Finally: why did I never just bring the Pokémon Hangman into the site layout proper. It doesn't even really have the nostalgia thing going for it because I did redo the look of it at some stage; I just redid it still as a standalone page for some reason. I should do that.

I just do not have that degree of investment in Pokémon Go, and eventually basically stopped playing it. For a long time I vaguely meant to get around to updating it all but put it off because of all the work I'd have to redo. I guess I feel better having just put the final nail in that coffin.

Writing guides for a regular game makes sense: people might pick up that game at any point in the future and whatever you wrote still makes sense. For a live-service game, you'd have to stay invested and keep redoing it every time the developer decides to change stuff around.

I had really, really forgotten just how long and comprehensive my Pokémon Go guide was. I'd forgotten half the mechanics I meticulously explained there, even. In hindsight it's a bit painful that I spent so much effort on it for a game that would inevitably go change those mechanics later.

Then I started to hit my stride with it in 2009 (Blue Rescue Team, Explorers of Time, Shadows of Almia), though with some lingering awkwardness, and by 2012's Conquest review I've started producing something I can basically read today and nod along with. It's fun to watch myself improve!

I enjoyed rereading all the game reviews I've done. The oldest, for Pokémon Colosseum, is from 2005, and I was very obviously fifteen and did not really know how to review things. Trozei (2006) and Ranger (2008) are getting better but still a bit awkwardly written and rambly.

I guess the secondary motivation for keeping that page was to not completely retire *all* the TRUTH pages, which were important to the site's identity when I first started it - I was very invested in debunking other sites that were wrong on the internet.

(Originally I had these TRUTH pages for each generation, briefly debunking misinformation I'd seen going around. I kept the R/S/E one at the time because people were still saying Shedinja needed a ball in your bag, but both of the other rumours on there are just completely unheard of today.)

I retired some but not all of my original game pages for the first three generations in 2005. Today I'm not sure why I removed the G/S/C Tips and Tricks instead of just making rewrites, and think I should probably not have retained the "TRUTH of R/S/E" page.

Yes

All in all, it’d kind of be a whole can of worms. I won’t say I’ll never do it, probably the best way if I were going to would be to log the full picker state each time we successfully pick a favorite and work with the individual eliminations, but I suspect it’d be an all-around headache.

Probably, in theory, the hypothetical data would still basically average out to roughly representing what Pokémon are most favored, because most people will probably be using it that way. But then we also open it up to people wanting to game the stats…

Likewise, maybe someone is doing something I’ve actively suggested to people - if they want to pick between a custom subset of Pokémon, use split mode and pick the Pokémon that should be included in the first round, then pick between them. How do we tell if a person is doing that?

Lots of people use the picker with filters like final evolutions only, while others don’t - what’s a fair and reasonable way to aggregate that data together? Just giving points to Pokémon that are on someone’s favorite list won’t cut it - then final evolutions have an advantage.