I guess I made the game ending mistake of choosing charmander at the start and heading into Brock's gym with a team of both nidorans and a charmander at level 10. I lost to the trainer's sandshrew, but I got my charmander up to level 12 from the geodude. I lost a lot of exp, but I was hoping to level up by fainting Brock's geodude. I did just that, and lost horribly when onix outsped and OHKO'd all my pokemon. When I went to rechallenge him, geodude no longer gave me any exp. Do I really have to spend the next 4 hours grinding a nidoran to level 16 on the level 5 pokemon in Viridian? Or do I have to give up and start from scratch on a new server? That's the s**t I'd expect from a FTP mobile game that's squeezing me for as much money as possible, but not even they would go this far.
