So this Christmas my sister and I got Pokemon X and Y, and we've been spending the past few days playing it. It's been a very enjoyable experience thus far, I've been very impressed with the surprises and the general effort Game Freak has worked into their latest game. However, last night my Sister had a very interesting event happen in her game. She had defeated Team Flare in the Powerplant and she was healing her Pokemon up at the Pokecenter, buisness as usual. But when the nurse gave her back her pokemon, she noticed that the nurse had more dialog for her:[quote]"Oh... It looks like your Pokémon may be infected with the Pokérus. Little is known about the Pokérus, except that it is a microscopic life-form that attaches to Pokémon. While infected, Pokémon are said to grow exceptionally well." [/quote]At first I thought it might have been some really clever story or plot related thing, like Team Flare had engineered some type of Virus steroid thing to artificially make their Pokemon stronger or some shit like that, but upon going to Bulbapedia and looking up their [url=http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9Rus]Pokerus Article[/url] I discovered a few things: 1) This is a mechanic that has existed since Gold and Silver. 2) The chances of having a wild or bred Pokemon infected with Pokerus is extremely rare, about 3 in 65,536. For reference, the chances of finding a shiny pokemon is apparently 3 in 24,576. That means for about every 3 Shiny Pokemon you've ever found in the wild, you might have seen a single Pokemon infected with Pokerus, and unless you caught it, you would never know. 3) You can quickly infect other pokemon you own with Pokerus using the patient zero, but after a certain amount of time after the initial infection the virus no longer transmits. 4) Pokemon infected with Pokerus gain double effort values from battling, and it keeps that bonus forever after the initial infection. I'm not a pokemon expert, so I have no idea what the hell that means, but it sounds super good. If you can help explain that crap to me, feel free to, I'd love to understand this better. Anyways my main point is: Who the actual hell thought of this shit? Again, I don't exactly understand what Effort values are, but usually doubling any sort of stat gain is crazy beneficial. But it's been 13 years since Gold came out, and this is the first time that I ever heard about this feature. What is the point of making something that stupidly rare and hard to detect? Did an intern get really bored and slip it into the code as an easter egg, and the developers felt the need to replicate that crap in future games? If my sister's pokemon end up infinitely better than mine just because she won the lottery, how is that fair at all? Help me to understand this shit because it makes zero sense.