Battle convention result!

[indigo_league]

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!

Comments

[heartofalioness]

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.

+1

[m67]

+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!

[lightningbearer]

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!