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.
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Nice to see that there is some way to still play under VGC ruling after the season is over.
However, if the Battle Box will be locked, I definitely would need to find a team to play with.
I wonder how this will affect participants of Brisbane/Sydney Regionals that weekend, assuming those Regionals will require locking of the box
I was thinking the exact same thing. I’m considering not joining now because of that reason.
I cri everytim
Seeing as how I made a team for nationals, and now can’t attend. I’m excited I’ll get to at least use it a bit competitively now. I don’t mind the 60 battle limit, it’ll stop me procrastinating my exam studying too much.
I don’t like the 60 battle limit. I’m in the senior division, and I don’t think the top range of CP holders will be that close after Nationals because there is only a few consistently good players and 10 CP won’t be too great for them. I mind it because with the special ladder leaving us, this has now become the best way to practice. This limit, combined with the inability to switch teams, can provide difficulty in preparing for Nationals.
Wow, Im surprisingly young, so this is pretty interesting >:D
I’ll go and have a try at some Championship Points. It’ll probably be the only way I’ll be able to get some outside of UK Nats themselves
Will be some good practice for UK Nats so i’ll join in. Luckily the dates give me a week after my final exam to actually sit and think about team building.
The 60 battle limit I’m initially skeptical of. If I have a bad streak for one of the days (which seemed to happen to me way too often in the previous International Challenges) it could potentially screw me over in an irreversable way, but then this encourages me to play at my absolute best at all times, which then I’ll get some great practice before Nats.
Last gen, you had to use the same team for both the Wi-fi tournament and the in person tournament if they occurred during the same time frame. The same probably applies this gen.
If you think about it. Its a good thing. Just for the fact it really wasnt fair that some people could play 100+ where maybe someone else could only play 50. This gives a fair playing ground and a more legitimate ranking
I think the 60 battle limit is fine. Prevents people from no-lifing as Zog has stated.
Additionally,think about this. Even if you won Nationals. You wouldn’t even manage to play 60 games. At most, you could play around 40 games. And nationals has a whole lot more on the line than 10 Cp.
sorry cant stand this reply, basically youre saying “i should be able to play bad sometimes and still be able to finish well if i play more games than others”
you should always be playing at your best if you expect to place well, rewarding poor performance is a bad system. is 60 games the right number? who knows, but its still like 10+ hours of pokemon across 3 days
Stupid accusations of not having a life or not, 160 games is a better gauge of who is a better player than 60 games. It is literally impossible to win a wifi tourney simply by playing more games alone. If you don’t feel like playing 160 games that’s your problem. This is a step in the wrong direction and makes zero sense competitively.
I think we’re getting a little melodramatic here. I think if we’re talking about fairness, a perfectly fair Wi-Fi tournament would have both of the following qualities:
Does 60 games accomplish both of these goals as well as possible? I don’t think it’s enough games, and I wrote as much in the feedback survey from the beta tournament. The idea of what’s being done here definitely isn’t unfair or uncompetitive, though, and I think with some tinkering it probably helps us get to a more optimal system. I think things like the removal of DCs and matchmaking based on rating will make the results of this tournament seem a lot more legitimate than the uncapped environment of generation five, but that some improvements could be made here.
I do want to emphasize even as someone who thinks the game count is too small that everyone should acknowledge you end up playing a ton of Pokemon over a few days just to hit 60 games as it is, though. Let’s say it takes you about 13 minutes to finish an average game between searching for your opponent, dealing with team preview, playing the game, saving the video, and getting ready to search for your next game. I think that’s a low estimate for higher rated games based on Battle Spot if you aren’t playing something like Sejun does. Anyway, since we’re playing 60 games and there are 60 minutes in a game, minutes become hours and now our estimate is that it would take you 13 hours of playing Pokemon over about three days to play all your games right now. Is that too much? It’s definitely not more time than I’d invest for a real-life tournament (though much less of that time would be spent actually playing Pokemon), but that’s hardly an irrelevant chunk of time, either. I don’t think it’s unfair to expect people to put a weekend aside to play in a tournament on Wi-Fi any more than it is to come attend a tournament in real life, but I think you have to be realistic with the amount of time people are willing to spend here. I think turning the game count up a little bit more might be ideal — about 75 games for a tournament of the current length, perhaps? — but I don’t think I’d see it as a responsible choice to increase it too much more than that.
Worst case scenario right now, the game limit should be causing people to take each game a lot more seriously than they did last year, and having that constant pressure (while stressful) is probably the best training you could hope to get for events that award more important chunks of CP.
Just a bit of help: How will people get to battle each other when the Challenge starts? Where do you go on PSS? Do you have to go on Battle Spot? Or will it be under Live Competitions or Pokemon Link in the main menu? I’m sorry if the questions sound stupid, but I’ve never entered an Internationals before, and I don’t want to get anything wrong. I tried looking on the link in the article but it didn’t say anything that I could find. Thanks in advance! 🙂
Battle Spot, then go to Online Competitions.
Alright, thanks a lot! Wishing good luck to everybody.
I’m actually pretty excited for this as I’m new to VGC this season and this will be my first official competition in the VGC setting. Even though I won’t be attending Nationals this year since I don’t think I can afford the trip right now, this should be a great test of my abilities.
Does anyone who partecipate at the april friendly succesfully sign up for the international challenge? I can’t sign up because when i go to online competitions it says “the competition is over” reported to the april friendly. What i can do? Thanks in advance and sorry for any language mistake
I can’t even log on, much less register for the international challenge. I don’t think it’s just you.
Did you cancel participation on battlespot first. I participated in april friendly and registered for this with no problems.
How i can do it?
I imagine a lot of problems could be associated with high site traffic.
I signed up on the GL just fine.
Should be under battle spot > online competitions > cancel partiipation
There aren’t the options cancel partipation in my battle spot, can i do it on gl?
that’s odd then. Perhaps gl is just experiencing traffic.
Sorry but does that’s odd then mean? I’m not american..
Australian and South African Regionals will not be locking Battle Boxes.
The 20-per-day match limit is something that is open to evaluation and reconsideration. Some can certainly play far more than this, and some certainly will play less. Imposing a limit on the number of matches changes the ranking equation from “how well can you do given unlimited matches” to “how well can you do from a sampling of [X] matches” – the latter has certain advantages in mitigating time as a determining factor in the rankings. Players should certainly be ranked based on a large enough sampling of matches, but if that sampling is too high, then time becomes an increasingly limiting factor in a players ability to climb into higher positions. Finding the right balance between these forces will take some time.
For some reference data, looking at the International Challenge from June of last year with over 10,000 ranked players (Masters) and the top 5% of players: