Thoughts on PLA/Gen 9 overworld encounters?

[jemarq04]

I've been working on adding all the SWSH encounters to the API, and now that it's complete I'm moving towards adding Legends Arceus. However, starting in this game, Bulbapedia no longer reports encounter rate percentages and Serebii only lists percentages for PLA. Additionally, the encounter rates from Serebii for PLA seem to be user-derived with two-digit precision floating point percentages along with the corresponding alpha encounter rate. The API can't currently handle floating point encounter rates, and there won't even be any rates going forward, so I'm curious what people think.

How should we handle encounters in games which have no simple encounter rate % (PLA, SV, PLZA)? My current thoughts are to make the rarity field in encounter_slots.csv nullable with tests in place to ensure that the value is only null for PLA and generation >= 9. That way we can record the pokemon that can be encountered, just without corresponding rates. But I'm curious to see if anyone else has any inputs on this.

[Naramsim]

Hi! That might be the only feasible way I think. Rendering nullable the rate field. Probably the rates are there in the game but a decompilation maybe is needed to find the values, that's why maybe Bulbapedia and the other sites still don't report the values.

I'd say we could even skip the rates for PLA if you think the values in Bulbapedia aren't 100% real. About the floating point precision, the less intrusive way to document it would be to rount the value to an integer, but that would make the info not reliable. Else a change in the schema that would affect all the other rates as well. Possibily breaking many applications if we add a .0 suffix to the currently available rates.

Adding a test is a great way to enforce consistency, I actually wouln'd have thought about it and just render the field nullable. Adding the test is a good point!

[jemarq04]

Ok great, I’ll get to work on that then! I’ll be using both Serebii and Bulbapedia to guide these as they display the encounter data in slightly different ways.