>>54275181100% agree. Half the issue with stuff like this is that people know about hidden values, now. So they can take advantage of them. But if the values only affect an RNG effect, the best you can do it raise it up and hope the RNG favors you. People like to make Pokemon out to be this RNG heavy game that needs to be curbed, but it's the RNG that makes the game fucking interesting to begin with. It breathes life into something that's honestly more like a spread sheet in video game form, sometimes. Happiness being a stat that matters makes the games feel more alive and makes them more about raising monsters than being good at spreadsheets.
>>54275126So, Happiness (Friendship) and Affection are now the same thing (as of Let's Go). First thing to do with a system like the one suggested is increase Friendship from 255 to 510, then spread the levels of Friendship out by double. There are currently 8 of them: 0, 1, 50, 100, 150, 200, 230, and 255 spread out double becomes 0, 1, 100, 200, 300, 400, 450, and 510 (1 is special so it has to stay and 450 in place of 460 for balance). Those are our thresholds. Then we attach the friendship bonuses to those stats in the way that they already are. See pic related.
On top of this, the Pokemon keeps track of these "Happy Moments" in the same way it keeps track of its encounter data. Where threshold 1 is 0, so that's just encounter. But 2 is 1 Friendship, so that's how you started to become friends. 3 is 50, 4 is 10, etc etc. And the data could be as simple to keep track of as 8 separate 8 digit strings: 000 000 00; where the first set keeps track of level, the second is location, and the third is action (01 battle, 02 picnic, 03 walking). This would be a simple set of numbers to keep track of, but they'd ensure that the Pokemon has a rough record in its code of where it has been.
