Proving the rate of encounter formula and what Stench does prior to Emerald? (Answers still welcome)?

Question

I'm a very busy guy due to college and am unable to do the leg work. I can however use data that people provide me and use probability formulas in order to prove or disprove that Stench did nothing prior to Emerald version.

First off, I need to prove the rate of encounter formula. If that is incorrect, I will be unable to find out if the information on Stench is correct.

What I need people to do is go to Route 1 in FireRed or LeafGreen. There, you will go into 2000 patches of grass and record how many times you encountered a wild Pokemon. You must not have an item or ability that increases or decreases the encounter rate.

I will also need people to go to Route 1 in FireRed or LeafGreen and go into 2000 patches of grass and record how many times you encountered a wild Pokemon. You must have a Pokemon with the ability Stench leading your party. You cannot have any other items or abilities that increase or decrease the encounter rate.

You can post one of these and not the other. I would prefer you post both though. Think of this as an opportunity to find that shiny Pidgey or Rattata. And no, 2000 is not an excessive number.

Please do not lie about collecting this data for the points. It will most likely be incredibly obvious to me if you do lie, and then you might end up being the target of a downvoting campaign.

No user will receive best answer btw. I do implore you to upvote anybody who posts.

Comments

quick note for people there are 156 patches of grass in route 1 in total
So traverse the whole thing 13 times. o3o

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I think my FireRed is broken. It's kinda sad. :(

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doesn't running and cycling increase the encounter rate? So maybe specify that people who do this only walk.

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Nothing anywhere supports this, and I agree with Pokemaster in that what is meant by those ingame messages is that because you cover more ground, encountering a wild Pokemon happens sooner.

But yes, just in case running/biking does effect the encounter rate, I am requiring everybody to walk.

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I haven't seen whatever pokemaster said on the subject, but that does kind of make sense. However, there are trainers in the game that tell you running attracts wild pokemon. Of course this is not backed up by anything other than their dialogue, so you would have to test for that in a similar way you are testing Stench.

Answer 1

Ok, well I have finally gotten around to giving this a try.
Normal
Here I led with my Bulbasaur that had no item altering the encounter rate.
I encountered 124 Pokemon in 2000 patches of grass.

So I did some maths:
124/2000 x 100 = 6.2%
So the chance of encountering a wild Pokemon in normal conditions is 6.2%, which also means there is a 93.8% chance of encountering nothing.

Stench
Here I led with my Grimer with the ability Stench. My results really surprised me.
In 2000 patches of grass I encountered a total of 3 Pokemon. No, I am not joking/making this up. I seriously encountered only 3 Pokemon.
3/2000 x 100 = 0.15% chance of encountering something with a Stench Pokemon leading the party
Therefore a 99.85% chance of not encountering something.
Yes, with Grimer I think I just got very unlucky, but it still suggests that Stench does affect the encounter rate in FireRed/LeafGreen (I was using FR).

Also, something else I noticed. In the summary of Grimer it said that the abiliy Stench:
>Helps repel wild Pokemon

So that also suggests that Stench does indeed have the out of battle effect in FR/LG, even without my results.

Also, please note that it would be better if more people tried this, as one person can get skewed results, so my 6.2% chance of encountering something (for example) might be a little higher or lower than the true percentage, just through chance. This is the same for everything based on statistics.

Comments

Thank you.
I was planning on waiting for either 10 people (which is a good number in statistics) or just for a month if I can't get that many.

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yea that sounds like a good plan. I just added the last bit for those people who look at this and think "this has already been answered, so I'm not going to bother"