Okay, I'm sorry for doubting you, I really am, I've defended your design choices to friends even, but reducing the drop rate of heart scales, really? Are you aware that this in no way increases actual difficulty? It requires no additional skill to farm, it requires no extra strategy or intelligence as a result of this change. What it truly reinforces is that experimentation is shunned, and that tedium is something that that you consider a measure of difficulty. Heart scales are what allow players to play around with interesting team combinations. By punishing players so heavily for using them, especially in a game with such a wide variety of species, you're essentially pigeonholing us into preplanning our teams for the whole game to minimize the effect that a lack of resources has on us. Every obstacle is easily overcome by ingenuity, save heart scales.
Now, before I continue, I'd like to say you've made a really fun game on the whole, the battles, the music, the story, and environments are all top notch as far as I'm concerned (Save maybe the wasteland because its difficult to actually understand what's going on visually.) This is obviously not a game-breaking issue, it's just my opinion that it would help the game.
The randomness is infuriating, because there's no way to predict the rate at which you'll roughly be recieving heart scales, you just have to mindlessly grind for hours, and pray that luck is on your side. I don't know about you, but I don't find that to be particularly compelling gameplay. This coming from someone who's happy to grind EVs 1 at a time for my whole team. The problem is, when I spend hours on a task, only to receive virtually no reward because of the power of poor luck, it makes me want to quit playing. It's not fun, it's not difficult, it's just tedious and frustrating, I've killed 20+ luvdiscs and not a single one was holding a heart scale for me to steal. That would be fine, if I could encounter luvdiscs with relative ease. But Luvdisc itself is already a low spawn rate, on top of the fact that you have to fish for it, which, I think we can all agree is not the most interesting mechanic in pokemon either.
I understand, and very definitely appreciate the genuine difficulty in this game, I love the level caps, The special high level battles, I love the way event pokemon work, I enjoy the characters, I enjoy the story, on the whole I find the game very enjoyable, but I can honestly say this is severely impacting my enjoyment of it. Using the few easily found heart scales from rocks, etc. one can make a team that's 'brokenly' powerful. The extra scales are for experimentation with new pokemon. As for older players that have already long since got their bounty of heart scales, congratulations, this is a complaint from someone who's started on EP 14.
A different source of payment for the pokemon psychologist might also help with this. The fact is, my current team can probably roll through the rest of the game with minor trouble. But I like many others, yourself likely included, enjoy trying out different pokemon in my team.
Now, all this being said, if I might offer a solution, it would likely be along these lines, revert the heart scales nerf, please. Alternatively, you might increase luvdisc's spawn rate, or allow access to heart scales in some other less frustrating manner that involves real difficulty (fixed level battles, random team battles, or some kind of re-doable randomized puzzle.) Please take the tedium out of heart scales, the game has plenty from other sources.
Sincerely, a big fan
Diamond.
(PS: Sorry if this came off sounding hostile at any point, definitely not my intention, I really do love this game, it's why I feel compelled to come here and say this. I'm easily enjoying this more than any main series games save for this one issue.)
