the_plateau | ANNOUNCEMENT 3: STRAIGHT TO VIDEO

Hey all! Friendly neighborhood mods here with a friendly neighborhood announcement!

There's nothing too exciting in this one-- just some technicalities we wanted to let everyone know about while we start tackling our next big FAQ/Informational Housekeeping Project: TRAVELING. It's time to get the Map and Pokemon Availability pages up to speed!

-POKEMON AVAILABILITY:

This one's just a reminder! Last announcement we had a Suggestion Post for Pokemon availability tweaks. We've gotten some great suggestions so far! As we're getting ready to work on officially updating this information, this is a final call for any suggestions from people who missed the last post!

-EXTENDED TRAVEL FAQ:

This is the next page we're phasing out-- like the old "Extended Item FAQ" page, it had a lot of information that shouldn't have been there, or was already available on other pages. All the important/relevant information has been moved over to the Johto and Kanto Map pages, respectively, and the particularly irrelevant/obsolete information has been deleted.

-WARP PADS 101:

As of June 2016, warp pads were introduced to both regions to aid with travel! BUT... none of the information regarding them or how they worked was ever listed anywhere outside of the original post that announced them. Needless to say, we wanted to fix that as soon as possible-- especially because a lot of people have had questions about them but nowhere to look for answers! In addition to the other information transferred over, we've updated both the Johto and Kanto Map Pages to include a blurb about the Warps along with the already-listed methods of travel. But just to make sure the whole game sees, here's the basics:

Warp Pads are located inside the Pokemon Centers in towns and cities, and will transport a trainer instantly to the Center in a city that is both next to the one they’re in and one they have already been to.
For example, this means that going from Violet to Ecruteak will take several warp trips, and will only work if the trainer has been to each of those cities before!
Just like information on captured Pokemon goes into the Pokedex, location data is keyed into each character’s Trainer ID as they visit new places. So no cheating! Get there on foot (or bike, or wing, or sitting crosslegged on top of your Torkoal) first!
With only a few exceptions, all towns/cities will have two warps in their Center: one to the previous town, and one to the next (ex: Violet City has one warp that will take you back to Cherrygrove, and one that will take you forward to Azalea).
The exceptions are Ecruteak City (which has a warp to the 'previous' city Goldenrod, as well as warps to both Olivine and Mahogany), and Saffron City (which has a whopping FOUR warps to the surrounding towns: Cerulean, Lavender, Vermillion, and Celadon).
There are no warps that go from one region to the other. The quickest, most reliable way to get from Johto to Kanto (and vice versa) is by the Magnet Train, which runs from Goldenrod to Saffron. A one-way trip takes about six hours, so still much quicker than getting there by foot, ferry, or flight would be!
Small, non-urban Pokemon Centers such as the ones on Mt. Moon or at the Lake of Rage are not outfitted with warps. Neither are small towns which do not have Pokemon Centers, ie New Bark and Pallet.
A trainer who has already been somewhere will NOT be able to escort a trainer who hasn’t through the warps.
Trainers who decide to hop through multiple warps all in a row might suffer from dizziness and vertigo! This normally wears off after half an hour or so-- unless you decide to go nuts and cross "Visit every single town in both regions in one day" off your bucket-list, in which case you probably will not be useful for much of anything after that. Go... go lay down for awhile.

-RIDE PAGERS:

Another fairly recent addition to the game (alongside the Sevii islands and the Gen 7 Pokemon) was Ride Pagers, a paid service that would allow characters to summon trained Pokemon specifically for riding. However, as the months have passed we've both started noticing and had people come to us with concerns about some potential issues with this mechanic.

As with the Warp Pads, the Ride Pagers were never listed on any official game information pages, meaning players had to hunt down the original announcement post in order to even know it was a thing.
In the video games, this mechanic was introduced mostly to avoid the frustration of having to keep Pokemon with HM moves on your team all the time and waste valuable move slots on said HM moves. However, Victory Road follows the rules of the Pokemon anime, in which Pokemon have no limits to the number of moves they can learn and therefore lose nothing by adding HM moves to their repertoire. In addition, the freeform roleplay setting has always allowed/encouraged characters to realistically ride their own Pokemon and utilize their unique rosters to accomplish everyday tasks and solve problems, making it redundant to have a specific in-game mechanic to summon un-owned Pokemon specifically for riding.
Some concerns have also been raised to us about the Ride Pager function devaluing/rendering pointless some of the perks for Breeder characters, such as not requiring Gym Badges to use travel-based HM moves like Surf and Fly.

With this in mind, we are considering how to best treat this mechanic, and would appreciate it if everyone answered these questions for us!