There are a lot of unfortunate oversights which have been unearthed in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet's first weeks out in the wild. Though many of these have had us chuckling away or otherwise afraid to turn the light off at night (spaghetti trainer haunts our dreams), none of them have the potential to be quite as annoying as this theory about the games' random number generator (RNG) when in Battle Stadium mode (thanks, Eurogamer).
Originally shared on Reddit by u/Lord-Trolldemort, the player found that using the move Frost Breath (an attack with 90% accuracy) wouldn't hit if it was the first accuracy check of the battle. This could be a coincidence, sure, but the Redditor tried out the hypothesis 14 times and had the same result on each attempt. Miss after miss. For the quick math, the chances of that happening with a working RNG is one in 100 trillion.
Yep, this has the potential to be particularly frustrating.
If the RNG selects the same number every time in Battle Stadium - the games' ranked online mode, no less - then this means it will quickly become easy to predict whether it is worth using a particular move or not. You apply this idea to a low-accuracy one-hit knock out move and you have a very messy situation indeed.
The theory was also put into practice by @Sibuna_Switch, who took to Twitter to show their findings. It worked as expected. The tweeted video (above) shows OHKO after OHKO using Sheer Cold - a move that usually has a riskily low accuracy - which will ultimately become a dead certain play if the RNG is not so random after all.
Weird pop-ins, spaghetti arms and eyes bulging out of trainers' heads are one thing, but a problem like this runs the risk of removing all sense of chance from competitive battles. All studios involved have been silent about the issue so far (as have they about all of the issues) but we can't help but think that something like this needs to be fixed fast.
Either the RNG is making all kinds of very much non-random decisions, or a number of players are getting very, very lucky in their battles.