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TalkBack / Re: The High Barriers to Entry in Competitive Pokémon

« on: February 06, 2013, 02:46:55 PM »

Hi all,


I wanted to do a follow-up to my previous post.  I'll make this one much shorter.


I ended up playing just under 30 games in the last tournament.  If I remember correctly:


I had only three wins
Three opponents disconnected on me, two when I was obviously winning.
After a while, I was able to tell with approx. 90% accuracy who had bred for combat (lab?) pokemon just by seeing their initial line-up.
I could tell within one turn if my opponent had "normal" or supercharged pokemon.


Despite losing, I enjoyed the matches with trainers with normal pokemon.  I felt like I had at least a chance to win.


Out of all the matches, I only saw one unique / interesting strategy (IMHO).  Someone had a level 1 Aron with sturdy.  They held Leftovers. They attacked using Endeavor.  The other Pokemon used Safeguard.  Ripped through my team.


Also, simply, I made bad choices which pokemon to enter and what moves they had.  They didn't support each other as well as I had planned.


I'll enter the upcoming friendly just to see what others use.


Also, I'm going to try to avoid playing at night Pacific time.  Bluntly, most of my opponents were Japanese and had supercharged Pokemon.  I had a much better chance of having an enjoyable game vs. non-Japanese opponents.  I hold no prejudice.  That was simply my experience.


And finally, could anyone direct me to where I could learn more about good strategies for different battle types?  For example, I'd like to learn some good two on two strategies for the future.


Thanks.


Caterkiller, at least you've shown good judgement in some things. Obligatory: Sorry.

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TalkBack / Re: The High Barriers to Entry in Competitive Pokémon

« on: January 27, 2013, 04:19:15 PM »

Hi all,


This weekend's International Tournament was my first experience with an official Pokemon online competition.  I had a few thoughts to add to this discussion (one of the more rational and least name calling forums I found about this online).


A quick bit about me just to help anyone understand where my opinions are coming from.  I'm 48 years old and have been a computer gamer for about 4 decades now.  I worked at EA for a while managing a testing team.  I get gaming.  I stay away from the fast twitch online games since I suck at them now and hate the trash talk.  I started with the DS Pokemon games about a year ago when my kids got interested in them.  I've spent at least a couple hundred hours playing the DS games but with very few online battles.


I signed up for this tournament expecting to lose most of my battles since I'm a n00b to this.  But what I found was discouraging, to say the least.  I chose 6 pokemons that I had levelled up to between 80 and 100 in the game.  I did not work the EV levels - I just played.  These pokemon easily ripped through the final four and champion several times in several combinations in-game.  I understand combos and at least the base mechanics and strategy for a 2 on 2 battle.


I started with just a couple battles one afternoon.  I won one and lost one.  Cool.  Everything seemed pretty much what I expected.  Then that night I logged in and played at least 10 tournament games.  Due to the time, 9 out of the 10 games were against people from a single country (I don't know if that makes a difference).  I got my Pokenuts handed to me each and every battle.  My most effective attacks barely scratched my opponents. Yet their attacks would often rip through my guys doing far more damage than base (i.e. Earthquake once took me down by over 180 hps).  And these were opponents with rankings at 1500-ish.


I thought the first few battles were just against good competitors that had really great pokemon.  But after another 8 battles with similar issues, I'm rather sure that these Pokemon were lab created (on the PC). Possibly some of the players had bred them or did an immense amount of grinding but I find it hard to believe too many players do that after reading this discussion thread.


I would submit that the online competitions are an entirely different pokemon game only based loosely on any of the video games.  Essentially we're seeing familiar components (sprites, abilities, items) to the DS games.  If it is true that a majority of competitive players create their teams on a PC within "legal" boundaries, really all the competitions are doing is using the online engine of the DS games.  The combatants are created and/or tweaked on a PC or online service for specific strategies with all important stats maxed out.  Then the owner uses the online components of the DS games to import their teams and then battle.


If such a scenario is true, playing the actual video games has little impact on the competitive online tournaments (other than the obvious fun factor and it is one way to learn the capacities of the moves and abilities).  Just because my Join Avenue shops are at 10 doesn't mean squat in an online competition.  My n00b brain has a hard time thinking of anything in-game that would impact an online competition if the combatants are lab created.


So the way I view the online competitions is to use experience and knowledge to create a team of combatants that will address at least one winning strategy while still dealing with the metagame.  So why doesn't Nintendo just come out with a Pokemon competition editor that allows creation within the legal guidelines?  If they throw on the already developed online competition code to such a product, they take away the grey market, reap profits and allow competitive players to concentrate on the large time sink of strategy, metagaming, different attack/defense/ability possibilities, etc.  To answer my own question, they probably make more money forcing the purchase of DS games and it allows them to keep the moral high ground by not endorsing grey market editing.


So, if you've followed me all this way (thank you), what's my point?  As a n00b, getting schooled by custom created Pokemon even as my rating kept dropping just sucked.  I had hoped the rating system would at least allow me to compete at the sub-sub-sub basement level.  Nope.  So I would say my barrier to entry was not understanding that no matter how well my Pokemon did in-game, there seemed almost no way for me win or enjoy entering the competition.  I would need to invest a huge amount of time, effort and potentially cost to properly edit a decently researched team and enter them just not to have my head handed to me on a platter. Of course, that's what the good competitors do. After spending a couple hundred hours having fun on the DS games, I was just hoping to enjoy some casual competition with people around the world.  Nope.


In the above posts, someone mentioned just using all rental pokemon.  Since I imagine that at certain competitive levels, most players are using pokemon with maxed stats, this could potentially work if one could choose from a stable of pre-made pokemon.  For example, possibly I could choose from one of 6 Emolga (maxed attack, maxed defense, etc.) and then a drop down with available Abilities.  Complex - yes.  Doable - yes.  Just a thought...


And who knows... maybe I just really, really suck at competitive Pokemon and that would negate most of what I said above.


Thanks all.  Oh, and since I'm Canadian - Sorry.