Do you find the green/yellow/red on Pokemon stats useful?

Question

I've been working on some changes to the site for a while now, and was considering whether to change the stat bars on the Pokedex. The current one looks like this:

The new alternate one uses a different colour for each stat, same as in the actual games:

What do you think? Do you find the current colours useful to see what are good stats? On the other hand, it's a bit arbitrary as green doesn't always mean great and red/yellow doesn't always mean bad (for example Pachirisu has no green but was part of a winning team at the VGCs).

Comments

In my opinion, new looks really pretty.

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I like the old style. It's easier to digest for me.

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I like it, but the old one is better.

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May I ask why, though? I mean, the original coloring is self explanatory, but I don't know if you're trying to emulate the games' way of stat bar coloring or what.

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@SeeYaLater Do you know the numbers that Smogon uses for each colour? [Edit: nvm I found out they use a formula for the colour which has a complete scale not just a few colours.]
@Jason Yes it was supposed to be the same colours as in-game.

Answer 1

I see that you chose Archeops, the only Pokemon whose Pokedex number equals its BST, as your example. A wise choice.
I kind of like how I can use the colrs to visualize how good or bad the stats are, but I don't like how the cutoff points between colrs are so random and arbitrary. (like, why the hell is everything below 69 bad and everything above 70 okay) I think Smogon and Showdown! had the right idea here, which was to scale the colrs. By convention, we can have a stat of 0 be red and a stat of 255 be green, which gives these two equations.
red=511-2*stat
green=2*stat
This is what it ends up looking like.

You might have noticed that most of the stats end up becoming red or orange, because a stat pretty much needs to be 191 or higher to be green. If you think this is a problem, then you can try scaling the colrs up.
red=511-4*stat
green=4*stat

The alternate suggestion might work if you arranged the colrs in a better order, like maybe this.

It still looks kind of gay, but why do we care?

Comments

Lol
The end loololoollooollol

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Because it triggers me I’m homophobic. Okay I’m not really but it hurts my eyes it’s too colorful. (Or “colourful” If you’re one of those people from England that like to misspell things for some reason.)

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I’m pretty sure adding the extra “u” isn’t wrong, it’s just their way of spelling things. :\

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It is wrong. The right spelling is "colaeiyr".
@Twineedle I guess for the third idea we can make the colors a little darker or more grayish.

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Yeah I think going with a colour scale is the way to go. It's a good way to visually compare stats.
It doesn't need to be complex either. All it needs is just a few extra colour intervals for different base stat numbers. We have three now: just make it half a dozen and you can make good distinctions simply eyeballing the chart.

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Are you sure we can just add more intervals? I like the equations better.

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I knew also it was Archeops lel

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@sumwun On the colourful version, the colours are in that order to match the games. But it sounds like the red/green scale is the most popular way to go.

Does anyone have suggestions for what stats should be what colour? I wouldn’t add too many different colours, maybe 6 at most - red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise(?), light blue(?)
So for example could be 0-30 / 31-60 / 61-90 / 91-120 / 121-150 / 151+

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Yeah I like that idea.

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As I said in the answer, I don't like having a small number of colrs because the intervals between colrs always seems so random. Like why 30 points for each colr? Why not have them be 1-32/33-64/65-96/97-128/129-160/161-192/193+? Why does everyone seem to hate equations so much?

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Lol well those are round numbers in a technical sense (binary) but for most people it would make more sense to have the cutoff on a multiple of 10. Btw there are very few Pokemon with stats over 150 so there wouldn’t be much point having different colours for, say, 160 and 250.

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But why do we have to have cutoffs at all? Why not scales or equations?

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Personally I prefer a few set colours. With scales it's harder to know when something is good or not. A lot of stat bars on Smogon are weird yellow-greenish mixes which are hard to distinguish and make them kind of pointless IMO.

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Honeslty, I think you should go with the same colours you have now except with a few extra tones in between. Something like: deep red (0 to 29), scarlet (30 to 59), orange (60 to 79), yellow (80 to 99), lime (100 to 119), green (120+).
I like intervals of 20 once you get past about base 60, since there are more Pokémon with stats above that range and thus more distinctions to make. You could add a seventh interval at 140 with a dark green, if mine end too early. In general I think any blue shade is too complicated.

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I think it's hard to know whether something is good or not either way. Like, who got to decide that 79 is bad and 80 is okay?

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I think the scaling/equations are a good idea.

Answer 2

For your example of Pachurisu, I say that doesn't mean Pachurisu is actually viable, the person who used Pachurisu even said that he used Pachurisu BECAUSE it wasn't very good. Besides, the viewer can judge whether or not a pokemon is useful by inspecting all its base stats, ability, move pools, and whatever else they need to factor in to decide if they want to use that pokemon. Base stats have, in my opinion, the greatest impact on how good a pokemon is, and showing which stats are good, mediocre, or bad, is very important. Also, most people are used to the current layout and might get confused, thinking that the pokemon is really good in HP, alright in Attack, and awful in Defense. So personally, my answer is keep it the same.

Comments

Thanks for the response. A better example might be Aegislash which is Uber on Smogon, but has 4/6 stats in the red.

P.S. yes this should be an answer, you’re answering the question ;)
Some of the comments above ought to be answers too. A one-sentence response is fine as a comment but anything more than that is often better as an answer here on Meta.

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I used Pachurisu as an example because YOU used it as an example lol. Thank you for clarifying I’ll edit that last part out now :)