Pokemon Data story
Do the attributes of pokemon decide their usage rate?
In the battle, we definitely want to have each pokemon's 6 basic attributes: HP, Attack, Defense, Special Attack, Special Defense and Speed as large as possible. In this part, we are more focused on the statistical distribution of attributes of pokemons to see whether the pokemon usage rate in pokemon battles is positively related to their attributes.
Tiers
We believe that a pokemon that is used more frequently is more useful. This usage rate is what the Tier stands for. The Tier of pokemon consists of values: 'Uber', 'RU', 'OU', 'UUBL', 'UU', 'RUBL', 'RU', 'NUBL', 'NU', 'PUBL', 'PU', and 'LC'. 'Uber' represents the pokemons that are banned. 'LC' represents the pokemons that are too weak to be taken into account. When players are arranging their teams, we can only use the rest of tiers. Therefore, the available tiers are 'OU', 'UUBL', 'UU', 'RUBL', 'RU', 'NUBL', 'NU', 'PUBL', and 'PU', where 'OU' represents the most frequently used ones and 'PU' the least. We generally only focus on pokemon in Tier 'OU'. Then, it is common to believe the total of 6 basic attributes reveals a pokemon's power. The higher the total number is, the stronger the pokemon is. Therefore, we want to visualize the relation between Tier and attributes as follows. We can see it is what we expected. For all 6 attributes of pokemon, we can see that all pokemons in OU have higher values for the 6 attributes.
Pokemon 6 Attributes' Distribution
We can see that most pokemons' 6 attributes' figures are centered in 0-90. We then illustrate the attributes of OU pokemons.
6 Attributes' Distribution for Tier OU
In contrast, most pokemons with Tier OU have a figure of more than 90 for 6 attributes.
Does the later generation have pokemons with higher attributes?
Generation Distribution
Generally, a game series will introduce more powerful figures (or characters) when they promote a new generation so that gamers would want to follow the new generation. The later a pokemon is introduced, its possibility of being stronger is higher as well. In order to see whether pokemon games obey this routine, we will illustrate the changes of each generation. You can use the dropdown below to see the changes in the mean value of each attribute as well as the base total of them. (Base total = HP + Attack + Defense + Special Attack + Special Defense + Speed). Find the variations of pokemon attributes by generation by pressing the button below.
We can see that although the 4th generation has a specially high number in mean figures, the trends of pokemon games obey the mentioned routine.
How to select OU pokemons by their attributes?
In pokemon battles, in order to win over other gamers, generally we will select pokemons with higher attributes. Therefore, OU pokemon list is created. When making a team, we want to select a pokemon purposely, i.e. a pokemon with certain features. For example, we want to select a pokemon with high attack and fast speed. Therefore, to visualize each pokemon's attributes directly, we create the radar chart below so that we can see whether a pokemon can meet our demand.