Looks very nice (I too am very happy to see a continuation of sorts for toxic purple), but one thing that worries me is that letting you steal Pokemon from any trainer would devalue actually finding and catching them a lot. Maybe this is your intention, but I think catching and raising Pokemon, evolving them and making them your own is one of the biggest draws of Pokemon. What's the point of that when you can upgrade them whenever you want because you see a trainer has some cool Pokemon? If you want to change your team it should at least take some effort in the form of finding a good Pokemon, catching it then grinding it up to the level of your team. It also trivialises difficulty because you'd have a massive pool of all different types of Pokemon to fall back on in case of a difficult battle. I get stealing Pokemon is an important thing for a team rocket hack but there needs to be a way to severely limit it, or encourage people not to do so. Like maybe the more Pokemon you steal, the more "infamy" you will gain and bad things will start to happen. Just a potential idea.



But anyways, disregarding that little rant I still really like the look of this hack. There's definitely a lot of room to be creative in a rocket hack, I hope you can pull it off well! Good luck!

Thank you!You're absolutely right, and finding a way to balance the novelty of stealing with keeping difficulty curves reasonable has been and still is an important issue in development. Catching Pokémon will be devalued in Rocket Edition-- in fact I've gone out of my way (lowering prize money, removing stray Poké Balls) to encourage stealing as the player's primary means of attaining new Pokémon.However: you will certainly not be able to steal from all Trainers from the very beginning-- as a grunt (which is the first and lowest rank within Team Rocket), for example, you can only steal Pokémon from kids and old people (that group includes Youngsters, Bug Catchers and Gamblers, among others). It should be noted that the first mission does feature a higher frequency of stealable Trainers than will be available in other areas until very late in the game (when you'll be able to steal from everyone), in order to familiarize players with the feature and to give them a larger pool potential party members from early on.For the most part this rank-based structure works well, provided stealable Trainer are consciously placed around the map, and their Pokémon's levels are balanced in lieu of them being stolen (more desirable Pokémon having lower levels, etc.). Your idea of stealing building infamy is spot-on, though, and I'm currently working on incorporating a system that devalues excessive theft which will be introduced during the second mission, which will help keep things even more balanced.