It's the safest way to make trading possible. If not for this restriction, trading would "break" the game. You wouldn't try to catch a good IV pokemon, you would just have to farm dust and check the markets for that specific 100%IV pokemon.
Anyone saying otherwise is just thinking about themselves and their multiaccounts. If you would see it from Niantics perspective, its actually one of the only ways to make this possible.
GamePress
IV changes when traded, discussion thread
What are your opinions of the changing ivs on trades, personally I hate it as for me it makes trading only for getting regionals, where I think they should just make them all available everywhere. I can see why they have changed them, but I just don't care about trading anymore. Please keep it clean, address the other person's arguments, not the other person please.
Report
Answers
I think it will be a way to try to take poor to middling pokemon with some valuable feature, and make them better. I have two legacy Shadow Claw Gengar with stats (a/d/s) of 1/7/7 and 4/8/12. If I can find a best friend with something similar, maybe we can trade pokemon and improve these to the point where they are usable.
Also, with best friends, you can balance your second tier. I have a few strong Ttars, and some that aren't quite as good. I could swap the not as good ones for something else not as good, not necessarily even a Ttar, to balance our teams off. The benefit of getting some candy is also nice - let's one functionally turn dust into candy.
Trading won't solve every problem, but it should solve a few.
It's the only way to prevent a black market of perfect Pokemon. Consider the fact that up until 3 months ago, you could farm high IV Pokemon using scanners, I'm sure there are ppl who filled their accounts with perfects for the eventual introduction of trading. These ppl would then sell those Pokemon on Ebay.
There still might be something similar for regionals and shiny, but shiny can't be farmed and they won't affect the game in any meaningful way.
Another category is legacy moves, but I don't think that anyone hoarded legacy gengar for trading purposes since no one expected it to go legacy, so none can build a business around selling legacy moves.
The IVs can be improved if your friendship level is high.
I'm hoping that if you're basic friends, the iv is capped at the current IVs and can only get worse. If you're best friends, the IV is floored at the current IVs and can only get better.
To me, that's a great way of ensuring real friends can benefit, while spoofers can't sell them. However multi-account users will get a big advantage.
I think the Stardust cost being prohibitively high for even basic Pokemon not in your dex is rough. I have mainly the same Pokemon as the people I predominantly play with because we play together! So when someone is willing to trade me something I'm missing, it's going to cost a lot. Which means they'll want something really good in return to make it worth the Stardust cost to them - which makes the Stardust + Pokemon cost not attractive to me.
One of the articles claimed that IVs could improve. Leading guess is the IVs will be rerolled with a minimum IV (like min10 for eggs/raids/research and min4 for weather) and the minimum IV will improve with friendship level. I'd guess that minimum IV for best friends might be around 10 so there will still be a lot of variation possible. Brings value not to high IV pokemon but to high level wild catches.
What are the specific actions that improve a friendship? If you "raid" together, do you necessarily have to win the raid? If you don't have to win, but still get credit for "trying" a raid could I:
Go at hatch of a wack Regi raid...mobile hotspot two level 35 side accounts, fight and lose, then wait for other players (that may or may not come) but not even bother using those 35s in the main battle. Would that make me and my 35s better friends?
