Interview with J.C. Smith of The Pokémon Company International about Competitive Organized Play
During the 2014 Pokémon World Championships we had the chance to sit down and talk with J.C. Smith, Consumer Marketing Director at The Pokémon Company International, about the Pokémon Video Game Championships (VGC). Unfortunately we weren’t able to publish it right away due to some technical issues, but with the release of Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire we thought it would be a good time to look at how someone from The Pokémon Company International sees the program we spend so much of our time with!
A lot of our readers probably don’t know who you are outside maybe as the person who’s in all the news releases. How long have you been with Pokémon?
Almost 7 years! Since 2007.
Oh wow, 2007. So the year before the first Pokémon Video Game World Championships.
Coincidence? I think not!
And what do you do in relation to Play! Pokémon?
My groups encompass Play! Pokémon, advertising, PR, and events in general. So basically I’m involved in a lot of the things going on here at the World Championships.
So what was it that prompted your group to add the video game to the Pokémon World Championships?
Obviously there’s people playing the game everywhere and there had been championships throughout time. In fact one of the first trips I went on when I worked at Nintendo was the 2000 Pokémon World Championships in Sydney, Australia so I’ve been immersed from the get-go!
When I came to The Pokémon Company, we decided we built this amazing infrastructure for the trading card game, we had all these amazing organizers, all these key learnings we’ve made about how to run a great tournament and how to build a community – let’s apply this to the video game side. Let’s build the video game up the same way. It took some time, but we’ve been building and finding who the communities are and finding who the organizers are and figuring out what works for us because we want to provide that same experience to play as much as possible with other people that love to play and battle.
Every year of the Video Game Championships has brought a host of improvements. How has fan feedback helped shape the Pokémon Championship Series?
I think a lot of people working at our company are fans. So I think a lot of it is, we just want things to be a certain way. We want to see more streaming. We want to see more people understand what we love about Pokémon. For us, it’s continuing to express that. A lot of the stuff we’re doing with tournaments themselves are to make them more fair, look gorgeous, and allow the audience to see what’s going on.
There are also developers that are here seeing how the game is being played. They’re looking at the metagame saying, “Ok, there’s a balance issue here, here, and here” and they’re thinking about how to fix that. We learn from things like the game timer in tournaments and we look at matches to find a happy medium so it works for the player and also doesn’t drag out the event for too long.
To what extent does The Pokémon Company International and Game Freak communicate on things like how the game is played by competitors and other fans in the western world?
We provide them a lot of data about things like what Pokemon are being played, what moves are being used, and other stats that we can gather. Things like that to help them understand it because it’s similar in Japan but we provide them stats from other areas. We’re constantly talking about it and we have all kinds of meetings throughout the process about the format as well.
Ok, this isn’t a job interview but where do you see the Pokémon Championship Series in 5 Years?
What I’d like is for more and more people to see it. We don’t really want Worlds to be necessarily bigger. It should be an exclusive group that has earned their right to be there. What we would like to see is to have it in more places meaning more qualifying events leading up to it. There’s a lot of great online stuff going on so that people can battle, but I’d like to see more that are channeling people up through into the Worlds ranks. Because for me, there are still a lot of people out there who just don’t have access to a qualifier that gets them here and we want to improve that as best we can.
In Pokémon Black & White 2 you had the Pokémon World Tournament download that added players from the Pokémon World Championships as opponents. That year you also had Three Time World Champion Ray Rizzo as a guest battler for fans at the Pokemon Game Show in Tokyo. How did those come to be and do you have more plans to highlight players in the future?
We definitely conveyed our sense of how awesome it was for both of those things to everyone organizing it. They loved it. Game Freak loved it. We’re always thinking about it but nothing I can reveal at this point but it’s definitely something they think about because they know how cool this community is. After all, they’re here right now watching it and enjoying it themselves.
Who do we need to write to and annoy for a spectate mode in this game?
You just keep writing about it.
Photo Credits: Doug M.
About the Author
Firestorm is one of the co-founders of Nugget Bridge and the Community Manager for eSports Tournament Platform Battlefy. He has been playing Pokémon since 1999, competitively since 2007, and attending tournaments since 2010. He lives in Vancouver, Canada with a degree in Interactive Art & Technology + Communications. You can follow him on Twitter at @rushanshekar.
17 Responses to Interview with J.C. Smith of The Pokémon Company International about Competitive Organized Play
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“How has fan feedback helped shape the Pokémon Championship Series?”
“people working at our company are fans. So I think a lot of it is, we just want things to be a certain way. “
But what’s the deal with Thundurus?
Its very interesting seeing how different things are run between TPC and TPCi. Also how competitive Pokemon game balance is being handled versus, say, Smash Bros.
Tell GF to stop making competitive team training so long-winded for no reason: random IVs passed down when breeding, grinding Battle Points to purchase items and moves, Super Training generally not as good as old-fashioned training, version-specific Mega Stones, etc
I think with how far the games have come in this regard I find it really difficult to complain. It is easier than ever to get whatever you want within hours (or less) and fully train it as well. Back in the original GSC/RSE it was exponentially more tedious to get anything you wanted and train it. There were no breeding items, no training items, only one of each TM that wasn’t available in the shop, no online trading either. To call the current training process long winded is such a huge naivety, especially to veterans of the game.
Yes, training has come a long way but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved further. I feel like you’re telling me to settle with what we have. Surely you’ve had times when you’ve wanted better odds when breeding Pokemon, especially when you want certain IVs for Hidden Power or just wanted to buy items with ingame cash rather than grinding for BP.
It’s like life, you just aren’t going to have everything handed to you. Hard work and dedication go a long way. You’ve got to earn what you get, there’s no reason to feel entitled enough to say that it needs to be easier to get everything because you said so. Sure they could ‘improve’ it further, but at what cost of the original source material it is based off of?
I think you all are maybe too far in both extremes there. The way I view it, it’s more like Rome isn’t built in a single generation.
I agree the sentiment that things sometimes take too long right now (and more pertinently, sometimes rely on too much chance). I also think it seems fairly evident Game Freak definitely wants players to have to play the game some to raise a competitive team. A lot of competitive players would prefer Game Freak to completely divorce those concepts and just have, say, the Battle Box be a completely separate function from the rest of the game that acts more like Showdown!’s team builder. To me, it’s hard to imagine Game Freak making that much of a concession on their apparent design goals. However, they made breeding a lot more streamlined in Generation 6 and added the 3 31s on unbreedables thing, so they certainly saw things were too far out of whack and made some changes to male things more reasonable for players. Hopefully they keep making changes for things to the better in Generation 7, in a similar way to how they keep making little adjustments to the battling for the better. I think there are a few areas that could definitely use some touching up right now — Hidden Power in general, BP grinding in general, Pokemon with imperfect IVs being nearly competitively useless, capturing competitive legendary Pokemon still being very time consuming — but things certainly are getting better, at least.
I want it to be easier to get competitive pokemon the more you play the game. My issue right now is breeding pokemon and catching legendaries is pretty divorced from actually playing the game. It’s a process that often reminds me of homework. If it could get easier to obtain perfect pokemon as I go through more actual game play I would be much happier with the game over all.
The other issue I have is that having an arduous breeding process raises the barrier to entry considerably for those looking to get in on the competitive scene. We don’t want people to turn away from a game they’d greatly enjoy because it’s to much work to get to the point where you can actually play the game.
Two points:
Breeding is tedious, but it is no longer hard. Getting your flawless parents for breeding only needs to be done once or twice per egg group, then you use those as master templates (and its still easy to RNG a Gen 4 or Gen 5 Ditto and xfer to gen 6).
Resetting the game for legendaries is annoying, but nothing is stopping you from speed running, or using the digital download versions and saving backup files. Is it really THAT different than breeding though?
I agree with Scott on this one.
I’ve spoken to multiple, completely random juniors who understood what EV training was because of Super Training being plain to see, right there in the game. This is a huge leap, light years ahead of what it used to be.
Yea, and I personally could see this be even better if they had IV training as a farther category to do in super training since it would be another step to curbing people having to waste so much time through inefficient methods or having to resort to unethical means.
Someone should’ve asked how to cheat without getting caught.
As long as improvements to getting a competitive team ready easier are being made each generation then I’m happy.
“IV training”, IV’s are supposed to be hard and tedious to obtain so they don’t distract those interested in the story. Super training was a great addition for both veterans and newcomers alike, it lets competitive Pokemon players check their EVs, and it lets rookies actually see their Pokemon’s progress and power. Super training is very quick most of the time so rookies can train their Pokemon’s at their own pace, its not supposed to be time consuming.
That doesn’t make any sense. How would allowing you to “train” IVs interfere with the story when you can just ignore it? How many people bother to EV train their in-game team, even now that it’s more transparent? All making it hard does is create a greater barrier to entry for competitive play.
And IV’s are individual values, unlike EV’s which are EFFORT VALUES. The concept of IV training is pretty bad seeing as how its not a stat that progresses but rather an individual trait that CANNOT BE CHANGED. Its to create a personality for your Pokemon, to show that each one is unique and to be cherished. Like in Diablo III, items aren’t guaranteed to be the same every time so their are good versions and sometimes better. It would distract the rookies of the game most of the time because instead of Super training which is fast and easy, it would be infuriating to progress and people would not stop until their Pokemon is at max power. Leveling can be ignored, but people still are determined to be the best their ever was. Individual values are just that, something to make your Pokemon stand out of your friends. So everyone doesn’t have the exact same stats so that luck can decide who wins a friendly 1v1 at a party.