Pokémon Launches Official Community Forums And It's Already A Disaster

I love that you guys used UltimaShadow’s tweet, and he’s right

I checked over there an hour ago and it’s such a train wreck, who thought this was a good idea?

I'll give it a week.

Join the Moose Club, we have free candy.

it got taken down... took em' long enough lol

@TheBigBlue maybe they saw our Forum and wanted a piece of our Moose cake.

I don’t think this is going to last long at all, and wile it’s a fun idea on paper, in practice I don’t think was ever going to work, heck they didn’t even seem to put a whole lot of moderation into it, that’s already a bad start, I mean there is a post on there asking which Pokémon is the hottest, lmao.

What a shame though, because with the proper moderation it could actually be a pretty fun place to discuss problems, and give feedback, and other fun stuff with Pokémon.

@Luminous117 well, one of the threads is asking which Pokémon is the hottest, so hopefully that gives you an idea

@Luminous117 very, very, bad.

They had to have known, right?

@Snatcher -starts singing- we are the champions!!!

Why are people like this?

Hey guys, did you know that in terms of water based Pokémon, Vaporeon is the most cool : )

@FishyS Taste is relative, so one's results may vary. As far as most edible, it's been proven to be Togepi, because egg.

@Snatcher The hottest Pokemon has to be a fire type, duh. 🔥 ❤️

This Is why miiverse died, this Is why we can't have nice things.
stop being weird freaks online please.

@PokemonDMG So flareon right?

@FishyS Yeah I think that one is fair.

@CurryPowderKeg79 all my friends tell me it’s machamp.

While I am nostalgic for an internet that isnt consolidated to a handful of websites, I cant imagine the kind of bravery it takes to see the insanity of social media spaces in 2023 and think, "Yeah, let's throw our hat into the ring."

@PokemonDMG magcargo… I mean.. it is literally made out of magma

I think they closed it but that was the best fifteen minutes of my life

That escalated quickly. That's how I'm describing it as...

I love how it immediately goes from thinking gardevoir is hot to does this charizard look homeless lmao.
Edit:this has been the most I've laughed in a week going through the forums

Let’s hope the mods are paid. Dear Lord.

Oh wow, that’s certainly something I never saw coming. I wouldn’t be surprised if the more “controversial” threads (you know the ones) are pruned and the users either given a warning or banned from using those forums again.

And one more thing: since accounts on Pokemon’s official forum is tied to a Play! Pokémon that means TPCi staff (and possibly volunteers) will now know about some of the questionable things you’re into and will probably act accordingly.

@Aerona I can still access it, TPCi more than likely decided to send all incoming posts into a sort of “waiting room” until they’re approved by a moderator due to the sheer clustercuss that’s going on.

@FishyS Would it be considered vegan to eat a grass type?

@ketrac 👏🤣 You win this thread.

Yeah its live for me! In addition to debating the hotness of Pokémon, the other trending threads include:

"Did you guys ever have crushes on the human characters when u were younger?"

"What human character is the fruitiest?"

"LETS COUNT UNTIL THE FORUMS SHUT DOWN"

and my favourite: "What pokemon do you think did 9/11?"

This is why we can’t have nice things, lol

I’ve just about had it with people and their shenanigans.

@FishyS i’m sorry, but we don’t need to know which Pokémon is the tastiest That’s a topic that needs to be off-limits because that’s not something people need to be thinking about

It’s things like this that shows you that a lot of nerd’s can’t be trusted with the Internet

@Funneefox I’ll give it 11 minutes

The weird thing about this there’s already plenty of decent fan run Pokémon forums like Serebii, etc that are modded well and are relatively safe places for decent discussion. What does this really offer?

I hate people sometimes. These kinds of people are the reason we can't have nice things.

... this is giving me flashbacks to that one thread I did that got locked... shivers

@Battista This forum is actually operated by TPCi and they can use it to streamline things (customer support, bug reporting for various games, tournament announcements, etc.) in addition to providing fans an official place to discuss the Pokémon IP in general with some sensible restrictions.

The problems is that TPCi employees barely use it, attempts to bring up bugs affecting the TCG Live end up getting a canned response saying that users should file a Support Ticket, and very little transparency in general.

Funny how NL posted an article about which would be our favorite Pokémon to eat.

Stuff like this is why even though I'm a fairly fanatical fan of Sonic, I mostly stay away from dedicated fan spaces and end up having long discussions about the games here on a Nintendo website instead. On this site, I mostly find old retrogamers who remember the "Sega vs Nintendo" wars, or younger people who grew up with Sonic on the GBA or Gamecube. That's great, we have detailed discussions about the games and characters. In more dedicated Sonic fanspaces, things can sometimes get a bit freakier than I'm personally looking for!

I'm aware its a massive internet/nerd culture meme to over sexualise Pokémon, just as it is Sonic characters, Ninja Turtles, MLP etc. I can see the funny side. But sometimes it goes so far that people start to associate adults who like the brand with assuming they like them in a Rule 34 kinda way. I'm not trying to shame anyone or say that its weird or wrong, its just not for me. After all, most of us first discovered our love for these franchises as kids, so we should be mindful of ruining that experience for new generations of them.

But still.... lol this is entirely Pokémon company's fault. This is exactly what happens whenever you try and make a child friendly space for a well known brand and don't heavily moderate it. Internets' gonna internet.

This is the greatest thing Gamefreak has ever done. My faith in the series has been restored.

@ketrac I believe if you ate the grass parts yes!

God bless the internet for babysitting the easily bored of the world.

Oh, the memories...
Before of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp; The forums 's community were the places where people lived together and interesting information was exchanged..., ok, and why not, where the crazy things of the internet were born and spread... Hehe , XD

I don't see anything wrong with it... A forum is a discussion board and if they remove people's comments/posts, then what's the point. A forum should be open to anyone and everything, no matter how different the posts are.

As for the question which girl I would tickle torment, I would either choose Misty, Iris, Olivia, or Professor Sada.

Why is which Pokémon is the hottest even a question?

We all know it's Gardevoir.

I took a look now and it seems to have little, if any at at all of that kind of stuff. But I guess a forum like that easy an easy target for brigading.

I'm pretty sure these freaky things are only normal on the internet

Miiverse was so nice, sas that it is gone.
Edit: Not the last iterations, those were kinda strange.

Child-oriented social media services need the STRONGEST moderation possible established before launch because child safety becomes the number-one concern. Absolutely horrendous that they launched this without lining up the entire plan of action or adequate staffing. Most cases it's just not feasible and these services don't last like MiiVerse

I'm chalking this all up to ignorance on the part of TPCi. We already have a corner of the web dedicated to this kind of Pokémon discussion, it's called /vp/.

@Ryu_Niiyama Because Pokémon fans

Part of me supports this. I don't like how companies just decided to close all their internal forums in favour of centralized platforms like Discord, Twitter or whatever.
Like, specially nowadays with platforms like Twitter imploding. It shows how unstable those platforms are and one of them closing would affect so many things it's honestly ridiculous (like, Twitter is used a lot for direct updates for emergencies, for instance).

However... unfortunatelly you just can't have a social platform of any kind nowadays without moderation. You just can't. In the "wild west" era of the internet it was possible because there were a lot less people (and less bots) but now? If you don't moderate your platform it will have even more spambots and hate than the big social media sites.

This is awesome. Miiverse's style of humor was hilarious and now it's back.

Ok, but it would be cool to discuss things like Pokemon crossovers with other franchises on this forum. I mean a Zelda X Pokemon crossover has been squarely on my mind since I saw the concept by BilsuArt on YouTube

@spottedleaf These forums have been around for a bit (I remember I started to use it back November when the Pokémon TCG Live was released globally and there are TCG Live Update Release Notes going back as far as Late May 2022), the issue is them becoming more noticeable thanks to Twitter catching wind of it and the 4th of July holiday (remember that TPCi's main HQ is in the US) more or less meant that it would be a complete ghost town moderation-wise.

Thankfully TPCi did the smart thing and locked the forums down when things got bad and it appears that a lot of the controversial content has since been deleted.

Oh, and while I was sitting on this comment I noticed that a few Twitter users were complaining about the threads they made getting deleted and having their accounts banned. The one thing that kind of shocked me was that it wasn't coming from the crowd responsible for the posts relating to Vaporeon an Gardevoir.

@TheBigK nods approvingly This guy gets it.

@jowe_gv It's honestly been a long time coming, Discord can be really iffy to some degree (remember that fiasco with one of the guys that worked on their Trust & Safety team?) and has a history of being used inappropriately by bad actors while protests surrounding Reddit's API changes revealed that the site's a digital Library of Alexandria waiting to burn. The next best thing is making your own forums like many fans have already done.

@OctoAmbush I hate to be the one to tell you this but you missed the boat, all of the Miiverse-style insanity has been deleted and I doubt TPCi will let it happen again.

@Axecon I have a feeling that's something that would get deleted pretty quickly for being "off-topic". The official Pokémon Community forums into five categories: Pokémon General (which is broken up into Video Games, Mobile Games & Apps, Anime, and News & Articles), Pokémon Trading Card Game (which is broken up into News & Announcements, General TCG Discussion, Decks & Strategies, and Bugs & Feedback), Pokémon TCG Live (same structure as the previous category), Pokémon UNITE (similar structure to the previous two categories, just swap out the TCG terms for UNITE terms), and Play! Pokémon (which only had News & Announcements and General Discussion categories).

"A disaster"
Miiverse was the last social network that wasn't a disaster.
People just need to relearn how to use vBulletin-style forums, which are infinitely superior to reddit, twitter, comment sections, etc. for any real discussion.

I am not surprised at all due to how much of a ***** show the Pokémon fanbase is (with the Gen 1 bias they share with TPCi and all their… controversial stuff).

People will do things like this and then are shocked when they get taken down.

@tsukipon And they'll likely blame everyone but themselves.

Hahaha, that thumbnail says it all

You should never give gamers the benefit of the doubt. They are the lowest form of consumer. Maybe heroin consumers are worse. But I doubt it.

This is why we can't have nice things. The idea of this forum is great, but as per usual people suck and have to ruin everything. Why can't the Pokemon "Fandom" who just complains about everything find smth else already and let actual fans just enjoy it?

@TheBigK
Hahahaha, "discussion" lmao

@ketrac it would probably depend on which grass type Pokémon

@tsukipon @EaglyPurahfan The furry section of the fandom seems to be really quiet right now but the LGBTQ fans aren’t happy about the headcanon threads being deleted and the users that posted threads and commented on those threads banned. IN all honesty I’m not too surprised by this, remember that Nintendo suffered a similar issue when they added the Stage Builder feature to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate a few years ago.

@PtM If it’s anything like Play! Pokémon’s Professor Program, judges, and tournament organizers then they’re technically considered volunteers.

I just made an account and it is a horrible website that is very hard to navigate.

@EaglyPurahfan I watched some of the drama unfold on Twitter and it basically boiled down to people complaining about how the LGBTQ+ threads and posts were deleted before the blatant furry/zoophilia threads were (I can only assume that he deletions and bans were done in waves based on how many times a thread/post was flagged, the former threads had more flags than the latter) an how doing such a thing is bigoted/homophobic/transphobic, comparing these deletions and bans to the MeatCanyon situation and that it makes the headcanons in those threads truly canon (despite the MeatCanyon situation involving legal matters, the fanmade short was removed from YouTube due to the IP holders filing a DMCA complaint).

That said if this is all satire it's not particularly good satire.

@PtM To be fair to TPCi the forums usually have a stopgap in place that requires a thread or reply to be approved by a moderator before it's posted and said stopgap wasn't implemented yesterday for some unknown reason.

Sounds like the forums have been hijacked by maladjusted, infantile adults who could have used a spanking or two as kids.

Where's Jigglypuff when you need her?

@Sisilly_G dont tempt them with spankings i dont think that'll yield the results we want

@epicgamner : Touché, touché...

The first thing I saw of Twitch Plays Pokemon was the Rocket Hideout aka Giovanni's Wild Ride and I think it was pretty emblematic of that, and probably this too.

(funny, the Gen 1 localizations for some reason threw out most of the dialogue in the initial meeting with Giovanni. Including the part where he introduces himself to the player. It was there in Japanese and restored in FRLG.)

Well, if they hadn’t shutdown Miiverse, all the degens would’ve most likely stayed there instead lol