From Gabe at PA

This whole Pokemon leveling thing really reminds me of Chocobo breeding in FF7.

Thanks to everyone who mailed me their Pokemon tips. Every single person who mailed me stressed the importance of EV's and proper EV training over just about everything else. I was given some great links and spent a good chuck of the day yesterday reading everything I could about them.
I'm thirty years old now, and I've been playing games for more than twenty of those. I've seen some real bullshit in all that time and EV's are right up their towards the top of the list. As far as I can tell this is how they work. If your Pokemon fights another Pokemon that's really fast for example, it earns a point towards it's speed Effort Value (EV). For every four of these points that you get your Pokemon will gain one more point to it's speed stat when it levels up. Now each Pokemon awards EV's for different stats and some give points for multiple stats. The problem is that these EV's are invisible and limited. So there's only a certain number of them that a single Pokemon can take advantage of and there's no way to track them in game. I got tips like "create a spreadsheet for each of your Pokemoin with rows for all their stats and manualy enter any EV's they get..."
Create a spreadsheet?
Then I started reading about IV's and I saw this shit:
Now that I've showed how much they can affect stats, let's grab the equation for determining a Pokemon's Individual Value. Keep in mind that this is NOT for Hit Points. That has its own equation.
IV = ((Math.Ceiling(Stat / Personality Value) - 5) * 100 / Level Value ) - 2 * Base Stat – Effort Points / 4
Are you fucking serious? I never got past algebra. All I want to do is show people my Pokemons, not build a Goddamn time machine!
So I started digging into serebii.net yesterday and I got my first glimpse at just how far this rabbit hole goes. I told myself I wasn't going to fall into it but I ended up spending the morning trying to acquire a new Chimchar with the preferred "jolly" nature. Once I'd done that I spent the afternoon EV training him on Ponytas and Machamps. I'm telling you this not because I am proud but because I need help. Someone needs to stop me before I start doing long division to figure out what kind of fucking berry I should feed my shittlesaur.