the_plateau | Battle convention result!

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Battle convention result!

Gather around, because it is time to find out who is the best battler in the entire game; who is the person who persisted round after round, defeating one opponent after the next to become the Victory Road (game, not location) champion?

And the winner is....!

Riku!

It wasn't an easy final fight, both opponents giving it their all, trading blow for blow, clever strategy for clever strategy, but when the dust settles (and the tricks run out), it is Riku who stands victorious, with Dirk Strider in second place!

And what about third?

The battle for third is no less hard fought between Emporio Alnino and Jean Kirstein. However in the end, and aided by a truly lethal Dragon Dance combo, it's Jean Kirstein who can lay claim to third place in this tournament. Congratulations Jean on being the highest ranking player who isn't an Aurora League champion!

But, of course, the accolades and applause doesn't just go to these three players. As the results are revealed (which includes a supercut of the tournament's finest moments), there is a big applause for every otherworlder who entered this tournament. Even those that didn't win, showed just how far they've come and how much they learned to understand about pokemon since coming here! And that too is worth some cheers.

Oh, but you didn't think we forgot about the prizes, right?

For coming in First, Riku will receive an Additional Mega-evolution stone of his choice. This stone will not count towards the normal limit (two for trainers, one for breeders) giving him even more options when it comes to mega-evolving his pokemon.

(like he needed even more power!)

In addition to his extra Mega-evolution stone, Riku will also receive P75.000. Don't spend it all in one place! Or do! Don't let us tell you what to do.

For coming in Second, Dirk Strider will receive an EXP-Share, as well as P50.000 to spend as he wishes!

For coming in Third, Jean Kirstein will receive an Multi-use TM of his choice as well as P25.000 to spend as he wishes! Also an invitation from the Elite Four to hurry up and come challenge them already!

Additionally, anyone who entered in the tournament will receive the TM Superpower, as well as a honourary badge, which lists your final ranking in the tournament.

Which concludes our first battle tournament in Victory Road in... nearly a decade? And at its conclusion, we'd love to share a few of our thoughts.

Because truly, we have been looking forward to running a tournament like this for a very long time! It's pokemon! Entering in tournaments and becoming the best (that ever was) is one of its corner stones. And yet, for a roleplaying game, such things can be very hard to organise in a both timely and fair matter.

What we want to say is that you've all truly blown us away with the level, as well as the creativeness of the strategies you submitted week after week. This was an event that took a lot of OOC time and effort, but you all came out with verve and made it one hell of an event to run. Running this sort of event, not only brought us so much joy and marvelling about how creative you all are, it also thought us mods a lot of things about pokemon we truly didn't know before!

Like, did you know that Substitute is truly the worst move ever? With how often its parameters have changed across the various generations, trying to find out what it does and doesn't block was truly a battle we did not expect to be fighting.

Also, did you know that non-damage dealing moves and status moves are not affected by type immunities? Because we sure didn't! Starting this tournament, we were certain a Dark type pokemon couldn't be hit by Hypnosis. Or that a ghost type pokemon would obviously also be immune to a normal status moves. Turns out... NOPE. Those can still hit and affect pokemon just fine! The things you learn while thirty tabs deep into Bulbapedia and Smogon matches to check what does and doesn't work.

In any case, we've learned a lot, both in terms of how creative you all are, how absolutely crazy pokemon rules are, and what little things we'd like to do different when we run another tournament like this in the future (such as setting everybody's pokemon to level 100 from the start, which really makes calculations so much easier). Because we'd certainly like to do this sort of event again in the future. And sooner than ten years, this time!

But first, we need a long, long break from Bulbapedia.

Still, what we'd love to hear is if you guys, especially the people who entered in the tournament, have any feedback for us. We have no idea when we'll be able to run something like this again (there is truly so much we want to do!) but when we do, we'd love to take everybody's ideas into account. So if you have any idea, feel free to drop them on this post.

And beyond that, please let put together another congratulations to Mega (Riku's player), Raile (Dirk's unfortunate host) and Otter (Jean's keeper) for becoming the best that ever was!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

GOD this was amazing! Thank you so much for hosting this and all the time and effort you put into judging! I think the format itself worked perfectly and kept everything as fair and orderly as possible, which again, NOT easy.

As for ways to make it better... honestly, as-is is great, and even the following is an optional suggestion since it's awesome to see how many moves and counters someone can use. But to make it a little more streamlined on the mod side of things- and maybe the players too- perhaps instead of using ALL of a Pokemon's current moveset, each Pokemon's could also be limited to certain number of moves, kind of like the Collegiate Gym's set-up. Like I said, though, going into the weeds of all these strategies is awesome, so going in with full movesets also works.

+1ing the possibility of keeping move sets perhaps limited to a certain amount would definitely 1) make things easier and 2) put in a lot more restrictions that could give characters a chance to really shine in terms of strategy! like, you could definitely teach/level up/breed pokemon with so many moves, but in pvp battles players could choose their top four best moves to mimic the pkmn game set up?

this might be an unpopular opinion but I use this rule for myself when I’m writing up gym badge challenges, and it’s just— ridiculously fun? idk, I think for a pvp battle it might even be able to even the playing field against trainers who have been in the game for so long that their pkmn know a ridiculous amount of tm moves vs a novice. something to consider in the future, but overall this was tremendous fun to watch and I can’t wait to get into the next one!

Since apparently we got namedropped I want to just note that the number of moves in the Collegiate gym roster is not just arbitrarily chosen! We fixed it at eight because doing so struck a nice balance between having useful moves for any single 'mon to use by itself, while also having moves that synergize with others in the roster. One particular consideration unique to our setup was "how can we ensure the RNG doesn't screw anyone over and give them a team that renders the challenge unwinnable?" and eight moves ended up being the magic number. Any fewer and we'd have to sacrifice on either the ability for any individual pokemon to hold its own and the ability create synergy and move combos with others. Any more and the movelist would start getting long to the point of making it difficult for a challenger to keep track of it all (a challenger is assigned 6 and chooses 3 to use; this means having to initially look at forty-eight moves and use a team with a total of twenty-four; adding more moves increases these numbers fast).

So basically, the trick to a move pool limit is to look at what you need to make things work the way you have in mind and then choose where to cap it accordingly, I wouldn't recommend just picking a number willy-nilly!

I'm not sure how it was from a participant pov but from someone who did not have a character in the tournament itself, I felt it was kind of hard to keep track of what was going on. Two things in particular stuck out:

- The timeline was in the OOC comm post, but not in the actual tournament post. This meant I had to do a lot of going back and forth between the two when checking out the latest updates/trying to remember when to expect the next update/deadline.

- I know there's good reason not to do a detail writeup of the judging of each match, but a brief little blurb would be nice, especially for later matches! For example, this matchup mentions the use of hypnosis and "clever strategy", but seeing as hypnosis is somewhat luck-based and both sides submitted counter-strategies for almost everything, I couldn't tell which "clever strategizing" is being referred to. Which makes it a little hard to envision how the match presumably went down! So something like a quick handful of match highlights would really help.

A few things: one, I am WHEEZING at calling Raile "Dirk's unfortunate host". IT'S TRUE BUT YOU SHOULDN'T SAY IT

Two, I was thinking that potentially, for future tournaments, maybe it would be best to restrict TM/HM moves from being used. (AND I'M NOT JUST SAYING THIS BECAUSE CLAUDE LOST TO A TM MOVE - ) They add a really fun element to strategy and open up a lot of options for players to make movesets for their pokémon that can provide widespread type coverage, not to mention reward player investment and strategic foresight, and those are good things!...but also, on the flip side, TMs are affected by time of year, IC finances, how long a character has been in the game, whether the character puts IC focus on battle strategy, etc. I feel like it's going to give a character like, say, Claude - who's been in the game for awhile and has been through seasonal cycles of TMs(and in fact was in-game before TMs began seasonal cycling), has tons of money from Pay Day farming(we all remember the 2 million pokédollar Dreepy), who's intensely strategic, and who's beaten multiple gyms and earned their HMs - a huge and not necessarily fair advantage over a character like (picking an example out of the air) Zack Fair, who recently joined the game and hasn't had the chance to gain the IC money or access to TMs/HMs to match him. (I have similar concerns about pokémon not knowing moves above their level even if they're leveled up for the tournament or the obvious disadvantages of unevolved pokémon from new players being unable to compete, but I think that's a little less easy to make provisions for within the in-universe logic of the game.)

Restricting the movepools might also just simplify a lot of things for modding these events, while also incentivizing players to construct more inventive and convoluted strategies based on the moves they know 100% their opponents have, without having to construct theoretical strategies based on "well if they know THIS TM move then my pokémon does THAT" when their opponent may not even have that move and it's ultimately a waste of time to make provisions for that. :|a While, of course, also making these tournaments more newbie-friendly by giving older players fewer advantages against them they couldn't possibly have leveled the playing field on yet!

My final thought is this: I definitely saw a bit of rumbling from players who aren't big into pokémon battles about this tournament, around how there was not a whole lot for them to do and feeling kind of excluded as a result. Obviously not every event's going to appeal to all players under any circumstances, but events like these are tailored very hard towards a specific subset of the playerbase - those who are really into battling - while leaving those who aren't in the lurch. And when we have players actively divided into classes like Trainer and Breeder by the game mechanics, with Breeders usually being players who aren't big into the competitive aspects of pokémon, it does feel a little rough to leave them out in the cold.

Maybe tournaments could be a sort of dual-part event in the future? On the one side you'd have the tournament itself, and then simultaneously there could be a mini-event running that's for people who want something less competitive to do in the meantime? And then players could just decide which aspect to engage with. (Obviously I'm sure tournaments are VERY involved for the mod team, so adding even more to that workload is a tough sell, but maybe a single mod - or, perhaps, lower-level mods, like ones who maintain lists and the like? - could oversee the much lower impact non-competitive side of the event. I'd hope it wouldn't take nearly as much oversight.)

Edited 2022-10-07 03:04 (UTC)

Just chiming in with a few thoughts in response to Callie - I agree with both of their points! Felix didn't enter the tournament despite being the exact target audience for the event, only because I was having trouble keeping up with tags as it was and I didn't have the spoons for writing up lots of strategy, but I gave it a lot of thought because I had intended to and just lost track of time/didn't regain those spoons before registration was over. -_- Which is entirely on me, obviously.

But as a result, I didn't have any way of participating in the event at all, and the folks who aren't into battling to begin with were in the same boat. So I agree with Callie that it would have been cool to have something else going on concurrently that the non-battling characters could do, and that wouldn't require any mod overhead so y'all didn't have more work to do on top of all the tons of work you were already doing (and kudos on that because I can only imagine how complicated something like this was to run!).

And I don't really have much to add on the TM point except that I agree with everything Callie said. (Including the part about Dirk's unfortunate host. 😂)

As a bit of a techie (looks at my spreadsheets where I hope I'm not overstepping mods), I believe there's an added bonus to an 8-moveset limit. I'm actually not certain how many moves this method is limited to - but it's an interesting idea.

You could use Pokemon Showdown to simulate the battles, thus offloading a bit of the Googling. I imagine this would only be used as a base to decide how the battle goes, since mods would still need to discuss other factors, but they could follow the written strat and use it to see how our characters would act.

How? Basically, in the team builder, you choose Gen 8 National Dex AG, add the Pokemon, then go to Import/Export. You can then use this team when you challenge somebody - another mod, I would assume - in a Custom Game with Gen 8 Mechanics. This could also be used if people ask for a rough version of how the battle went - while it wouldn't dictate the results, it would also show how their strategies worked.

If this is used in the future, and the mods need help, I'm here as tech support, aha.

Also, if there is a limit to moves, I do believe that a player should be able to nominate one or two egg/tm/tutor moves per-Pokemon, but need to mostly rely on natural moveset. Since, for example, there are trainers who rely on rain teams, so don't want to nerf them by removing Rain Dance. But let's be real if Minfilia used her Audino, she'd be focusing on non-natural moves.

Edited 2022-10-07 03:24 (UTC)

Coming from the Breeder side of things, I think it would have been nice if Breeders could have had some workshops too and maybe had a chance to sell some eggs. While they may not be professional level yet, they're trying and a big event like this would give a lot of publicity for them and it would be nice if they could learn things that would be directly helpful for them.

Also, I really appreciate having this post to invite people to discuss the event and what worked and what didn't and what they might like to see in the future. I think it would be really nice to have this for every major event so people might feel more free to talk about their feelings without as much possible fear of offending. :)

Congrats on completing the event! A lot of fun's been had and I really appreciated the workshops and shopping opportunities. The battle enthusiasts really put their all into it and it shows. :> I didn't participate in the tournament itself because I didn't feel like I could compete with the move pool depth veteran characters' teams have, so I had some thoughts on that:

I know veteran characters having an advantage over newbies is to a large extent unavoidable and absolutely makes sense ICly, so I'm not asking for the playing field to be totally level, I know that's impossible! Even if we were all using rental mons with equally good movesets and no held items, the veteran characters would still have a huge experience advantage and their players have a lot more practice at writing strategies.

But I think narrowing the move pool gulf a little could help newer characters feel a little more confident about trying next time. As others have mentioned above, there's a few possible ways to do this:

-Let the level-equalizer machine temporarily grant the moves from that Pokémon's level-up learnset. In my case, one of Kaiba's mons was just a few levels short of being able to learn two game-changing moves in time for the tournament.
-Restrict movesets as others mentioned. I kind of feel like restricting TM/HM/egg/tutor moves would be hard to moderate with how learnsets shift between gens, but in my opinion restricting all mons to 8 moves total, no matter what move type, would narrow the move pool gulf a bit and make judging less complicated for the mods.

I still enjoyed reading everyone's strategies, and I know not every event's gonna appeal to every player! But I hope to be able to stick around long enough to compete some time in the next few years, it was really cool to see.

Edited 2022-10-08 19:17 (UTC)

re: move limits again: I think it would be neat to limit the number of moves for the reasons already stated, but in some way doesn’t completely restrict TM/HM/egg/move tutor moves? perhaps limiting the number, again, could be a good idea (out of eight moves, for example, two could be tm/hm/move tutor and two could be egg). completely shoving them out the window kind of defeats the purpose of breeders breeding better pokémon in the first place, or even having tms in-game. it’s something that breeders could use to get some spotlight and importance if they’re eggs, so pulling them out completely just feels like a little too much. same thing with removing tms, like……… if we’re not using them then what’s the point of having them??? limiting numbers could be the best bet, but not their existence in tournaments like these, I believe! that way, I think it could be fair for new and old players.

on top of the number of move limits, I just remembered one thing that stuck out to me: the dreadful amount of switching that was happening in some battles. it got to the point that it was daunting to read and consider, personally, and the battle wouldn’t continue because someone would switch and then cause the other trainer to switch, then switch again— and so on. it also kind of puts a null on actual switch moves such as u-turn and volt switch, so perhaps a suggestion: limit the amount of switches per round, too. kind of like in Pokémon GO pvp battles, where you’re basically allowed to switch only once the entire round, then put on a timer for however long to be able to switch again.

it removes the complete reliance people have on type weaknesses and could allow for more of a fair, strategic playthrough of things. like, hey, you’re only allowed one switch (either through the whole battle or just per round, whatever seems fairer UNLESS it’s a switch attack, such as the aforementioned u-turn or volt-switch), so choose wisely! i feel like many trainers that could’ve shined in some battles didn’t because of this constant switching, and it could get annoying. it lessens the amount of mod speculation as well when deciding on a winner.

the players choose a line up, have a certain number of switch limits, then must play through that line up. it’s something to think about!

Edited 2022-10-13 11:31 (UTC)

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Battle convention result!

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