Standard Ruleset for 2015 VGC Season Updated
The Standard Ruleset has been updated. All tournaments that are a part of the Pokémon Video Game Championships (VGC) will use these rules starting January 1st, 2015. As many have predicted, it will mirror the ruleset used in the ΩR/αS League Doubles ladder on Battle Spot. For those who need a refresher, that means:
Standard Ruleset
- All matches are played in the Doubles format.
- Pokémon above Level 50 will be brought down to 50 for the match while those below 50 will stay as is.
- Players choose 4 of their 6 registered Pokémon after team preview.
- Pentagon Rule: All Pokémon must have the blue pentagon on their stats page indicating they were caught, bred, or received as an official gift in Pokémon X, Y, Omega Ruby, or Alpha Sapphire.
- Species Clause: No two Pokémon on your team can share the same Pokédex number.
- Item Clause: No two Pokémon on your team can hold the same held item.
- The following items are banned:
- Soul Dew
- The following moves are banned:
- none
- The following Pokémon are banned (all forms):
- Mewtwo
- Mew
- Lugia
- Ho-oh
- Celebi
- Kyogre
- Groudon
- Rayquaza
- Jirachi
- Deoxys
- Dialga
- Palkia
- Giratina
- Phione
- Manaphy
- Darkrai
- Shaymin
- Arceus
- Victini
- Reshiram
- Zekrom
- Kyurem
- Keldeo
- Meloetta
- Genesect
- Xerneas
- Yveltal
- Zygarde
- Diancie
For full rules, download the rules document here.
Additional Rule Clarifications
Headphones
You are allowed to use headphones while playing as long as they are wired and plugged into your 3DS. The cord must be visible.
Time Limits at Premier Challenges
Due to the longer than normal timers when using the Player Search System, Premier Challenges and other tournaments where you don’t have your Battle Box locked and rules downloaded at registration can have time limits enforced manually by a judge. Time limits may also be extended if the organizer sees fit. Changes should be communicated at the beginning of the tournament alongside the number of rounds and top cut size.
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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thats a good question…
but then I looked at a 0/0/0/0/0/0 IV thundurus’s stats compared to emolga’s
That was just the first mon to come to mind with that typing. It was just an example.
If they didn’t want us to use those legendaries, the best idea would have been to not re-introduce every one of them after creating the Pentagon rule which excluded them by default.
If so, that would be poor game design. Making something difficult to obtain isn’t a substitute for balance.
Two Pokemon with the same typing can have vastly different roles based on their stats, movepool, and abilities, and those roles aren’t always all equally viable. For example, Garchomp’s Speed, Attack, and ability all made it very useful in last year’s metagame, while the same-typed Flygon was too slow for the meta, lacked the raw Attack power to take advantage of its movepool, and had a not as useful ability, and was consequently never seen.
The closest analogue to Thundurus is another legendary, Zapdos, and even then I’d argue that the two play different roles.
Detroit no!
The reason they were all reintroduced in the first place was so they become legal to use in rated battles and vgc for ORAS.
SRing legends is just for competitive players trying for the best spread and I highly doubt that is what they had in mind.
If they didn’t expect people to SR then what did they expect? I think the fact that they gave us three guaranteed 31 IVs shows that they know what we’re doing. They just need to take it a step further.
Although this doesn’t really have anything to do with the main point of this argument, your proficiency with RNG manipulation is still of use here. Check the lottery number in a gen 6 game, RNG a fresh save file with that TID in gen 5 and bank a mon over. Instant free master ball. You can even get multiple master balls a day if you have more than one gen 6 game copy to work with.
Well I SR’ed a perfect Terrak, time to sit around in guilt under the gazes of people who assumed I hacked it. Shame on me, shame.
But srs, having to work just a bit harder to get some good Pokemon, whether it be by trading a bunch of your own or spending your own time SRing or just having nice connections, its the end all! How dare us, as we try to get into competitive Pokemon put in the time and effort in an attempt to better our chances at winning.
I remember someone mentioning here on nugget bridge but I can’t remember where, that its a little bit like those big league sports. Sure you can play a bit of footie in your backyard or with your friends at the local park np, but when you want to get into the real big league games with real prizes at stake you gotta put in the time and effort to better yourself both in terms of a competitive mindset (practicing battles, predicting opponents, getting a general idea of what Pokes tend to carry what moves etc.) and a stronger body (getting good IV’d and EV’d Pokemon). Getting annoyed because some people spend more time to do this and win because you just wanted to stroll right in is a bit,,, idk.
I don’t mind SRing for my own Pokemon, but my concern with this is that I feel like a fool for spending a ton of time trying to get everything I need when a handful of others are likely going to be using cloned legit Pokemon, or worse, IV edited legends. We’ll see how it plays out, but an honest discussion of how the majority of players are obtaining their competitive legendary Pokemon is something that I would like to see. Ideally, everyone would put in the time to SR, but at the very least, cloning is going to be extremely popular as it already was last season with HP Ice Zapdos and such.
This isn’t meant to be a complaint post, I’m just genuinely curious as to how this is going to play out.
Nobody is saying that GF should give us for free the Pokemon or the tools needed to get a desired spread. While other eSports put more emphasis on the competitive side, Pokémon puts it more on the griding side because that’s the way this game is and I’m PERFECTLY fine with that.
If you read my previus posts I said I don’t mind to spend 40 hours to get the spread I want (even if that’s a little bit too much), what I’m complaining about is the way it’s implemented, it’s boring and not rewarding at all until you get what you want or give up.
I already threw away a bunch of ideas like an special machine/lab that needs tons of energy to recharge and the way to recharge that energy is spending that 40 hours doing real stuff in the games, or something like an ability capsule but with a higher pb cost that only works for an stat at a time, etc. That way we would still be encouraged to reset for a good natured and good 3 perfect IVs distribution pokemon and then farming to improve the rest of the IVs we don’t like. That would be great because sometimes we don’t want 3 perfect IV’s, imagine for a second that you want a legendary with HP fighting, done? OK, then keep imaging it because it’s impossible to get, you need at least 4 even IVs in order to get HP fighting and with the rule of 3 guaranteed 31s you can’t. I know it’s not a big deal but it’s another flaw and you can’t get around this one.
The system is flawed and you can’t deny it, I know it’s not the end of the world and that we will get around it as always but I think it’s important for the game growth to point out the existing mistakes for GF to adress them.
Mnehhh, I personally don’t find myself worrying about how others got theirs (and I don’t care about clones). Regardless of whether theirs is their own SR, a clone from a friend or something they traded for, or even manipulated with some kind of third party system, I don’t really care. Because I still worked hard to get my own legendaries, whether it is SRing or trading away some of my own rare things to get stuff I otherwise can’t get (like thundurus becaus I have ruby version) and i won’t let any assumptions about how others got them bother me because regardless we’ll be on a more or less level playing field and I can be happy of my own accomplishments regardless.
IV editing and cloning would be detected in hack checks,correct?
You’d definitely hope that IV editing would be caught, but cloning seems unlikely; if the cloned Pokémon was legitimate to begin with there wouldn’t really be any signs.
It should be said that their hack checks definitely need an overhaul; however, clones have no discernable difference if the original is legitimate, so those will probably always be legal.
I have no problem with cloning,but nature and IV editing goes to the point of cheating,unless they are just to breed with,then it’s alright.
Does the ranked doubles ladder in Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby use this VGC 2015 format?
I hope so we can practice on cartridge instead of having to use Showdown when the special ladder was something else. Haven’t play on the ranked doubles to check to busy soft resetting.
Yes, ranked doubles is identical to this year’s VGC format, except for the timer (including the pentagon rule).
Bisharp is going to be very, very good again. There are just so many intimidaters (specifically Landorus-T).
The hack checks work on a legitimacy/legality system. If the sets could legally be obtained, then they’ll let them through (unless someone goes through and manually checks everything). I used a Porygon Z on XY BattleSpot that I found out was made IN PowerSaves and it never gave me any trouble. The only way I’d assume IV editing could ever be detected is if the software left an error in the .pkmn file, whereas cloning with external software is just duplicating said file.
The easiest hack to detect would be force-shiny-ing a Pokemon since the ID numbers would be invalid. Or something. I never quite grasped the concept of Shiny Numbers.
Mew confirmed for elitist.
I agree with you on these points. I’ve never really been fond of the pentagon rule, either. It makes it so you can never build up a solid stable of Pokemon and carry them over from game to game for competitive use.
I have no interest in the exotic; I wouldn’t be hokking up my Gamecube and working toward a flawless Mewtwo with Self-Destruct/Explosion (whichever it was). But it bothers me that Gamefreak has rendered my previous work in older generations (nearly) useless in Generation 6. All of the Pokemon I used in Regionals in Generation 5 were bred or caught by me, and not a single one had flawless IVs across the board. They all had 2-4 31s, and there was one I would have considered using this year.
Oh well.
I mentioned this once before and got shouted down, but I would be interested in seeing official tournaments — Premiere Challenges or otherwise — spring up that used older formats as their ruleset. Whether or not you made players use the newer hardware or not doesn’t matter to me. I just think it would be cool to revisit the older tournament formats every now and again. The pentagon rule wouldn’t really apply, and our older Pokemon, should we choose to use them, would once again be viable. These tournaments/challenges could run in tandem with the current VGC metagame. Just a thought.
Won’t happen for Premier Challenges, or officially sanctioned events worth CP. However the GS Cup is an officially sanctioned fun format, as are standard Singles, Triples, Rotations and Multi. There are of course non-sanctioned events that people host that use non-official rules (ie: Smogon OU) that you can attend, they just aren’t official.
[IMG]http://i59.tinypic.com/14iznex.jpg[/IMG]
This is an appropriate trainer name, right?
Does anyone know how many CPs are needed for a Senior living in the Asia Pacific to qualify for Worlds? Thanks in advance.
Unfortunately, there’s insufficient data to make an accurate prediction as to how much a Senior in the Asia Pacific region will need to get a Worlds invite.
^^ I see you’re in Australia. It’ll vary based on whether we have PCs or not, there’s just not enough info on the events we will be having to tell.
Ah ok, thanks for the advice. Sorry I’m relatively new to VGC but what is a PC? Thanks again.
Premier challenge, which is essentially a smaller kind of tournament more frequently run in more places to get more consistent amounts of CP throughout the season
But can’t you just get the required amount of CPs at a Regional/National Championship?
If you T2 Nationals, sure. There’s a lot of variables though: Premier Challenges can offer up to 200CP towards your total, how many bother to travel for Regionals (for Seniors I doubt many at all), etc
Alright, thanks everyone for the advice.