Two years have passed since Pokémon Sword and Shield inaugurated the eighth generation of Pokémon games. With it came indignation from some fans, though most agreed Sword and Shield didn’t flounder when it came to its competitive scene.
Pokémon tournaments are played under the Video Game Championship (VGC) umbrella, and online Ranked Battles in Sword and Shield mirror the VGC ruleset. Tournaments, both grassroot and official, are frequent, and exciting rule changes occur every three months, restricting and unrestricting the availability of certain Pokémon.
Yet we’re now nearing the release of the next games – the Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl remakes – which will have little, if any, effect on competitive Pokémon. During the Pokémon Presents in August, The Pokémon Company stated November’s remakes will not include Ranked Battles. Next January’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus, while an intriguing departure from the usual formula, will shelve online battles entirely.
With no Generation IX on the horizon just yet, where does that leave competitive Pokémon? We asked Aaron “Cybertron” Zheng, a real-life Pokémon Master, that very question.
“I imagine we’ll be playing Sword and Shield for the next year basically,” Zheng tells us. “If Generation IX doesn’t come out in 2023, and we play Sword and Shield for two more years, well that’s a long period. That makes me a little bit anxious.”
When we call Zheng a Pokémon Master, we mean it. He has qualified for eight different VGC World Championships since 2008 and won several Regional and National Championships. He also runs an informative YouTube channel that he has kept updated frequently since 2014. The Pokémon Company International recruited Zheng to commentate on multiple International and World Championship tournaments, making him one of the most prominent experts in competitive Pokémon. He knows his stuff all right.
Zheng’s dedication makes him the perfect person to comment on the challenges competitive Pokémon players face and the difficulty of growing the scene. In particular, we asked him for his thoughts on Pokémon’s inaccessibility. Despite being a deceptively simple game, it takes a substantial amount of time and requires knowledge of many esoteric mechanics to build a competitive team. You can’t just take your favourite ‘mon and find success online.
For example, breeding a Torkoal with zero speed IVs to allow it to attack first when under Trick Room can take hours. If that sounds like another language to you, that’s just the tip of the Avalugg. Understanding effort values, natures, egg moves, hidden abilities, held items, and so on is necessary, and Sword and Shield do not explain these intricacies well. It’s up to people like Zheng to break it down battle by battle on platforms like YouTube. And even with help, jumping into competitive Pokémon is a daunting task.
I think of League of Legends. Yeah you play casually, but anyone that does can still tune into the major tournaments and follow along. For Pokémon, it’s such an intricate part of the game that you have to find and invest in.
“Competitive Pokémon has always felt like a lot of people don’t know about it or find it somewhat inaccessible,” Zheng said. “It’s such a small component of the Pokémon brand, whereas other games are based around the competitive scene. I think of League of Legends. Yeah you play casually, but anyone that does can still tune into the major tournaments and follow along. For Pokémon, it’s such an intricate part of the game that you have to find and invest in.”
Sword and Shield did introduce nature mints and made it easier to rent teams other players built, but developer Game Freak could still make many things clearer. Zheng, however, doesn’t think accessibility is the main problem. Rather, he’d like to see competitive Pokémon promoted more within the games themselves. He brought up how the League of Legends game client advertises the World Championships when you open it. Pokémon doesn’t promote much in-game, leaving players to stumble upon tournaments elsewhere.
Despite all this, it’s not all Houndoom and Gloom for competitive Pokémon. Like literally everything, in-person Pokémon events were shelved when the pandemic hit. Zheng attended an event before then, and had this to say about it:
“The Regional Championship we had in Dallas was wild. It was the largest Regionals we had in years, and it really felt like 2020 was going to be such a great year for the scene to blow up.”
Zheng holds out hope that when in-person events return next year, the competitive scene will see a resurgence of interest. That’s not to say the pandemic stopped Zheng from playing. On his YouTube channel, Zheng features a new team every two days built by players from around the world, keeping up-to-date with meta changes as they happen, while explaining his thought process behind each play in great detail. The video below highlights what to expect from his channel:
“It’s mainly just passion,” Zheng said when asked how he managed to upload a set of matches almost daily for two years. “Sword and Shield was so exciting. Just seeing so many people get into it. There’s so many cool teams to try out. People share their teams with me all the time.”
Outside of watching Zheng’s channel and browsing communities like the VGC subreddit, he offered some advice for those looking to learn how to compete:
It’s a game in which even the best players lose all the time. Don’t be afraid to lose... There’s no one right way to play Pokémon – see what works for you and go from there.
“It’s a game in which even the best players lose all the time. Don’t be afraid to lose. Losses are really your best way to learn. Team building can also be pretty daunting, that’s why I typically recommend for people looking to get good to try out some of the more successful teams. And overall just remember to have fun. If you’re not having fun with the game, step away, try a new team, or take a break from it. There’s no one right way to play Pokémon – see what works for you and go from there.”
The Pokémon Company recently announced Ranked Battles will soon rehash a ruleset first introduced last February, which disappointed many players. It’s also likely that we won’t hear anything about Generation IX until well after Pokémon Legends: Arceus launches early next year. However, with content creators and competitors as passionate as Zheng continuing to keep the torches lit – making a complicated, inaccessible and under-promoted game more digestible for thousands – competitive Pokémon’s future looks as bright as a Pikachu using Flash in the depths of Mt. Moon.
Comments (78)
I am very sorry to point out something dumb like this,
but XI is 11
IX is 9
again sorry
great article though
I used to play quite a lot of VGC for a while during the 3DS era and I was thinking about getting back into it once the series came to the Switch but Sword and Shield completely killed my interest in playing so my competitive Pokemon days are probably behind me now.
@redpanda0310
This is so glaring.
I agree.
Where it goes from here is onto Pokémon Showdown playing the Gen V meta. Still great fun.
I've been watching his (almost) daily uploads for a good year now. He's a pretty humble and respectful person and listening to his thought processes helped me step up my competitive game quite a bit.
The article is a nice read aswell
Thought this article was specifically about ‘pokemon go’ due to the unfortunate title, good read though.
Ah... I still remember my competitive team from the X/Y days: Charizard Y, Greninja, Espeon, Scizor, Flygon and Luxray
Luxray was definitely a weird choice, but it allowed me to take many teams by surprise.
Would help the title if verbs weren't capitalised.
@redpanda0310 I was like, “wait, what happened to IX and X?”
With the things introduced in Gen 8 (nature mints and the hidden ability capsule), all that's really left is a way to get the exact IVs necessary for minmaxing - more than just being able to maximize stats, that is. For example, 0 IVs in Attack can be useful to minimize damage from confusion, while 0 in Speed is valuable for Trick Room teams. And then you get pokémon like stakataka, where careful management of IVs can mean getting useful Attack boosts rather than redundant Defense boosts thanks to its ability.
They have crack down on all the hacking and cheating, until then it will continue to fail
#WolfyLied
Gen 5 on Pokemon Showdown is where I go.
Because pokemon games are so easy to hack, the competitive scene will always be broken. I mean for £10 I can buy a full ev/iv trained pokedex, surely they can come up with something
I've been an avid PokeFan since 2008 and in my opinion "Competitive Pokemon" can die in a fire. Pokemon battling was designed to be more like Mario Kart than an eSports. Randomness, hidden values, fun and friendly competition.
The real draw was supposed to be going on an adventure with some digital pals and sharing that experience with other humans.
The "competitive" Pokemon scene has done a lot of good for the franchise, but it's also sucked a lot of the fun out for everyone who isn't the most serious of player. It's taken a game with hundreds of characters and millions of options and cut it down to a meta with a few dozen viable options.
You can't even play Casual Battles online because even that player base is dominated by trained Monz, meta strats, and legendaries to keep pace.
I still love Pokemon. I was playing Sw/Sh just last night. But I wish the competitive scene either never emerged, never had so much sway, or was able to be kept entirely distinct from the players who would rather approach Pokemon in a different way.
If you are a competitive Poke-player, that's fine. I respect you, I just wish the thing you love didn't impede the thing I love so much.
@UltimateOtaku91 Many people have perfect competitive Pokemon, now it's more accessible than ever to make them but that doesn't break the competitive scene. People with perfect competitive Pokemon lose all the time since it's pretty much the most basic requirement to even have a chance to compete so I don't mind that they get them that way. As long as there aren't Pokemon with stats and moves that they shouldn't have it shouldn't bother others.
@UltimateOtaku91
Hacked Pokemon, if anything, only encouraged the competitive scene, at least in the decade or so before Gamefreak started making viable mons much easier to attain in-game.
For those who don't know, in a competitive environment, you've never been able to hack a Pokemon that has moves, stats, abilities, etc that the Pokemon wouldn't normally have had. You aren't able to hack your attacks to hit or your opponent's to miss, or anything. A hacked 'mon is exactly the same as a normal one, minus the tedium of dozens of hours it takes to raise them.
Competitive Pokemon events have always (at least, for over a decade) had hack checks in place. There's no way to tell a well-hacked Pokemon from a "normal" one - and that's the point. But anything with an actual unfair advantage, something unattainable legitimately, would be caught.
Especially before Pokemon Showdown, hacked 'mons were essential to testing out how a team would perform and being able to iterate on your ideas quickly. Back in the DS and Early 3DS days, it was practically an open secret, among both players and staff, that 90% of the Pokemon teams that made it past round 1 were hacked. Actual competitors DO NOT CARE, and never did.
@roy130390 I love using slightly left field Pokémon on my teams on ranked. Of course it has to be still somewhat good, lol.
On topic: SwSh's competitive scene has been really fun to be a part of. Like Zheng was saying, there's always new blood when a new gen launches. And a key aspect of any competitive game is having an audience, a "streamability" factor. And the jump to the Switch made it SO MUCH better. The days of watching tournaments of the ridiculous 3DS resolutions are over.
@Chocobo_Shepherd
"It's taken a game with hundreds of characters and millions of options and cut it down to a meta with a few dozen viable options."
Without a competitive scene, what would change? You'd go "Oh I want to use my favorite Pokemon, Hypno, online" (Your favorite Pokemon for this example is now Hypno, sorry). And then you'd get your butt whooped by some guy rocking a bunch of legendaries. Because you don't need to be "competitive" to realize that certain Pokemon are insanely stronger than others.
That's what makes sites like Smogon great. As much as a certain faction of players denounce them for saying their favorite Pokemon sucks (and yeah, sorry, it does), what Smogon's actually doing is creating a tier system that's used on Showdown, where you can play matches exclusively with Pokemon who've been organized into a certain tier or lower. Now, even Hypno can be viable!
... OK that's a lie, Hypno is trash even in the lowest tier. But if you really want to use one, you'd have much better odds doing it in a competitive-tiered PU game, rather than taking Hypno to a casual game where your opponent can rock Blaziken and Rayquaza or whatever.
On top of that, I'd argue that competitive viability isn't nearly as stale as you say, and it's brought a lot of neglected Pokemon into the light.
Aaron Zheng, the player in the article, won world championships with a freaking PACHIRISU. You know how many other players were running that 4th generator pika-clone on their teams? Literally nobody. Not even casually. Nobody would've cared about Pachirisu, the 3rd of what was in 2014 a series of 5 or 6 pika-clones, but Zheng took the little guy to worlds and won it all.
Personally, I got really interested in Liepard gen 6 (who was only considered an early-game mon, and a bad one at that, in Gen 5) because they had a combination of really fun moves like taunt and encore to force your opponent to use certain moves, fake-out to force a first-turn flinch, and then foul play for a powerful attack that doesn't rely on Liepard having a strong ATK stat itself.
Heck, even something like Butterfree had niche use, and this was long before it got a Gmax that didn't do anything for its viability. Rather, it was the combination of compoundeyes and sleep powder that gave it a pseudo-spore (very accurate and reliable Sleep on the opponents, in other words), plus excellent support moves like tailwind and rage powder.
Pokémon is literally one of the worst games to play competitively.
It's tedious to learn, tedious to train for, boring to watch.
It also should be a separate game, it doesn't make sense for the mainline games to make compromises in their campaigns to better accommodate competitive play.
@BLD I believe you're mistaking Aaron Zheng for Sejun Park, the guy who won with Pachirisu. Unless Zheng also did and I'm not aware, lol. But to add to your point, WolfeyVGC, another prominent competitive player and a friend of Zheng's, made a video titled "The Biggest Lie You Believe About Pokémon", in which he discusses this idea of the meta being stale and everyone using the same teams. Tldw: it's actually pretty varied. Even a single Pokémon has very different uses that can change the course of a match. Fully recommend the video to anyone interested.
@HenHiro When have they ever made compromises to the campaigns because of competitive play? Pokémon campaigns are as vanilla as you can get, there's zero influence of competitive play.
@roy130390 Intimidate or guts? As cool of a design, luxray is a bit disappointing. Based on its design, I think bulky or fast would have worked but it’s a bit in between which makes it hard to justify over another electric type. It looks like something that could learn truck room so if it was slower and more bulky, guts could have had a cool niche.
@Tulio517 Possibly they mean that all the challenge comes from the competitive side of things. Each game has become easier, but that’s a problem that started all the way back with gold and silver.
TLDR: “I imagine we’ll be playing Sword and Shield for the next year basically,”
@BLD You miss my point that if things weren't treated so competitively in the first place, my Hypno wouldn't be facing a bunch of legendaries all the time. Just like how when you play Mario Kart you can see every character and every kart in the winners circle.
Also, you know why everyone knows about that Pachirisu story? Because it is so profoundly exceptional to the rule.
I appreciate the comprehensiveness of your response even if it missed one of my key points. It's nice of you to have put so much thought and effort into replying.
EDIT: Imagine someone's favorite Mon being Hypno? Hilarious.
No ranked battles in BDSP? Well that sucks. Can't see SwSh going for another 2 years.
You can use your favourite if you do your research on them and team chemistry.
Competitive can be disheartening when you put time into getting a team right legitimately then you see proven hackers like WolfGlick celebrated. Hacking is so rampant but GF simply does not care. It encourages it by not punishing hackers. So bizarre.
@BenAV IT's weird because as a pokemon fan, but not a fan of competitive gaming, I felt like Sword & Shield seemed(when looking the way the game was designed, stuff it did introduce to make training pokemons IV/etc easier and so on) like it was designed for the competitive gamers first and foremost... which was the bit I liked less about it because it's the traditional titles which I was missing in my opinion.
@BeautyandtheBeer Tbh I kind of don't mind the lack of ranked battle because, though I could be wrong, that makes me feel like a full national dex is all the more likely(though I wouldn't be surprised if the game focused instead of what pokemons were instead in the national dex at the time of Platinum).
If anything, I felt like Sword & Shield more than previous titles specifically felt like it was catering to the competitive multiplayer crowd first and foremost with all the quality of life stuff to make leveling up IVs passively with pokejobs/hyper training(using XP candies to reach lvl 100 faster than ever before to unlock that) easier than ever before while having one of the singleplayer story/campaign that felt almost like an afterthought with how quickly it was over compared to older titles(which, for competitive players is almost a boon because it means less story to trudge through before all the post-game multiplayer/competitive facilities and all were unlocked)
.
@Chocobo_Shepherd Those are different beasts. The difference between the best kart character and worst aren’t huge and more importantly, trade offs for speed are made. Pokemon also tasks you with making 6 selections and require that your 6 selections compliment each other.
It’s a turn based game, skill will only get you so far if you don’t use the meta defining Pokémon. If legendaries are allowed in the format you play, you leave yourself at a disadvantage if you don’t use legendary Pokémon. With the Pacharisu example, I believe that was only used because certain Pokémon or move combinations weren’t currently available in that tournament. It was also a single example, on a team that used some commonly used Pokémon.
@anzzjam I don't remember perfectly as I haven't played in competitive for many years but if I gave it a different build to the ones recommended. I think that it had intimidate and was built around defense and physical attack. He wasn't good enough to be a bulk type but he could usually resist a couple attacks. I think that he had crunch and an electric and fighting physical moves that I can't remember. It was my least used pokemon, but the few times that he saw action he delivered.
He definitely wasn't the most viable though, but it really worked well with my team.
@HenHiro The funny thing is the more I played it, the more I felt like that's what Sword & Shield was trying out to be.
With all the means to level up pokemons faster than ever before and hypertraining to max out IVs of pokemons who reach lvl100 and items/pokejobs you can use to level up EV outside of battle... and on the flip side one of the shortest(if not THE shortest) story in the entire franchise to funnel players as quickly as possible into a multiplayer-focused post-game.
@BeautyandtheBeer I don’t like hackers which is why playing smogon is really the only sensible route. It evens the playing ground so the guy that hacked or kept a Pokémon from gen 3 with an event move can be used by everyone on smogon.
@Ludovsky The story, from what I can remember, was just a worst retelling of what happened in gen 7, which happened to have a great story. I doubt they will ever make a worse main game than sword and shield, but we will see I suppose.
@roy130390 I always liked Luxray too. Weird stats that’s for sure.
@Ludovsky Which is strange because playing against your friends is more tedious than any gen since WiFi became available. I have no idea what the hell happened with gen 8. So many stupid decisions on top of a lackluster effort equaled the worst generation by far. In my book, of course. It’s the worst due to the potential for a great Pokémon game taking in all the best ideas over the years. Sure, possibly on a technical level, with all the changes and what not it’s better than gen 3 let’s say. Well, of course it is, the special physical split already occurred, abilities are more fleshed out etc. Gen 8 added very little and actually made quite a few things worse.
@Chocobo_Shepherd Honestly I'm almost kinda with you.
I actually don't dislike the competitive scene because there's some kind of curiosity about studying some of the insane builds and tricks competitive players can come up with.
But on the other end that's also what can make it so much inaccessible to common players and as someone who's played Sword and Shield from start to finish multiple times now, I feel like what I like less about it is that it feels like a game that was designed FOR the competitive community with all the stuff it does to make leveling up pokemons, customizing their EVs and so on.
It's like... it's not even that the story felt short. Like for what it did I'm not sure what more they could have done. It's just that the singleplayer, at some point felt like it specifically WAS designed to funnel players into competitive multiplayers as soon as possible.
Like "Okay you've had your story mode now, happy? Now go and pump up those pokemons full of XP candies, hypertrain them at level 100 to max out those Innate Values and have them pump iron doing pokejobs and gobbling up vitamins until their Effort Values until they're competitive ready and then chuck them into competitive tournaments, you'll have fun we promise".
@anzzjam The thing is I'm talking about competitive and you're talking about playing "with your friends".... which in the eyes of a lot of people isn't "competitive" because you're always playing with the same people rather than "whoever is in your current ladder which you try to climb above to become the very best of the very best".
After all "X who reached the top of the ladder" is more of a competitive scene driven thing than "X who is the best only amongst their friend".
Ditto a pokedex that had less pokemons to "balance" for competitive multiplayer.
Either ways it's kind of why I'm glad not to see ranked play in the remakes and might not mind a lack of online battles in Legend Arceus since I feel that leaves more space for the singleplayer to be interesting.
@Ludovsky Yup. And I do play online and against the occasional friend. It's just ... not fun. ^_^ lol
But I love the idea of Pokemon so much that I keep coming back and banging my head against that wall haha
@anzzjam I see where you're coming from. Agree to disagree.
@Ludovsky I personally don't think having a full national dex has any bearing on ranked play or not. The more choice the better, there's only a select few that need balancing. I do agree at SwSh being catered to making competitive much more accessible. Easiest teams I could create including trade only evos like Conkeldurr I could get how I wanted.
@anzzjam I can kinda understand the appeal of Smogon rules but everything I've seen from that community is just so full of toxicity with what they ban and the like. It ain't for me.
@BenAV Everytime i try playing a Pokémon game online competitively, i just end up seeing it way more casually than it should be, i bet if i had the right knowledge and time I'd probably get into it, but it's just too much or too little
@BeautyandtheBeer more choice true, but there's also such a thing as indecision paralysis and then all the questioning of "is it me who sucked or did I just merely pick a weaksauce pokemon that an never be redeemed?" and so on
Though of course the return of over 200 pokemons alongside(rather than through, since you can still trade for them without the DLC) might make that moot I'll admit since it meant 3/4 of the pokedex was still available which was no small number.
It does make me wonder what the pokedex will be like in the remakes of gen4 however because a LOT of the stuff missing was all stuff found in those titles for the most part when you take starters out of the equation.
I don’t even play Pokémon competitive I just like playing the games.😂
Competitive pokemon seems too difficult to me , at least for a game thats suppose to be funny and relaxing !
@Patelo1994 Same here tbh which is why I'm okay with the Gen4 remake to not have ranked battles. Gen4 in my eyes seem to have been particularly renowned for the sheer size of Sinnoh as a pokemon region to adventure in travel from town to town, I'm actually looking forward to the experience.
Honestly I feel competitive took a bit too much room in the last couple of gen when the core of the playerbase.... isn't, but simply come for the singleplayer adventures with groups of cute critters, with the occasional trading with friends to fill their pokedex.
Ironically enough, the fact that "create the first pokedex ever of a region" is the focus of Legend Arceus is perhaps the main reason I'm looking forward to that title to be honest. Though it means none of the old "traveling from towns to towns" of older titles will be there I'm nonetheless curious how the "pokemon monster hunter expeditions" structure is going to work. It could be bad but on the other hand Capcom did find something really neat with that "organize at hub->go on expedition to hunt monster/etc->return to organize and prep up for the next expedition" structure of theirs.
@Ludovsky Gen 4 will not have ranked battles??? That sure takes a lot of the stress away ! To be honest i never really finished the Gen 4 games, so i'm really looking forward to.And even tho i dont enjoy the competitve pokemon battles , i enjoy multiplayer features like make your pokemon video clip (pokemon X/Y) or make your pokemon photo with stickers (pokemon sun,moon), or pokemon cuteness competitions (gen 4), wonder trade etch.!! I Also cant wait for pokemon Arceus , is seems to me that its gonna make a huge step on how trainers interact with pokemon !
Removed - flaming/arguing; user is banned
@redpanda0310 No, thank you for pointing it out! That's a very glaring mistake on my part. Glad you enjoyed the article, though
@BeautyandtheBeer The banning I can understand but the logic used their can be iffy at best. What I dislike the most is bans on certain methods of battle. Like baton pass for example. I think it’s built into the game and since stealth rocks seems fine, and every team runs them, if baton pass was valid it would make more people run haze and whirlwind which makes for a more interesting game.
@Ludovsky yes, that's what I'm saying, it doesn't make any sense, especially because judging by the views of VGC on YT, it's a small minority of the community who engage in competitive.
@Tulio517 what? Ever heard of natures for example? A feature that is completely useless in the main game, that no one has asked for, and only exists to make it harder to get competitive Pokémon? I'm really glad they're gone for Legends btw.
Also literally hundreds of moves that are again, mostly useless in the campaign, like most status moves?
Masuda has literally stated one of the reasons for Dexit was balancing competitive.
There is just no reason for the VGC to take place in the main line games, it never made sense and it especially doesn't make sense now
@Patelo1994 Yeah, I wasn't sure about Arceus and there's stuff that feels like such a change, but on the flipside it also seem like it has potential to be a REALLY interesting take on the formula.
Plus instead the agile/etc mechanics for attacks, change to how turns are handled and so on feels like interesting shake-up that feels like a "real" change of how combat mechanics will work rather than trying to shake combat by leaving it's base mechanics as-is but introducing "gimmicks" like mega-evolutions/etc.
@HenHiro It makes me wonder if Sword&Shield being so focused on getting player into competitive was Gamefreak/etc perhaps hoping/thinking it'd be a way to keep players playing the same game for longer but noticing from gathered online data afterward that even if competitive players are passionate, most players that purchased the game may still have ended up focusing on singleplayer/coop stuff instead(if going online at all) and they could have been at risk of losing them if focusing too much on online content?
@HenHiro Natures existence isn't a hindrance of any kind to the main campaigns, neither are status moves. I really don't get your point. These examples are completely inconsequential to the story. As for Dexit, it's a more solid argument, but yet again doesn't really make sense in the grand scheme of things. Anyone's playthrough of a game campaign is limited to the regional dex, so Dexit is also of no effect on the story. Of course if I wanted to start my SwSh save file with a Chimchar just for the sake of it, I'd be completely disappointed, but most players will just play the game like normal, catching pokemon as they go. Listen, I'd be down for a game fully dedicated to competitive play, like somewhat of a merge of Showdown and Stadium-like games. It's a good idea, but what you're saying doesn't really justify it in any way.
Signed in to also say that I agree the competive Pokemon scene can die in a fire. As I also feel it's sucked alot of fun out of the games. Kinda glad Arceus is going that route honestly. Things were more fun imo when Pokemon was offline and had local battling n trading only, like up to ruby n saphire when ev n ivs weren't hugely known. It was always a great feeling running into someone irl who also has the games and got to battle or trade n see how we matched up. Shetts def too meta now.
@Travisemo007 It’s weird to me because it seems the game caters more to casual than competitive as a whole. Eh, I guess we all see what we want to see as the problem when we are dissatisfied with something. Me included.
@redpanda0310 Ha, damn Roman numerals. Corrected, thanks
"the Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl remakes – which will have little, if any, effect on competitive Pokémon" is a statement that requires explanation or evidence. I'm not saying this is false, but that I need to understand this before ordering the new remakes.
@X-Slayer Absolutely. Honestly, what I said perfectly reflects my feelings on Smash too. Except with Smash I just stopped playing all together lol
Who says next year won't see a next gen release of new Pokemon games?
They can still hold a Pokemon direct in early Spring with holiday release announcement in 2022.
And who knows. Maybe they give Sword and Shield the "ultra sun/moon" treatment with included DLC + some extra's and add the rest of the missing Pokemon to finally please the fans. (wishfull thinking I know lol)
Definitely the worst part of competitive play is exactly what he said: a complete lack of in-game support, without having to stumble around the internet for videos and fan tutorials. Competitive battling is such an integral theme to becoming a Pokemon Master within the Pokeworld, but actual high-level play is completely ignored.
Pokemon is a turn-based RPG. Stats, numbers and variables dictate combat more than direct input. The skills associated with competitive gameplay are more scholarly, like the ability to anticipate a myriad of variables, or a person's breadth of intricate knowledge, like which Pokemon uses which moves, likely to affect your own Pokemon team in which ways, their abilities, type matchups not including dual typings which complicate it further, etc etc
The other main problem with competitive Pokemon is the fact that older and weaker Pokemon are thrown by the wayside for the newest batch of supported Pokemon, aka, the latest Pokemon generation(s). Oh, and of course everyone's favorite Charizard and Co.
Game Freak needs to find ways to power up older/weaker Pokemon in various ways, either with powerful moves, abilities, or legal super forms, like ye ole Megas. The other, more traditional way to power up neglected Pokemon was to give them new evolutions, but GF really hasn't touched that in years for some reason, favoring regional variants instead. Which is fine, but Alolan Raichu would feel more permanent of a version if it was a proper evolutionary pathway in the Pikachu line.
That's easy... Pokemon Stadium 3
... Wun can only hope.
Never understood competitive Pokemon and never will, but thats fine. There are plenty of people who do enjoy it and good on them. I'll just stick to my casual experience with it. If Im feeling competitive I'll play Pokemon TCG
I thought those games were single player.. what is competitive about it?
@Tulio517 of course natures are a hindrance, they're yet another factor to make it harder to get strong Pokémon.
@Ludovsky it's a fact that competitive players are a very small minority, understandably so imo, again, Pokémon is a terrible competitive game.
I think that they were just trying to please everyone, as they always tell. Like I said, I think it would be beneficial for the mainline games to get rid of all the competitive stuff, IVs, hundreds of moves, natures, all that stuff just makes the game more complicated and less fun for the majority of the players. Competitive should take place in a Stadium 3 or whatever, there the mons can have all different stats for balancing and stuff, but let the mainline games concentrate on the story experience most people play the games for.
@X-Slayer I'm a very casual Smash player, but what bothers me is the adventure mode in Ultimate.
It's terrible in my opinion, one of the worst story modes I've ever played in any video game, I don't know how one can defend it, the story modes in past games were so sick, it's unbelievable how low it has fallen, the baffling reason being "We didn't want to make a story because it would leak" What????
@HenHiro Honestly I could see Sword and Shield, at least for now, filling the shoes of a "Stadium 3" because honestly in the long run that's what the game felt like once you hit the "post-game" because it felt like it took only a very short time until "guess it's time for online PvP" was the only thing that felt like there was left to do
VGC hasn't really changed much over the years, its always been the same format and sometimes we get a meta shake up due to major mechanics (dynamax, megas, new mons, etc).
Competitive literally won't change in VGC cause of how restrictive its always been from the starts, team building isn't an issue at all
because its super easy to just generate them, modify them, or if you don't have the tools rent/buy ones that are.. the scene wouldn't exist at all without these tools especially for the era the scene started in. If you can physically drive or convince parents to take you to one of these events its hard to fathom why you couldn't do this as well.What is dead is community competitive, 6v6 is just impossible to properly run due to the 20 minute timer.. its the main reason I have no motivation in BDSP because if I want to relive gen 4 competitive, the originals are inarguably better to DNS server games in since there is no timer (and BR looks better than the switch games anyways). If you want to play 6v6, you have to simulate the game on showdown
Competitive Pokemon has less worth than shiny Pokemon these days and that’s saying something.
As soon as a meta is found the top ranked players all fall in line and copy and paste the strategy with minimal tweaks. So boring to watch.
As for smogon/showdown, don’t even get me started lmao.
All I want is a competitive format of the following:
Double Battles
Species clause
Hold Items clause
No Mega/Z-Move/Gigantamax/similar gimmicks of the gen
All monsters that can be hatched from an egg, plus Ditto permitted, all others banned.
I think it could be interesting.
I just came to say..
..SIF>>>>>pokemon in the thumbnail
Pokémon will somehow survive and continue in one flavor or another.
Honestly I stopped caring about "competitive" pokemon a long time ago.
Its boring as hell to play for me since everything is a tedious grind getting the pokemon and making them viable for play and watching it is even more tedious.
Raising the EV's and IV's of pokemon just isn't fun to me and without doing it you don't stand a chance
@Screen alas, they can't
unless they get rid of the grind completely, its not going to stop people from generating & hacking mons nor can they filter them when their legal.
@Shadowmoon522
I’m not an expert, but I know enough programming to be able to find duplicate ID values.
They could choose a threshold, high enough to forgive anyone who tried it once out of curiosity and then ban the people abusing the cheat.
It’s not a perfect system, admittedly
@Screen hackers can alter the ID & SID's attached to pokemon and have been able to do so for over a decade.
they also tried something else like this with HOME as every mon that goes into HOME gets a unique tracking number attached to it to limit clones... but hackers can just clear that off that number in SW&SH making it so the mons get a fresh new code that "legitimizes" it in home. clones from other generations that go up though home also get individual tramp stamps and it doesn't affect anything if other clones of the same mon are alrwady in HOME. its also impossible for anyone to tell if a cloned egg from of a legit mon's egg is a clone as well.
that being said, clones of legit mons are still beneficial, especially with shiny event only mythicals that where attached to movie tickets and never distributed again. hell, they even give out a bunch of clones in most events .
thing here is that ILCA, GF, TCP, & Nintendo don't actually care if a mon is generated, cloned or a glitched so long as it falls into legal parameters and isn't something absurd like a surfing charizard or the infamous wonder guard spiritomb.
this is also why its doubtful that all the clones made in BDSP from the glitch will get blocked by home, especially as clones are exact duplicate's of existing mons and will always look legit unless you find 3 of them that are 1 per game and have the same ID & SID and can't be breed.
hell, they even made it harder for people to even tell if a mon is hacked when they added in ability patches that can give hidden abilities to any mon that has one regardless of generation.
used to be that if you saw a blastoise from a gen 3 game with rain dish it would seem like it was hacked, but the ability patch changes that.
they only times ever actually do anything to hinder hackers and cloners for good PR and nothing more. for example the shiny ranger manaphys are considered legit even by bank & HOME, regardless of them being the result of a glitch or oversight. though it is one of the 3 hardest pokemon to shiny hunt that can be shiny hunted, the other 2 being 3ed gen mew & jirachi...
@Shadowmoon522
Actually they care quite a bit, that’s why they banned it outright and have (painfully useless) hack checks at official events.
Tap here to load 78 comments
Leave A Comment
Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...