2014 International Challenge — May
The first International Challenge of the VGC ’14 season has been officially announced and with it comes news that the Top 128 players in North America and Europe in each age division will receive Championship Points for their efforts. As there is no guarantee that there will be another International Challenge before the World Championships, it will be an incredibly important part of players’ seasons as they chase that elusive Worlds invite. This will especially be the case for European players who will not receive Premier Challenges until next season at the earliest making this their only chance of breaking ties between players who end up at the same number of points after Nationals.
The International Challenge is an online ladder-based tournament. You will be able to play up to 20 battles per day (which if past tournaments are any indication, will roll unplayed games over to the next day though we make no guarantees) from 00:00 UTC on Friday May 16th, 2014(5:00 PM PDT on Thursday, May 15th ) to 23:59 UTC on Sunday May 18th, 2014 (4:59 PM UTC on Sunday May 18th).
To register, you’ll need to have an account on Pokemon.com and register your game with the Global Link. Your game must be attached to the same account that has the player ID you use to play in Regionals, Nationals, and other events in the Play! Pokémon program if you want to receive Championship Points. You will be able to participate if you are one of the first 50,000 players to register on the Global Link for the event between 00:00 UTC on Thursday May 8th, 2014 (5:00 PM PDT on Wednesday, May 7th) and 23:59 UTC on Thursday, May 15th, 2014 (4:59 PM PDT on Thursday, May 15th).
The tournament will use the Standard ruleset and should prove to be the most competitive tournament yet with thousands of players worldwide playing to prove themselves and increase their chances at a World Championship invite! All participants who play at least one match and don’t get disqualified will receive an Enigma Berry. Championship Points will be awarded as follows:
| Placement | Points |
| 1 | 10 |
| 2–8 | 8 |
| 9–16 | 4 |
| 17–64 | 2 |
| 65–128 | 1 |
With the Special Ladder on Battle Spot switching from Standard to Inverse Battles on May 12th, this will be the only chance afterwards that we know of to practice with other players online in-game under the same ruleset you’ll be using at the National and World Championships.
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.
Related Posts
Nugget Bridge Update →
GS Cup Announced as Pokémon’s 2016 Ruleset →
2016 Pokémon World Championships Date & Location Surfaces →
Yes I remember you, played awful in that match, good game and well deserved win though
29-11 after day two. Hair is starting to fall out from all the crits and misses, though it could be a lot worse. Really only had two games I lost due to bad predications against good players. I expect day three to be a blood bath, so today I’m going to get wasted and play Skyrim.
It must be. The amount of hax I’ve had against me has been incredible. I haven’t won a single game out of my 40 so far due to hax but I’ve lost over 6 to relatively inexperienced players who avoid 3 will-o-wisps in a row and rock slides then turn around and crit me. It just gets really frustrating.
So from what Im reading on this thread, it seems like nobody ever loses legitimately…
Well in other news, 27-13 #nomeganoproblem
I have not had much time to get in battles, but I’m doing well so far. 18-3 is pretty good, and I am sitting at about 1700 rating, which is nice. I will get those last 39 battles in later. I have had tough battles this entire time, even in junior/senior division.
I think I lost to that guy too. Did he have a Gourgeist and a Rhyperior (can’t remember what else he had)
The worst luck ever – that is all
Seriously, can people stop whining about luck? I’m just going to delete posts that are just RNG complaining after this point. We’re all playing the same game. It happens to everyone over 60 games.
This thread is a little less terrible than the ones last year because of DCing being much less of a thing, but let’s get over ourselves…
The standard that people seem to be playing, even the players that have transferred with no-protect teams, seems to be pretty high (almost lost to a team with no protects) Going decently, just broke 1700 on 27th game with is ok. Not sure if it’s on track for gaining any CP in the end, but had a bit of a rocky start so we’ll have to wait and see.
I’m 14-16, taking a break and getting in a few more battles in a couple hours.
Up against some interesting teams and combos. Here’s the most interesting strategy I found myself up against when (IIRC) I had a battle against a Japanese player named Eva (エヴァ):
1. I lead with my usual Manectric and Azumarill; Eva leads with Gengar and Rotom-W.
2. After a turn, Gengar mega evolves and then Rotom-W performs Trick on my Azumarill, taking her Leftovers and leaving her with Choice Specs. Wait, what?
3. Mega Gengar uses Disable on my Azumarill, who was going to use Play Rough (I forgot Gengar was Poison/Ghost) on it, and because of the Choice Specs, she’s locked into that one move. Much struggling ensues and I am eventually defeated 4-0.
In the classic words of Ron Burgundy…
It’s impossible to make the statement that an equal amount of luck that mattered occurs to each player. You don’t even have any statistics on other people’s games. Step off your high horse please. You aren’t the end-all be-all source for Pokemon insight.
Giving people the benefit of the doubt is a small thing do, especially since you should be setting an example as a moderator. I don’t think it’s your job to set standards as a massively insensitive and brash person.
let’s be honest here, this thread is basically 90% posts complaining about RNG and the other 10% is people describing a certain strat / did anyone battle me? / posting their W/L. I think almost everybody on here is a little tired of the complaining and would not hesitate to have the constant whining stop.
I don’t really have a problem with the shift away from complaining about luck. My problem is with the way Scott handled it, and the way he handles a lot of subjects.
Hey, that’s exactly what I did once I was done. xD
…Aside from getting wasted, anyway.
I’m pretty sure he had a Rhyperior. And the Gourgeist was the TR setter, of course.
Finishing up today with a 25-7 record. Not bad at all. I have a lot of battles to do in the morning. At 1730, the battles are becoming really intense, and it’s a blast. I have really enjoyed this tournament overall.
Currently at 29-14 right now. Really realizing the flaws in my team and the way I’m playing it at the moment and am slowly learning just to deal with all the crits that keep happening, as some of it has been completely out of my control and I shouldn’t get so worked up about something that happened in 60 games. It’s been pretty bidoof frustrating today but eh I’ve already learned my flaws with the team and I’m already thinking of some new spreads. All I’m hoping is that I can just get most of them patched and get truly comfortable with the team before Nationals.
Now that I look back at my Google Doc, that person actually did. The rest of the team was Mega Mawile, Bisharp, and Rotom-Heat.
Person was from Japan and I think the name was あも–ち. However, that is more or less a rough copy and paste job from attempting to write down the name and Googling JPN letters. I am somewhat wondering if I should write a long post about this competition when it’s done in my point of view.
EDIT: Whoops. Never mind about the deadline. Just saw it. Looks like I’ll have a smaller sample size overall.
Ah, thanks. I didn’t know it. I’m in more love with Rough Skin+Rocky Helmet now.
Finished with 46-14 with 186X/187X points (irritating how you can’t see your final ranking…)
I’m pretty happy with that. I’ll probably make a little post after my premier challenge tomorrow about my team and how it plays against highly skilled opponents, as I think the topic is pretty interesting.
Good luck to everyone finishing up their tournament today!
I agree that there are a lot of posts complaining about hax which are pretty pointless (I mean if you flip a coin 60 times it’s going to have a few unfortunate sequences), but I still see DCing as an issue. It may have been worse before (I didn’t play wifi on cartridge until gen 6) but it’s still not even close to where it should be.
At the end of the day I’ve got 14 battles recorded going 11-3 where not a single one of the 3 losses were completed games (there was another game I was probably going to lose but that one DC’d and didn’t give me a loss or a win).
Since I didn’t go into the battles tonight expecting a stable platform I’m significantly less frustrated, but I’m still super disappointed in Nintendo. I don’t think we should consider this an acceptable platform for any kind of even vaguely serious tournament, let alone one that awards CP.
One of the most important concepts in software development is useful error messages. These error messages aren’t useful; the cause of the error and its effect on the tournament are totally opaque to the player.
And it’s really a sad state of affairs when fan made projects with a handful of developers hacking in their limited spare time with no funding can provide a more stable and transparent platform for battles than what’s been shipped in the retail games. I wish I could convey to Nintendo how much they need to focus on making the online battling more robust before they expect anyone to take it seriously. I mean do they even try to send messages again if things don’t go perfectly the first time? Because to the player the disconnects are very abrupt, no indication that something is going wrong until it’s irreversible.
I’m also somewhat curious how other networked games on the 3DS behave; Gamefreak may be doing the best they could with what they’ve got from the system, but I somehow doubt it.
I wonder where the best place to leave feedback for the tournament is.
Geez, I don’t know, I don’t see a lot of people complaining about disconnects. The one I had was because my Internet got clogged up and got recorded as a loss for me, the few others my opponents had got recorded as a win for me. Have you ever thought about the possibility of those 3 disconnect losses were something on your end?
There are reports from people that some of the disconnects don’t get recorded properly, but I think the complaining should be done after final results are out, because it might simply be a display bug and they might still be included in the rating that gets cooked up in the end. If it’s still wrong then, it’s probably safe to complain.
That’s part of what I’m saying. Even if the exact same number of disconnects happened and they were all my fault, but the error messages were more clear about the cause of the disconnect, I would be much less frustrated.
I still think that I shouldn’t be getting disconnected, but right now there’s nothing I can do except guess and clearly this thread is good evidence that people aren’t apt to blame themselves first.
Messages like “Your connection to the Pokemon servers was lost, your match will be recorded as a loss.”, “Your opponent’s connection to the Pokemon servers was lost, your match will be recorded as a win.”, and “The Pokemon servers encountered an unexpected error, the match will be discarded.” would really disambiguate it and at least limit the scope of the complaints.
Okay, so here’s how it works:
I haven’t heard/read anything about Nintendo servers having issues during those 2 days, so I sincerely doubt that was the case at any point.
TXDW-WWWW-WWW7-F9V6
This guy had a FEAR Smeargle, Snorlax, and a Mawile with a pretty unusual moveset. The most notable thing was using Smeargle to help Malamar set up and later having Mawile use Psyche Up to copy those boosts. Has this been done before in any notable competitions?
Also made rly bad plays pls don’t judge
I can’t seem to recall any successful instance of gimmick use like this, unless you’re considering verlisify’s “undefeated” run at Colorado springs last generation. Jokes aside, I’m sure that setup like this has been attempted at numerous notable competitions. However, I’m just as sure that it never fared very well.
Verlisify: I did not get defeated by knockout, only timeout. I would have pokemon on the field that would win within 2 turns… unfortunately the judge staff didn’t know how to handle illegal game stalling so I would be given a loss in a 1v2 pokemon scenario. I had losses on my record but no defeats.
Legit.
In that case I’m pretty bad for falling for it
Bounced back gracefully from my lackluster 13-7. And I’m now sitting at 1851, 37W-11L with 12 more battles I can play.
My 4 losses this time were a lot more play based rather than luck based which was good. Rather… I think I had plenty of luck based wins this time, as much as I may dislike admitting to it.
I played against Fatum, Massi, joej m, and The Battle Room. Kind of Moody’d my way through defeating Massi, and lost against joej m where I had a small chance to win only if my Blastoise slept for the minimum amount of turns. The matches I won against Fatum and Battle Room were good though. ggs
I agree that empirically it seems like if you get thrown out of battle spot you get a loss or the match doesn’t get recorded. And if you don’t get thrown out you usually get a win, but it’s not always immediately awarded. But that’s not my point.
My point is that we shouldn’t be reduced to guessing. Match outcomes should be deterministic and obvious. I can’t imagine anyone seriously thinks that more transparency here is worse.
I’m really past being upset at this specific tournament, and I feel like people are missing my point that there’s serious room for improvement here and I think it would be in everyone’s best interest if more time was spent making this system robust, so I’ll leave it here for this thread. These posts really don’t need more replies about how you did or didn’t experience disconnects or about how through trial and error you’ve come to gain some insight on which subtle behavior produces a given result.
Finished my matches……a disappointing 35/25….my first time playing in a tournament of any sort…..what shd I do to gt my box unlocked?
Go back to Battle Spot and choose Cancel Participation.