Competitive Pokemon

[GiMYz]

This is something i wanted to talk about a bit sooner, but i didn't really have the courage to do that until recent things that showed up and made me think more clearly about this situation.

I made the decision to buy Pokemon OR/AS to play competitive Pokemon immediatly after watching VGC14 Worlds. I've followed VGC14 metagame quite superficially, but i did it nontheless, as i've had a passion for this game since my childhood and i've always wanted to keep up with the latest news, new Pokemon, new abilities and in particular, 2 years ago, i was also interested by the introduction of Mega-evolutions. I knew about Mega Kangaskhan being an incredible powerhouse during VGC14, but what happened during Worlds that year (Sejun's team and the fact that only 1 or 2 M-Kang made it into Top16) made me think: OK, it's not about who has Pokemon with highest stats in his team, but it's also about teambuilding skill, in-game strategies and great predictions.

Early VGC15 has been fun. I was searching for sources to keep up with the competitive scene and i found this site, NuggetBridge, Cybertron's YT channel and many other stuffs. There has been an incredible evolution of the metagame during January-February-March season. Gengar and Sylveon! The first one could outspeed and Icy Wind, Taunt, W-o-W everything on your field. A pain to face.. but not as much as the second one. Choice Specs Pixiliate Hyper Voice.. that's it. Get rekt.  And immediatly, Bisharp came out of nowhere and started to Iron Head OHKO that little pink monster. Bisharp became a must-have to solve the threat of Sylveon... until Terrakion made its appearence in the meta as as Bisharp and Kangaskhan killer. Then APEX 2015 said one thing: Mega Venusaur was a threat. It could Sludge Bomb Sylveon and Giga Drain Terrakion and bulky Water types such as Milotic and Suicune which were getting popularity thanks to Icy Wind and Tailwind and their ability to threaten Terrakion and Bisharp with Scald. Which pokemon is able to KO Sylveon, M-Venusaur (the new threat) and Terrakion? M-Metagross! How do you stop Bisharp and M-Kang Sucker Punch? Substitute! And that's the story of SubMetagross and how everything started to fall apart: a well played combination of Heatran, Landorus-T and Thundurus could easily STOP M-Metagross, Terrakion, M-Venusaur, Sylveon, Bisharp, any form of speed control such as Tailwind or Icy Wind (because of Prankster Taunt and TWave) and every other Top5 Mega (M-Kang, M-Salamence, M-Mawile, M-Charizard). Fortunately, Heatran was not Shuca yet, Scarf Landorus-T could be checked by Wide Guard and Taunt was still used over Swagger on Thundurus. However the metagame was already heading to a stagnant situation. US Nationals used successful but outdated archetypes from Japanese metagame (Japan Sand and TR Gardevoir). We all thought that there could have been space for some creativity this year aswell, but we were wrong. Worlds confirmed that M-Kangaskhan, AV Landorus-T, Swagger Thundurus, TR Cresselia, Amoonguss and Shuca Berry SubHeatran are the best Pokemon team composition (it also got a name, CHALK) and we ALREADY knew that unconsiously, but we didn't want to admit it and we tried and we tried again to build something that could perform well as much as CHALK could do.. without the results we expected.

"Hey ehm.. ok.. GMX?? these are your thoughts on VGC15 metagame.. what's the point of all this"?

Game Freak hasn't laid a finger on this situation. Seriously? Just look at this:



We are talking about a $50,000 prize in a game where you can win by basically rolling a dice EVERY. SINGLE. ROUND. That's not how a competitive game should work and i'm also inclined to stop calling this game "competitive" as there's no trace of skill when certain %random chances start to play against you.

Everyone is aware of a true fact: every competitive online game is also supported by BALANCE patches because that's how a eSport works. League of Legends, Dota, Counter Strike, Heartstone, Mortal Kombat and even Super Smash Bros just to name a few of them, are all supported by weekly or monthly patches. Why should game developers waste their time nerfing and buffing stuffs? Because balance is what makes players stay in the game. It's simple: if there's no balance, people will start complaining ("why are we forced to use only those 2-3 weapons or 2-3 heroes/characters in order to win when you are offering 20 weapons and 20 heroes/characters in your game?"). If people start complaining but nothing happens, they'll eventually left the game for that particular reason and the game will slowly lose appeal (which means money, by the way, for Software Houses). Without a particular appeal, there will be less players starting to play the game > less money > less tournament prizes > less competition > total decline.

# Is competitive Pokemon balanced? Absolutely no. Parendal Bond, Full Paralysis, Swagger, Rock Slide, Freeze, Critical Hits and many other mechanics needs to be nerfed and some other things may also be improved.
# Is it possible to patch mechanics of the moves through an update? Of course it is. As they fix a bug in the story mode, for example, they could make the TM Swagger a 10 damage Normal type attack (which means it doesn't work with Prankster or against Ghost types anymore).
# Why aren't they doing that? There may be three answers:
1) Game Freak still doesn't treat competitive Pokemon as an emerging eSport and doesn't fully support the competitive side of this game. This means they also don't get in touch with the community, which is sad and this isn't the right game for me.
2) Game Freak is not aware of this unbalance. This is even worse in my opinion, since that would mean Game Freak will never ever be able to properly balance the game, unless they hear what the community suggests but that's unlikely.
3) Game Freak is waiting for Pokemon Z to balance these stuffs. What if they can't properly balance eveything? Will they start to support the game with balance patches or will we be stuck with a partially balanced game for 1 more year?


Honestly i think the right answer is the number 1. This being said, last year i had much more expectations from this game. I invested a lot of time the past year, but right now i regret it.

I'm attending a Regional tomorrow. Or i should i say.. i was about to attend it. I started to teambuild again after a long break from Pokemon around 4 days ago, but everytime i asked myself "why shouldn't i use M-Kangaskhan? is there a better option? why shouldn't i use Landorus and Thundurus then? why shouldn't i use Heatran? it just walls half of the metagame thanks to its typing". Why should i build an anti-CHALK team where i can just run CHALK to play actively instead of passively? Anyway i would never use CHALK, not because i have something against it but because it doesn't fit my playstyle.. however everytime i try to build something new i'm unsatisfied because i know it will be always less performing and consistent than CHALK and CHALK variants on the long run. This is not the game i want to play. I'll stop playing competitive Pokemon until something changes.

[Eckley]

(Oct 31, 2015, 05:08 PM)naitre Wrote: I realized that Gamefreak had absolutely no regard for the competitive aspect of Pokémon when M-Rayquaza was announced. I had suspicions in the past, but once the leaks proved to be truth and not a hoax, it became absolutely clear to me that they don't even take their own game seriously. I agree that the heart of the matter is that Gamefreak simply doesn't care about the competitive aspect of the game and doesn't fully recognize it as a competitive game.

Even Smash, a game marketed as a party game, takes the initiative to listen to its competitive community despite the fact that Sakurai has said multiple times that he doesn't want it to be a competitive game and never intends for it to be taken as seriously as it is.

The community is dying out because Gamefreak is poisoning it. I know I'll be throwing in the towel once and for all if the next installment is another reboot and doesn't address some of the major flaws in its unhealthy metagame.

This pretty much sums up my thoughts on it. Maybe they have no intentions of Pokemon being a competitive game, and if that's the case they'll have no intentions of balancing it for competitive play. Like you've mentioned with Smash, Sakurai said he didn't want it to be a competitive game, and yet it still gets updates balancing the characters.

From all the Pokemon stuff that's been coming out, it seems that Z is likely to be the next title, but I have no reason to believe that anything will be different from what it is now. A lot of people, myself included, have gotten bored of ORAS or just Pokemon in general, and if GF keep going in the direction they are now I feel like a lot more people will be drifting away

[Apo]

one thing I would like to add:

a game can't be competitive when you have to spend hours and hours to not even train, but to "farm" what you need :
could be gears on MMO's for example, in Pokemon it is: EV,IV,Nature just to name a few

one way to balance the meta in the first place would be to remove legendaries from VGC, then balance the rest, then find a way to make EV,IV, etc easier.

if you take Dota for example, you can start playing, meaning training, as soon as you start. in Pokemon you would have to spend dozes of hours breeding to try your team out, to check if it works or not.

[ChaseInfinity]

I myself try to play risky and use something unique because it makes the game fun or me, but a lot of times especially when I started to first play competitively, I started to get frustrated because I was losing much, I wanted to win, but I also wanted to have fun too. I struggled to fine that balance. But I don't know how motivated I'll be for the next gen if it's just the same thing, maybe the new pokemon will change it but that common pokemon now will still reign supreme. And don't get me started with RNG, I've lost countless amount of games to stupid rng and tbh its not fun, I wanna win to a good battle not stupid luck. We'll see what the future brings, I just wanna have fun battle with my friends and show people my skills. But for now I'll stay with binding of Isaac and Sm4sh ;P

[Marcusube]

Competitive Pokemon, in my opinion, has gotten rather stale and I agree with you GMX. Gamefreak doesn't give a rats behind about the competitive aspect of the game. In VGC14, players were complaining about how Kangaskhan was basically dominating the metagame by simply clicking Return, not to mention how much issues this Pokemon brought when it was first introduced into Smogon. Gamefreak keeps creating unbalanced Pokemon and making them legal in the meta. When the community complains, they don't respond.

Honestly, I myself have tuned out from competitive Pokemon on a whole. I do play Smogon with viewers on the various competitive battling streams on Twitch and I still play Free-For-Alls with members from this community but aside from this, I have absolutely no intention of playing VGC until GameFreak gets their stuff together

[Zigzagger456]

i agree GMX it has become very stale if you face a japanese player on bs assume chalk is gonna be there 90 percent of the times i still play tho i am trying my best to find something new but every time no matter what i make CHALK ruins it and if they don't change anything next gen i give up

[Pokeventurer]

The only four things that i think that make pokemon non-competitive are confusion, flinch, freeze and para (hax) the main effects of para (speed control) are still OK to me. i think that there are ways to deal with things like confusion, para and freeze through certain moves, abilities, items but flinch hax just doesn't makes any sense, apart from the move called 'fake out'