Disclosure: This post assumes that you are familiar with Pokemon and its newer features (in X, Y, and ORAS).
When breeding for a Pokemon with a Hidden Ability, it can be a major challenge as it adds complexity to the breeding process. However, when breeding with a male and female Pokemon with the Hidden Ability, there appears to be some discrepancy in regards to the probability of the offspring having the Hidden Ability. IGN states that the probability is 80%, while sites such as Heavy state that the probability is 60%. Since there is not uniform consesis on this issue, this warrants our investigation. Thusly, we performed a statistical test (a more advanced one than what is typically seen in an introductory statistics course) to determine what the actual probability is. If you would like a more detailed explanation, you can see the work I did for this on my other blog here at RGalleon.com. Otherwise, I will discuss the basic summary of the results in this post.
However, why should we even care about this? Who actually cares about the probability of this certain event in a video game? Besides the fact that playing Pokemon is a fun game and myself and others desire to fully understand this game, there is a practical reason as well. In industry, it is important to be able to test your product before releasing it the public for release. Nowadays, this can be much easier to do with patches for video games, but broken games or software can still be developed and released. For example, if the Apple released a broken iOS for their iPhone that essentially broke the device, users would flock to an alternative that worked such as Android. Thus, it is still important to test software and products before releasing them.
The results of our study did indicate that the probability is more likely to be 60%. So, IGN was probably incorrect. However, this study was only done by using Eevee’s. Therefore, if we assume that breeding probabilities are universal across all Pokemon capable of breeding. However, we do know that the gender proportions are not universal across Pokemon. Therefore, it is more liberal to state that all Pokemon have these proportions. However, if we are being more careful in our assumptions, we cannot generalize for all Pokemon that the breeding probability is 60%. Therefore, I would suggest that we need to do more research in regards to this. However, I would not be surprised to find that it would be true that for all Pokemon the breeding percentage was 60.