2013-2014 Play! Pokemon Season Rules, Dates Revealed
Lots of news today in relation to next season’s rules. The Pokemon website has revealed a number of things about the next season.
The official changes document has been posted on the Play! website but we have also included links to more specific information where necessary.
First off Regionals, Nationals, and Worlds dates have been revealed, though no information on location has been revealed just yet for the stuff we didn’t already know. You can see those dates here, but they are also as follows:
Fall Regionals
Weekends of October 12th, 19th, 26th
Winter Regionals (2014)
Weekends of January 11th, 18th, 25th
Spring Regionals (2014)
Weekends of April 5th, 12th, 19th
US Nationals
July 4th-6th, 2014
Worlds
August 15th-17th, 2014
Fall Regionals will continue to use Pokemon Black 2 and Pokemon White 2, while further tournaments will transition to Pokemon X and Pokemon Y.
Along with these changes to Regionals dates there has been a restructuring of prizes for the next season. Instead of directly giving you a travel award from your performance at a Regional, your Championship Point standing will determine which prizes you will qualify for. Winning a Regional will now give the first place winner a Nintendo 3DS. All the information related to Championship Points can be found here.
After the Spring Regional Championships, the Championship Point rankings will award Travel Awards and Stipends for North American players to the 2014 U.S. National Championships with the following distribution (per age division):
1st–16th: Travel Award and a $300 Stipend
17th–32th: $700 Travel Stipend
33rd–64th: $350 Travel Stipend
After July 10th, 2014, the final video game Championship Point rankings will be pulled. Accounts must be in good standing and updated by the user to reflect accurate information. At this time, Championship Points earned at the 2013 World Championships will also be added to players’ accounts. The following prizes will be awarded (per age division):
1st–4th in North America: Travel Award to the 2014 World Championships
1st–16th in Europe: Travel Award to the 2014 World Championships
Included are also best finish limits to the number of Regionals that will count towards your Championship Point total. Only 3 of your best Regionals performances will be counted towards Travel Awards/Stipends and Worlds Invites. The Top 16 North American players at the end of the season will receive an invitation to the World Championships, with the Top 32 European players also getting invites to the World Championships. There will also be 4 spots available for Last Chance Qualifier top 4.
What do you think of these changes Nugget Bridge? You can find all the information related to VGC for next season on the Play! Pokemon website.
About the Author
makiri started playing VGC in 2008 and has been an advocate for VGC play since then. With three Regional Championship victories and multiple other high placings, makiri is a seasoned competitor ready to impart knowledge of the game to others.
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Well, for Europe i do like the System how Paid Trips and Invites are distributed, 16 paid Trips and Top 32 Invites seems ideal.
What i dont like is how they organisite again the whole idea of competition in europe..Again we will probaly get 3-5 Nationals and NO Regionals, meaning, if they dont change the Top Cuts , rather the more lucky Players will get the Top Cut and the CPs.
speaking of tournaments: we need a HUGE improvment here, this years season was, although more likely the really better players in europe qualified in this year, overall a mess. In Mailand the whole organisation was a mess, letting us players wait for hours till the first round, in Bochum the organisation was close to perfect (because of Amigo which is expierinced with operating tournaments) but they decided to play only 7 rounds instaed of 8 like in Mailand although there were 50 more Masters attending! (and this really messed up the Top Cut)..there was enough time they were just not willing to do so (and then they really slowly played the final rounds) in Birmingham they decided to double the paid trips without any anouncing beforehand…yeah thank you TPCI for spending my money on the wrong tournaments.
These Tournaments were really inconstent and not really fair..i want to have the same chance in each tournament iam attending, not relating on the mood of the tournament operator at this day.
speaking of mood..i think still Europe get the short stick speaking not about the invites and trips given but about the support for the players. The Gamerbase of whole Europe is almost or even a bigger than the U.S. one but still we dont get any regionals..yeah i know money is a reason maybe but hey is it really necessary that the 32.-64. of CP Ranking in the US get a 350 $ dollar travel award for nationals?? Money is there , but its distributed wrong in my opinion. they should really start a more consistent way also in europe , who also would like to play a whole years season to determinate the best players of a year not of a month!
Money is there so are the people imo..but i dont see the willing yet. i know its harder to organisite from America whole Europes season but , another example is , why do we get the locations and rules only 1 month before they actually start? I dont think its just because of money ..Europe is far away so its not so much in sight than America maybe.
maybe an idea is the they should create an “European TPCI” which is a daughter of the Main TPCI but much more closer and based in Europe. i know that also TCG is a part of TPCI and its a bit more difficult to handle in different european countries (for examle Amigo only is in Germany) but i think there is a better possibilty to organisite the tournaments in europe than they did this year.
Regionals don’t matter any more. All you need to do is get championship points, by beating the elite 4 champion 100 times.
Did you even read the article?
I read the article but I got confused by other comments. But from what it looks like its gonna be 2-3 regionals + wifi tourneys + Nationals = North American worlds invite. Or I just somehow am absolutely confused here and will probably just play and score the best I can as much as I can.
I read the article I think I’m just pretty much confused from reading the comments and basically I’ll just do what I can do which is 1 regional + wifi tourneya + nationals and hope for the best.
Aaron did get this, even though it says TCG
Aaron received clarification about this from TPCi, they are trying to switch players over from VGC to TCG so he received an invite to TCG worlds next year.
because tcg is small and needs to grow
Sorry for being a little slow on all this, but from what i’m seeing here is that the top 16 players with the most CP post-nationals in the US will be the ones who get invites to Worlds. Am I getting this right?
That’s correct, although only the top four players on that same list will have their flights and accommodation paid for (as far as we’re aware).
There is the possibility that travel awards to Worlds will be in the prize packs at Nationals for example However, I believe this to be unlikely due to the fact that it’s also somewhat likely that a lot of the players finishing in say, the top 4 at Nationals would be the same people who are in the top 4 on Championship Points due to the weight difference against other tournaments (Nationals winner is very likely to jump straight to first place as long as they actually at least dabbled a bit in the season already).
Anyone expecting events to give out prizes in addition to the CP prizes is kidding themselves. Pretty excited for the season! Think there’s a way better chance of me hitting Top 64 in CP than there is of me hitting Top 2 at a Regional =P
Well, I’m sure they’ll give out PRIZES as well as CP
just not trips 
To be honest, I like reading everyone’s input and ideas. Here in Australia we get jack shite… so it’s interesting to see the frustrations and feelings that people experience when the format is changed.
That being said, it’s interesting to read (pretty sure I read somewhere) that the TCG is small. It’s Ironic because here it’s the opposite.
The thing I want to know is, why would they give out 3DS’s when people will already have one for playing X & Y on. O.o haha
The TCG isn’t small, those comments were sarcastic ones. VGC is peanuts in comparison, but at least it’s growing fast.
As far as Australia getting not much right now, that will improve in time hopefully. Every region has its stepping stones, at least actually having an official tournament at last means it’s going in the right direction!
Atleast 2014 is going to give Australia a chance to have the same amount of practice as the rest of us and get more into the metagame, must have been a rusty start for them though due to their Nationals was only a short time away from when they were first announced, but I’m sure if they set their mind to it, they would have made great teams and have gotten used to the metagame.
uhhhh……….
i get the point tho
VG vs. TCG fun fact: The European TCG Master nats attendance numbers were noticeably smaller than the respective VG nats, maybe sometimes even with foreign invaders not counted (you know, TCG nats are for residents exclusively), but that I don’t know for sure.
We had over double their average stream viewcount at Worlds and the YouTube videos seem to be working at a similar rate. TCG is much bigger at least in NA and has representation across more of the world for now, buuuuuuut…
Well I’ll try my best to stay unbiased towards this as much as possible. The first is that the whole going to as much regionals as you could quite possibly go out of control with super dedicated people with the money and time to have a huge advantage over others in these type of rules. I personally can’t go to all three seasons of tournaments due to sports in the winter leaving me at a disadvantage. However I won’t just complain about the flaws about this system. The fact that you can actually get travel awards through cp is actually a good idea. It makes it so that people can get t16 at at least 2 regionals (still have to do decent at a third reg) and still get a travel award. With me having an off season I will try to take advantage of the multiple dates concept and go to two tournaments in either the spring or fall.
I really look forward to South Africa taking part in some of the (official) VGC tournaments like Regionals and Nats this year!
So far we’ve only had fun tournaments at our Leagues, but that should change come October.
Boy we gonna change that
The problem is that Australia video game stuffz is run by Nintendo Australia, so tPCI has little to no say in how events are run or how many events we get here. TCG is another story and are heavily supported there.
If only the online tournaments actually gave some form of CP Australia might have more of a chance to get in
. Highly unlikely but worth a shot regardless.
We sure are gonna try to get into the metagame. There’s a few of us trying to promote this site and everything on it, so that we get better. Hopefully an Aussie wins the 2014 titles
Edit: The VGC National event in Australia had more people than the well established TCG here. I did have to chuckle about that.
This is what I mean about it taking time, Rusty.
Originally, TCG and VGC tournaments were completely separate. While they still are different things and always will be, the events now run together in North America and Europe. If TPCi still organises TCG in Australia (I don’t really know how it works over there, but your post makes it sound like they do), it won’t be long before your Australian VGC Nationals happens over the same weekend, in the same venue as the TCG Nationals (thus organised by TPCi in a similar way to the rest of the world). Hopefully, you even gain some kind of Championship Point system as you can compete alongside everyone else in the Wi-Fi Tournaments, which will hopefully give you some form of advantage going into Nationals.
Only time will tell, but this is a recent change even for the rest of the world, so it’ll take more time to bed it in elsewhere.
As a comparison though, Europe had to deal with four years of Single Elimination (Best of One battle) before we finally had the Swiss format and Best of Three Top Cut introduced this year. If Australia got Swiss after just one year, that’d be a vast improvement right away!
What confuses me is why TPCi runs the TCG and VGC in an overlapping way so that you can’t play both at a high level. TPCi seems to want to promote the cards over the video game (thus the schedule and last year’s prizes); however, you can’t “top cut” in cards and still play the video game in most regionals since the event times run simultaneously on Sunday. It’s almost as if the VGC is being run as a side event for those in the TCG who don’t make it into the Sunday rounds. I understand it’s really more complicated than that–as event scheduling has much to do with space and how to get all the events in over a weekend. And technically speaking, most agree that the VGC structure has improved drastically over the past two years despite the VGC’s secondary status–and even if some of us still like the idea of a “top 16” at each Regional that officially determines Nats qualifiers. When is the TPCi going to begin a professor program for VGC specialists? That seems an important step.
Hmmm.. it’s a little difficult to say. We are hoping that the two will be run together but it’s a little different. TPCi will run the TCG event and all things about it, whereas Nintendo Australia are the ones who have the rights to do stuff with the video game side. It will just be about combining the two, having people put in a little more effort and it will be fine.
As for the way Nationals were held and such, I know a lot of people griped about it being single elim, but I tried to remind them that they should be lucky we had them at all. Let’s be grateful for the things we have, than the have nots. With that being said, it will take some convincing from the Pokémon community here to get Nintendo to do events with swiss. They tend to be very fond of the single elimination as it runs smooth and can be done within a set time frame. We’ll have to wait and see. I’d say the hosting of Nationals is a definite step in the right direction though
.
Oh I also would like to see VGC professors too! I know a crap ton of information about the VGC, however I am just a casual player for TCG. It’s a little off putting atm to go for the professor’s test knowing it’s TCG based. Maybe one day that will happen too.
Hopefully we can find out more about this system to see how much more in depth they go with the whole “VGC becoming like TCG” thing. Leagues and Professors in VGC would be cool for everybody to learn from and play in. The system is also probably still being developed and probably won’t be all set in stone until a week or two after October 12th when X and Y come out.
Why is there more emphasis on NPA on Nugget Bridge’s front page than on the 2014 season information? There’s random tidbits of important info (like External two External) scattered about, and there’s also a couple articles on the 2014 season but the information is split. Everything’s not in one spot. It’s frustrating to try to make travel plans when there’s not a clear list of all the dates+locations as they get revealed. But at least I know when then draft was so whatevs.
As far as I know, it’s because because the regionals are split up between different weekends this year and they haven’t said exactly which regionals are which weekend so it’s kind of hard to say for sure on anything regionals related at this point
that’s what this thread is for, badintent. we probably shouldn’t be making an entire news post for only two confirmed regionals, especially if we’re going to get unofficial individual confirmations days apart. once we have enough information to actually make a front page news post, it will happen (at least, this is what i’m assuming). almost everyone is waiting on making travel plans
NPA is an exciting new thing on NB and we need to get information for that out as well, it doesn’t really make sense to not update the front page with NPA news when NPA is currently happening. its the largest tournament we’ve had on nugget bridge so far. you want all the info in one spot but you want each individual regional confirmation to have it’s own post on the front page?
There is very little official information out right now about Regional dates / locations. I do not recommend creating travel plans at this time. Sorry if having 1 story on the new season information and 2 stories on NPA constitutes as too much emphasis on NPA.
We could try inventing some fictional information about event dats/locations, since we don’t know that, or maybe CP award structure from events, since we don’t know that, or maybe even information on how many events count toward our CP totals, since we don’t know that. Since that’s apparently what we’re expecting. Then we could spread them out among multiple news articles and also put them all in the same article since apparently we both split the information up too much (even though this thread is all we know) and don’t have enough coverage relative to NPA.
What a stupid post
Something I was thinking about in regards to prizes: Given that a 3DS is just giving people what they already have, I wonder what the chances of getting eShop credit in the future is? Could be cool to win $200 in digital games. It could even be used as prizes for online tournaments to keep countries where CP doesn’t matter trying!