I'm not exactly sure why, but it seems as though players are afraid to battle before they are able to build a dream team of competitive pokemon. I think the cause of this is the unrated tracking system. If players think that any loss they have will stick with them forever and affect their chances of ranking high on the competitive battling ladder they may be scared to battle with people early to mid game. The result is almost no battling happening early game which kind of makes it like playing the cartridge game with other people walking around.

 

Suggestion: Remove the unranked battle tracker and only track win/loss ratio for ranked events. Doing so may put people at ease about battling their low iv starters or partially ev trained in game team. This would add more depth and fidelity to the player's immersion into the pokemon world, and add a component of excitement currently missing from the early to mid game.

+1

I had an encounter yesterday where a guy asked me if I wanted to battle.

I asked what level he was at, and he said 13. I was level 10 with my four pokemon and didn't even have the first badge yet but I was like "Sure, let me go heal up."

 

So we battled and he was doing pretty well but then I took out his Charmander and then I assume he just got a couple of others not as high level and almost immediately after I beat his Charmander, the battle was aborted and my opponent had "disconnected".