship were merged. They kept that in SwSh, alleviating the problem by making the highest Friendship you can get w/o Camp and berries 160, thus not triggering the ashpull effects quite yet. You'd have to actively use that stuff to start dodging shit and healing statuses. But in BDSP, they removed the 160 threshold again, probably because there isn't an Amie-like thing you can do with your party.
By the way, following pokemon in BDSP only makes your team's friendship grow FASTER, not AT ALL. Whether or not you use the feature, levelling them raises the stat, meaning that by a certain point in the game, you'll see ashpulls start happening without much warning. Sure, you COULD use bitter medicine to decrease the stat, but besides the badfeels of essentially feeding your Pokemon rat poison, it also makes the game more tedious--which just harkens back to the original question: Why can't this just be an option that people can turn on and off?
