What We Learned: 2012 VGCS Winter Battle Edition
During every Pokemon event, we learn a little bit about the game of Pokémon and the community that surrounds it that is worth reflecting on. This Masters-centric column will appear following major events and highlight important trends and moments during the previous weekend’s(ish) events.
Now that the holiday season is over and we’re back on our normal publishing schedule, it’s time to address the last major event that happened prior to the break: the first Wi-Fi tournament that counted for Championship Points.
I want to be very forward about how I think we all need to look at this: this tournament was objectively both good and bad in a lot of ways. For those of you who don’t have a lot of background on how this played out already, the Wi-Fi tournaments have notoriously been a joke to the competitive players because the disconnection rates for every event have been absolutely sky high because for some reason Nintendo inexplicably coded a Wi-Fi system that can’t actually tell which party caused the disconnection. Like most situations involving humans, when people think they can get away with something they will try to get away with it, and we were for the most part terrified by the prospect of a Wi-Fi tournament that awarded Championship Points given the history of the player behavior during these tournaments. It is at least slightly harder to DC now in Black 2/White 2 where players receive a 1 hour time out if they turn their DS off during a battle, but with that being easily avoidable, or in some cases acceptable to players trying to save their ratings, we expected there to be a ton of disconnects once again with so much on the line.
This is where TPCI came in. I wish more players would acknowledge how bad of a hand they were dealt here, so I want to start off with how I view their end (I specify view, since I’m sure we’ve all noticed they’ve been totally silent since the tournament ended). We’ve been complaining for years that we wished we had more opportunities for official play like the TCG does with Battle Roads, City Championships, and State Championships in addition to Regionals and Nationals. The only viable way for TPCI to do this without ridiculous expense and maintaining reasonable accessibility for players given the comparably small size of the VGC community is to use the internet. The only the way they could do that is to incentivize Wi-Fi tournaments, which the terrible infrastructure they’re forced to use and our lack of honor had made into a joke. It is pretty obvious that the status quo would make these tournaments even more of a joke than they already were, so like I expected, and like I assumed the rest of you expected as well, TPCI clamped down extremely hard on DC rates, which led to a rather large amount of players being disqualified.
There were a lot of signs pointing to this inevitability. We knew that the way things were wouldn’t work, that the new head of VGC had a history with being extremely tough on this sort of behavior in other games, and that they had changed the DC disqualification formula when we signed up. I think the part that surprised most of the players is exactly how tough TPCI ended up being on DCs, since players who “only” intentionally disconnected four or five times were almost without exception disconnected due to the low margin of error relative to previous tournaments. I feel badly for the players who got disqualified as even though many of the players from our part of the community who were disqualified either have had opponents come out and say they disconnected or had internet troubles these tournaments take a really significant time investment and it doesn’t seem particularly just that they walked away completely empty-handed even if almost all of them were certainly cheating, at least a little. That’s without mentioning anyone unlucky enough to have been disqualified exclusively because they were unlucky enough to have had a disproportionate amount of opponents disconnect on them, which is a major weakness of the current system.
I do respect the heck out of how tough TPCI was on this, in spite of the drawbacks. I would expect that the fear of disqualification lowered the DC rate for this tournament and that the surprising extent of the disqualifications this time will greatly diminish the rate of disconnections next time, much as they must have planned. I can’t help but feel like the results of this tournament were kind of sacrificed for the greater good (which I guess is easy for me to say, since I finished high enough to get 8 of the possible 10 CP), the ethics of which is debatable, but as someone who tends to spend a lot of time playing the bad cop myself I think it was the best long term approach they could have taken, and I would expect the conditions in these tournaments to improve drastically by the end of the year — something that will be very important given that these tournaments are the primary qualification system for some of our friends in other countries like South Korea. I hope this review doesn’t imply that I don’t think any innocent players were wrongly disqualified — they absolutely were, and that isn’t OK — but I think that is the exception rather than the rule and that TPCI took some necessary steps forward here.
Look At Friends, Not Countries
I have written a few times that I tend to find the psychology around Pokemon more interesting than the competition itself, and one of those most interesting cases of this to me is the way many people view the idea of “tactical disconnecting.” We have had a few good internet fights about this already, but I have found it really fascinating how different groups view it, and I think people who are trying to characterize entire countries’ views on disconnecting are being pretty lazy because it is much easier to figure out what is probably happening here when you go smaller than that and look at the ring of friends players are probably interacting with during these events instead.
It is easiest for me to analyze the competitive players in North America just because it is what I’m most familiar with, but I think it’s interesting both if you view that as the entire group and then when you look a little deeper. One thing that seems to be different here than with some of our competitors abroad is that for the most part we all agree DCing is never okay on the surface. I specify on the surface because I mean that in the sense that none of the North Americans are going to admit to DCing more than once anywhere in the open because they agree with the perception of disconnecting, but perhaps not the execution, since there are plenty of frequent DCers here just like everywhere else. What I’m implying there is that I know there are several social circles where people did DC a few times because of bad luck and that those groups seem to view that as acceptable because the players involved had much better odds of winning than losing before Pokemon happened.
I think this is an interesting contrast to, say, the part of the community that is built around some of the historically sketchy but more recently honorable players like Paul Hornak and Huy Ha, who are apparently better at keeping their ethernet cables plugged in than than they were counting EVs, and Ray Rizzo, where even in smaller circle chats people would get absolutely lambasted for disconnecting on purpose and whose members largely show up on the final standings — Biosci and I being notables on the front page, but predictably people like resident EVologist Huy also got their CP. I noticed a good chunk of Team Magma also managed not to get disqualified (and most of the people who did seem to know why), which doesn’t surprise me very much either because I imagine that’s another community where there wouldn’t be that positive feedback loop to disconnecting when your get bad breaks that feeds the system, with that aversion to that sort of behavior evidenced by Dimsun’s reaction to some of what was said on their podcast. Most of the other American players near the top who didn’t get DQed are people who don’t really seem to be part of many circles beyond the community as a whole but who are people who are known for being particularly mature and/or honest like R Inanimate, mattj, and ryuzaki. I think if we step away and look back, it probably isn’t too surprising to see the names that survived did so because for the most part they’re the people who were big on fair play or had people around them encouraging them to play that way.
I have a harder time giving an honest analysis of most of the rest of the world here because I don’t know the players individually as well, but from reading some stuff outside of Nugget Bridge like the Spanish VGC forum and some Facebook posts, I know that while many of the posters there were very upset about other people disconnecting on them, they seemed to mostly be in agreement that tactical disconnecting was just part of the tournament when they did so themselves, so I don’t think what happened there is too surprising with almost all of them getting disqualified. I don’t think that means those players are particularly dishonest, but their view of the game we were playing and the vision TPCI had for it didn’t match up very well, so I think it was pretty predictable they got disqualified. I wonder if they wouldn’t have been a little better served as a group if they tried to emulate flash_mc a little more and Ruben a little less, but I would expect for the next Wi-Fi tournament they’ll adjust to the way DCs are handled now and many more of them will appear on the final standings.
I guess the point of this section to me is that I think we need to help each other with this stuff. Peer pressure is a big deal. If you and your friends think it is OK to DC a few times you’re more likely to do it and more likely to get DQed, so hold yourselves and each other to taking the losses and you’ll probably all be better off.
You Play To Win The Game… Unless You Don’t Play It
Ties. This is the issue I think we should be arguing about rather than the disconnecting, which I think everyone has soundly had beaten over their heads at this point. I hadn’t really expected this to be an issue, but a surprising amount of players were forcing draws if they hit each other during the competition so neither side would lose any points. I’m not a big fan of this — at some point these tournaments should actually involve beating other quality opponents to see which players are the best rather than just seeing who can farm 1550 players while not getting disconnected on the best. As such, trying to dodge quality opponents through ties seems to undermine the competition pretty significantly. Obviously, this also winds up making these events more difficult for players who aren’t already established members of the community, since they have to actually play out those games against tougher opponents, and they are probably more likely to get disconnected on as well, since people think they can get away from it. I don’t know what I can say about this one since I doubt TPCI will care to do anything about it but this seems pretty classless to me.
Oh Right, This Was a Pokemon Tournament
I guess I’ll take a moment to break away from the drama around the tournament to comment on the fact that this was supposed to be a competition about Pokemon rather than internet connections. I think we largely saw what we expected to see from the teams in this tournament: quite a lot of Rain, most of same popular Pokemon and movesets from VGC 2012, and a splattering of Pokemon popular with less competitive players like some of the very fast, frail sweepers and the starter Pokemon. The top 6 most used Pokemon by ~~STRONG PLAYERS~~ were predictably the 6 Pokemon on Ray’s Worlds team (Metagross, Cresselia, Tyranitar, Rotom, Garchomp) followed by Scizor, Hitmontop, Politoed, and Latios. Largely, the movesets and items these Pokemon were holding were almost unchanged from the last BW1 event we had, indicating that the metagame is shifting to BW2 pretty slowly. I was most surprised not to see Thundurus in the top 10 most used, since you’d think between Thundurus-I being such an important disrupter and Thundurus-T being an exciting new weapon it would have at least slipped in towards the bottom of the top 10 there.
The Tournament Format is Likely Not Changing
I hate to break it to people, but I would be surprised if this format changed significantly in the next two years, so we’d best get used to it. While we haven’t heard anything from TPCI in a while, I would be surprised if they had a way to improve their disconnection detection or matchmaking available because with the system being so obviously broken if that was an option they would have done it already. I can’t imagine them getting any help from Nintendo until at least generation 6, assuming that winds up being 3DS exclusive, so the way things are is likely the way things are going to be for the near future.
I think more than anything this explains why TPCI did what they did here. They likely don’t see it as a reasonable course of action to wait two or three years for Gen 6 for Wi-Fi tournaments to start feeding into our CP system. They can’t change the infrastructure to improve disconnects that way, so the only thing they can do is invest everything into fixing the system they have now by changing player behavior because it is the only meaningful variable they can control. I think I would personally have preferred that they just waited until the next generation to expand beyond our previous qualification system, but since that is obviously not going to happen we’re all just going to need to buckle down and make the best of this. The system isn’t going anywhere.
Fix Your Yamsing Connection
I think at a high level one of the main skills required in Pokemon is learning how not to expose yourself to unnecessary risk. Sadly, this has apparently managed to extend into real life, as players must now do what they can to prevent themselves from being disqualified for things that are only partially under their control. With the rate of allowable disconnections being reduced so much from previous competitions, we’ve established that we’re at the point where even a handful of intentional DCs will probably lead to disqualification… which means that a handful of unintentional DCs will probably do the same thing. Especially given that this must look exactly the same as people who have uncles toggling their routers so they can eat lunch as they’re about to lose, this is something people are going to have to try to work out if they want to stay in the standings.
No one expects anyone to go out and change ISPs and knock down all their walls to have better reception or whatever, but with the month between Wi-Fi tournaments I hope everyone has spent some time figuring out how to make what they have work as well as they can and maybe upgraded their routers if they needed to. We’re lucky to have a pretty low expense game with the video game compared to the TCG or whatever, so I guess having to invest a little here isn’t as big of a deal as it might seem, but please, do what you can to protect yourself here. No one wants to see anyone get DQed for the wrong reasons. If you have a particularly bad connection, it might be worth seeing if there are local businesses with more stable wireless you could use.
You Aren’t Owed Anything
Maybe the hardest thing for TPCI to work out of the community is going to be trying to remove this bizarre entitlement people have where they think they should never lose matches against people they think they’re better than. This phenomenon is strange to me because at any given real life event like half the known players pick up at least one hilarious loss to players we’ve never seen before using teams that often aren’t very good because we’re playing a game where there is both a large luck element and matchups are a major factor for a lot of teams. In spite of this, in the Wi-Fi tournaments many people have suddenly decided that being a dedicated/experienced player entitles them to never lose to players that are significantly lower rating than them and they feel justified DCing. You know what entitles you not to have to lose to weaker players? Not losing to weaker players.
Accountability on the internet has always been something that is pretty hard to find, so I guess it shouldn’t come to much surprise that people think they can get away with this sort of thing, especially when they feel they deserve to. The part of this that really frustrates me is that I’m sure none of these players are forfeiting when they get the positive RNG, so apparently luck is something that’s only allowed to happen in their favor. I hope that the tough stance TPCI took here forces some people to grow up a little.
Play To The Format
I feel like one major thing that would cut down on the frustration that isn’t directly from connection problems for many players is to consider the format a little more. I don’t mean this in the incredibly productive sense that most players are actually choosing to take when re-evaluating the format such as “Wah! I didn’t get the result I wanted! Wi-Fi tournaments suck!”. Rather, I think that there are some important changes in team building and playstyle that players should be making for this event because there are a handful of conditions that change from what we normally deal with.
In the real life events, we make a lot of choices with the expectation that our team will work most of the time rather than all of the time, because we never start in a situation where we need to win every single game, usually only needing to win 66-75% of the Swiss games in any event to cut and then two of three in each of the following best of threes. Because that definition of consistency has a somewhat generous margin for error, we tend to use a reasonable amount of moves like Hydro Pump, Megahorn and Meteor Mash because they work often enough that they should get us what we want while having significantly higher damage than their more accurate counterparts when they hit. Due to the significant amount of points lost if you lose even one game to a player with a meaningfully lower rating than yours in these events, this is one situation where we should probably be leaving as many of those moves at home as possible in favor of moves that are going to work more reliably to avoid throwing winnable games. That’s not to say you can’t be successful relying on a bunch of these moves, but it would probably save you some frustration to either use the more accurate version of those moves or to leave Pokemon that rely on the less accurate attacks in your PC for these events, since if you want to finish near the top it’s more like an 80-90% rate you need to win at, and when you account for things like actually getting outplayed and losing conventionally that’s not a margin you can afford having the RNG work against you. Most of your games aren’t going to be against other good players where you need to squeak out every bit of power to win.
I think having reliable solution to “gimmicks” is also a really big deal in this sort of event because you tend to face a much greater variety of strategies than you would in a real event, so having Taunt or even something like Roar available just to disrupt the crazy stuff can go a long way toward avoiding those losses people tend to have mysterious connection issues during. Controlling speed is also a big deal in these things, since you need to limit the amount of actions your opponent gets to reduce the odds of getting Pokemoned. You really don’t need a team that would win a Regional to do well in one of these events; you just need something that is consistent and handles common team strategies and the strangeness of Wi-Fi tournaments well.
Conclusion
I hope most of you had fun with this tournament, even though it was frustrating in many ways for most of us. Let’s just try to be grateful for the practice and that these tournaments are probably going to wind up being worth a nearly inconsequential amount of CP with only 1-10 CP awarded per person per tournament and get ready for the bigger events on the horizon with Winter Regionals only two weeks away.
About the Author
Scott started playing VGC in 2011. He finished 17th at US Nationals, then lost in the final round of 2011 Worlds LCQ. He finished 10th in the 2012 World Championships and qualified for Worlds again in 2013 after going into US Nationals second in CP. Instead of playing, he commentated at US Nationals and the World Championships in 2013 and 2014. Follow him on Twitter @NBNostrom!
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