I had an interesting idea for rivals in Pokémon when playing through Heart Gold/Soul Silver with my little brother. The premise of the idea is [b]your rival is an actual player, just like you.[/b] See, what my brother and I did was after every gym, we'd battle to see who was stronger. At the end, I had won 3 and he had won 5, but he got Water and I chose Fire. It was interesting because we weren't only building our teams to beat the game, but to beat each other. It was a lot if fun. Now, I also have an idea for how Gamefreak could implement this into whatever Pokémon game they make next. Here it is: When you reach certain points I'm the game, you battle another real player at the same point in the game. These battles would replace the normal rival battles. To make things fair, there would be restrictions on the matchmaking, depending on play time, average team level, team size, etc. This way, you don't run into someone who spent 3 or more hours grinding their Pokémon up to level 20 when you have level 5 Pokémon. A new system of disobedience would be added to discourage grinding to ridiculous levels. The simplest system I can think of is without gym badges, Pokémon will have a 10% chance if disobeying for each level above level 10. This cap would be raised by a margin, depending on the levels needed to defeat the eighth gym. Estimating level 45, each gym would raise that cap by 5, possibly more earlier on, like 6 or 7. Anyway, it's a simple idea, without too much thinking to it. Please tell me what you think, or ways it could be improved.