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Video Games => Video Game Chat => Topic started by: Lizard Dude on March 08, 2011, 08:45:26 AM

Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: Lizard Dude on March 08, 2011, 08:45:26 AM
That's what you get for using a "balanced" team rather than plowing through everything with your starter.
You might not know this, but the main point of Pokémon is to battle your friends. To even begin to do this, you need to level six things to Lv. 100. And that's just for a single bare minimum team. And if you want to do it well, you have to level them from newborns and according to invisible secret stats. Hundreds to thousands of hours needed just to be able to play the "real" game.

Compare to a fighter like MvC3. To play the "real" game, you similarly need to invest hundreds to thousands of hours training in the systems of the game to be able to achieve anything the characters are capable of at your whim, but you have to train yourself to be better, as opposed to mindlessly mashing A for 1000 hours to make your artifical stats raise. This is why Pokémon is bad and why MvC3 is good. One flushes your time down the toilet; one invests your time in a skill.

Historical Note: I did not post this as a thread. Someone split it from posts out of the Weekly Releases thread.
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: WarpRattler on March 08, 2011, 11:52:22 AM
More like why JRPGs (or RPGs in general) are bad and fighting games (or arcade games in general) are good. But Pokémon's better than most in that regard - your bundles of numbers can be carried over to the next version, though it's not as good as your skills in one fighting game carrying over to nearly every other fighting game you'll ever play.
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: Weegee on March 08, 2011, 01:06:46 PM
You might not know this, but the main point of Pokémon is to battle your friends.

O RLY?

Compare to a fighter like MvC3. To play the "real" game, you similarly need to invest hundreds to thousands of hours training in the systems of the game to be able to achieve anything the characters are capable of at your whim, but you have to train yourself to be better, as opposed to mindlessly mashing A for 1000 hours to make your artifical stats raise. This is why Pokémon is bad and why MvC3 is good. One flushes your time down the toilet; one invests your time in a skill.

As always, you fail to acknowledge the element of strategy involved in turn-based RPGs. Investing 1000 hours into Pokemon would give you a thorough knowledge of the series' mechanics, which would be invaluable when battling friends or Battle Tower competitors with equally-levelled teams.
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: bobman37 on March 08, 2011, 01:15:09 PM
I disagree. You can learn the Pokemon series' mechanics by reading guides and stuff, and in a relatively short time. The rest of the time put into Pokemon is pretty much exactly what Lizard Dude described, pressing A over and over. The only way to get better at fighters is to play them for hours upon hours upon hours, each time using skills you've learned while developing new skills and knowledge, and also incubating and creating your own skills and strategies.
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: Lizard Dude on March 08, 2011, 01:17:59 PM
RPGs are not Go i.e., it doesn't take 1000 hours to learn Fire beats Grass.
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: WarpRattler on March 08, 2011, 01:41:41 PM
Furthermore, any amount of strategy introduced with Pokémon's typing system and high number of available attacks is immediately canceled out by attack accuracy and critical hits (i.e. luck, which isn't an element in most serious fighting games).

Bottom line is, Pokémon sucks at the very thing it's designed around. It's sucked at that for the past fifteen years and it's going to suck at it for the foreseeable future.
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: Luigison on March 08, 2011, 04:23:15 PM
Also this week is apparently Disney week for PSOne Classics.  A Bug's Life is actually pretty good.
Now if we could get them to rerelease the NES Classics like Ducktales.  Why can't Disney, Capcom, and Nintendo get together on this?
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: Weegee on March 08, 2011, 07:26:01 PM
The guys who wrote these would like a word with LD and Warp. (http://www.serebii.net/potw-dp/)
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: Turtlekid1 on March 08, 2011, 07:31:12 PM
Competitive play has more strategy than the main game, true, but how many of the series' fans actually play at that level?  And frankly, even the competitive game comes down to base stats and raw numbers.  And that whole "luck" thing.
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: WarpRattler on March 08, 2011, 08:08:43 PM
Don't even get me started on the competitive community. Those people don't realize that by creating things like enforced tier lists and clauses regarding what Pokémon you can and can't have on your team and what moves are and aren't legal, they're proving how bad Pokémon actually is as a competitive game.

I don't know how you can possibly take these people or what they do seriously when they say, for example, you're not allowed to put more than one Pokémon to sleep at a time because it's overpowered.
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: BP on March 08, 2011, 08:48:51 PM
You don't really NEED to get a party to level 100 to use them in battles. If everyone's cool with Flat battles, level 50 will do. Even then, Battle Revolution has some regulations that level everything UP to 50 as well as down to it, so just having maxed EVs and all the moves you were after will do it. EV training can be done quickly with the help of 'roids, the Macho Brace, and if you're lucky enough, Pokérus.

they're proving how bad Pokémon actually is as a competitive game.
Well, was it designed as one? Just because it gained competitive field doesn't mean Game Freak can't make dick moves like Stealth Rock. And don't forget that the boxes always have the game breakers on the front...

But it's natural that it did. I wanna beat you. You wanna beat me. We fight, we win and lose, we try to counter, we try to counter counters, we come up with the most unstoppable ways to win, we decide a certain way to win is TOO unstoppable and that we shouldn't do it because it locks out too much of the rest of the game, and it just goes on.
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: WarpRattler on March 08, 2011, 09:50:44 PM
If you have to restrict yourself from being the very best (like no one ever was) to play a game competitively and still have fun, maybe you should find a different game.
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: Lizard Dude on March 08, 2011, 09:55:52 PM
I think everyone's in agreement here except WeeGee, and I think his problem is that he's never played any better multiplayer (nearly anything else ever made with multiplayer).
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: BP on March 09, 2011, 12:05:01 AM
But Warp, Akuma is banned from Street Fighter 2 and chain grabs and stalling are banned from Smash Bros., so... what? You never play a game if something in it is banned in advanced play?

Actually considering that you don't play Smash Bros. either I can half-expect you to say you don't...

Also, don't think I necessarily play by tournament rules. I don't use legendaries (not that all of them are banned anyway) and I don't hack, but I have no problems inducing sleep multiple times if I can do it. I don't even KNOW all the rules. I just understand why they're in place.
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: WarpRattler on March 09, 2011, 02:00:19 AM
Akuma was only actually banned in US SSF2T, which I don't think means much anymore because I doubt anyone still plays the non-HDR version at a competitive level (he's not banned in HDR, of course). In Japan he was soft-banned, meaning it was implied that using him was lame and dumb, but not actually against the rules.

Either way, there was a legit reason for banning Akuma: he broke the game on a technical level. No character in SSF2T had any sort of counter for an air-to-ground projectile because no character except Akuma (a secret character most players didn't even know about at the time and who required an arcane button input to access) had one, so if he was properly allowed it probably would've ended up like SSBM's NO ITEMS FOX ONLY FINAL DESTINATION. Whereas there are mechanisms in place in Pokémon to not make sleep assrapingly good (abilities like Insomnia, for example), but no one pays attention to them because the Pokémon with those abilities aren't viable or there are better abilities available.

No, I don't play Smash Bros. (nothing to do with tournament play, I just don't like the games all that much), so I don't even know which version you're talking about or what those things are. That series isn't exactly known for being well-balanced, though (see above), so it's not surprising that things would be banned.

A good multiplayer game should be balanced well enough that you shouldn't need to ban anything, even if some concepts or characters are more or less viable than others (disregarding games that can be easily patched for rebalancing). Having to ban entire classes of moves (OHKOs and evasion boosts) and severely limit other parts of the game (sleep, freezing, number of unique Pokémon on a single team) are clear signs that it's not anywhere near a "good" multiplayer game.

Also, as an example of a game I do play where things are banned in advanced play, Magic: the Gathering has a sizable list of cards that are banned from tournament play or restricted to a certain number per deck. However, the ban list doesn't affect 99% of current players because most of the fully-banned cards are stupid rare and haven't been in print for well over a decade.
Title: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: BP on March 09, 2011, 03:09:52 AM
There are viable Pokémon that prevent, nullify, or take advantage of sleep. Most sleep moves are so inaccurate that it may as well be legal, and everyone would start using a fast Safeguard more. And now there's stuff like Magic Coat, too. And ways to self-induce and take advantage of other status problems to avoid being affected by any other. I'm starting to wonder in what generation the sleep rule was made and whether anyone has seriously considered dropping it.

So I can't tell if you just think the regulations on playing Pokémon competitively are dumb, or if you really think playing it competitively at all is the dumb part. And do either make a difference on not playing competitively?

Which makes me wonder how I should describe how I play. I devise teams that are supposed to be hard to beat without regard to the rules or tiers, but if I just wanted to be unstoppable I'd go ahead and use Zapdos, Jirachi, Heatran, Mewtwo and Ho-Oh. I choose not to, but I'm not so scrubbish anymore and don't mind having to take down legends and pseudo-legends (Jim's mother****ing Blissey gives me a harder time anyway but I have some plans to punish it).

Guess I don't use them because I don't want to end up relying on them...
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: Turtlekid1 on March 09, 2011, 08:25:37 AM
chain grabs and stalling are banned from Smash Bros.
That must've been awfully recently, then, since I've seen tourney recordings from as late as December with people using Ice Climbers and Dedede for chaingrabbing.
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: WarpRattler on March 09, 2011, 01:11:28 PM
Mainly I think ultra-traditional turn-based RPGs in general make for bad competitive games. Pokémon happens to be a readily-available example of why that's the case, and the stupid regulations and the fact that a tier system has to be enforced in high-level play (not the BP And Jim Hang Out At Each Other's Houses And Play Games League) for the game to be playable just back that up.
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: Lizard Dude on March 09, 2011, 08:27:39 PM
At this point in the service let us have a reading from the Good Book (http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/what-should-be-banned.html).
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: Lizard Dude on March 15, 2011, 01:38:36 AM
/thread
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: Mr. Wiggles on March 15, 2011, 01:51:47 AM
It only ended because the arguments are both sides consist entirely of this.

(https://themushroomkingdom.net/board/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.meh.ro%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2010%2F10%2Fmeh.ro5681.jpg&hash=980f332a8aa736694992d04c9ee7bd14)
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: Lizard Dude on March 15, 2011, 01:55:56 AM
No they didn't.
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: Mr. Wiggles on March 15, 2011, 02:11:38 AM
This is what I gathered from going back and reviewing the entire thread:

People claiming Pokemon is a repetitive, tedious, time consuming process that provides a false sense of skill which isn't entirely dependent on the player's actual talent.

People claiming Pokemon is a deep investment that involves more than number crunching, such as creating strategies for dealing with entry hazards and highly used Pokemon.

Not once did I see anyone really concede to any point, nor did they agree with each other's assessment. That leads me to believe the people enjoying Pokemon will continue to enjoy it despite realizing how unbalanced and time consuming it is, while those who despise it will continue to pay attention to it and attempt to help those who play it realize it isn't really a well structured game at all.

Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: BP on March 15, 2011, 03:43:49 AM
From my point of view it looks more like each side was more or less thinking "You know, you're right! ...

Well whatever"
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: WarpRattler on March 15, 2011, 04:38:45 AM
Pokemon is a repetitive, tedious, time consuming process
Already proven several times over.

provides a false sense of skill which isn't entirely dependent on the player's actual talent.
Also proven several times over, and it applies to nearly all strictly-turn-based games, not just Pokémon. We already had this discussion. (http://themushroomkingdom.net/board/index.php?topic=12984.0)

Pokemon ... involves more than number crunching
Right, it also involves pressing the A button a lot.

creating strategies for dealing with ... highly used Pokemon
If not for special rules and enforced tiers based on comparisons of unchanging sets of in-game numbers, "highly-used Pokémon" would be boring unstoppable parties like
Zapdos, Jirachi, Heatran, Mewtwo and Ho-Oh
bringing us back to the argument that the game is unplayable at a high level without a bunch of made-up rules. Even Marvel vs. Capcom 2, with its tiny amount of actually-viable characters at the high end, is more interesting than Pokémon multiplayer.
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: CoconutMikeNIke on March 15, 2011, 08:50:49 PM
Pokémon is a terrible game to play competitively because, as stated, there are moves and Pokémon that are deemed unfair and are banned. There is no quality balancing, and the vast majority are useless outside single player, and plenty aren't even good there.

Now, calling it repetitive is subjective, some people don't take issue with the breeding and EV training the old fashioned way. During Gen III I sank into all of it, the full metagame experience. Boxes filled with mons that weren't the right nature or something. But I also played a lot on... Well, I can't remember the name of it, like Pokénet or something?  Anyway, it was an online battling program, and you could max out a team with which to fight. I was on that all the time, and while there were a lot of teams full of Kyogre/Groudon/Speed or Attack Deoxys/etc., there was plenty of expirementation with not-over powered. I'm not sure where I was going with this. Oh, repetitive. Yes. Basically it's only as repetitive as you make it and how much you want to play with ideas in game. I can see the argument that it can be painfully slow, but if you know what your looking for, you've cut a great deal of the issue off. Ramble ramble ramble.

As far as the actual battling, it's not all that much different from good competitve games. Let's compare it to other games with reasonably large competitive communities - Super Turbo, well Street Fighter in general, Smash Bros. Brawl and Melee., and meybe an FPS They all have a great deal going on under the hood that you don't really need to know to play - easy to pick up, difficult to master, they all require, at high level play, a knowledge of the moves at your disposal, your opponents disposal, what they (the opponent) are likely to do, how you should respond, the yomi idea that Sirlin has talked about a great deal. To say that no skill is needed in Pokémon is not necessarily wrong, it's more it doesn't need the same kind of skill you would use in SF or Smash or say, Counter-Strike. They involve a lot of muscle memory, timing, and knowing what to do in that sit. Pokémon Really only removes the muscle memory. And from my experiance, it's not the inability to pull of that last Shoryuuken or because you couldn't hit that Monkey Punch that caused the loss, but rather you did the wrong Move at the wrong time. What I am trying to say that if it's not the ability to do the move that matters, Pokémon could be a great competitive game. I mean, people still play chess, and you don't have to juggle bowling balls while blindfolded to castle.   

Negatively, Pokémon really runs into the problem of having only a small number of viable mons, and those only have a few movesets that you will ever see. And I say runs into a Problem like '100 mph headlong into wall' problem. They can't be beaten except by another of the high tier mons. There's a reason most every team, if Legendaries are banned, you'll end up seeing so many SkarmBliss, Weezing with Will-o-Wisp, or whatever super mons that have come from the last few, I haven't kept up to date as much. Or Fox in Melee, or Dedede/Snake/Meta in Brawl., Sentinal in MvC2, and it looks like Storm/Sent/Mags is where 3's heading again. And while OHKO moves are not bad, but in a game where dodges or blocks are based on rng, it's impossible because there will be someone to stack the numbers. Yeah, DK can pound you in the ground, then hit you with a bat, but there is still more you can do to counter it. Number based games aren't bad, OHKO aren't bad, putting them together leads to god tier or ban, niether is good.

Pokémon has many features going for it to be potentially a great competitive game, but falls apart with it's massive roster, poor, if any, balancing, and game mechanics that undermine the stratagy it could have. 
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: WarpRattler on March 16, 2011, 12:13:33 AM
Pokémon requires no skill whatsoever because skill and strategy are two very different things. Fighting games, RTS, and FPS all require both skill (you call it "muscle memory") and strategy. By their very nature, turn-based games - Pokémon, chess, Go, and so on* - do not require skill, and instead revolve around strategy. (To round things out, rhythm games are an example of games that only require skill - there's no strategy required when the premise of the game is "hit the corresponding buttons when the notes reach this line.")

OHKOs aren't inherently bad, to be sure (as I've mentioned before, I love Guilty Gear), but I don't know why they'd even be a concern in Pokémon. All of them have 30% accuracy against targets of the same level (which can't be boosted) and low PP, both of which should far outweigh "KO the target on hit." And you can always use Protect against them.

*Pokémon is nowhere near the level of chess or Go in terms of strategy. Pokémon is an abacus to chess's home computer. Go is Watson.
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: CoconutMikeNIke on March 16, 2011, 01:03:01 AM
Yes, skill and stratagy are different concepts, and I think for future reference we should come up with a resonable definition for what Skill can pertain to.

I would classify Skill as the ability to assess the current situation (bad guy shooting you), determine what course of actions would give the most positive outcome (don't die, shoot bad guy), being able to execute it (aim at bad guy/ headshot), and to adjust your stratagy, both short and long term, to fit (keep not getting shot, keep shooting, win).

Putting aside all the other glaring problems with the competitive game, the actual battling only removes the problem of being able to execute each action. And you don't enter into a competition if you cannot execute accurately a vast majority of the attempts. And the same could be said of RTS, to an extent. There is more of time restraint, but actually executing an action is done with just a couple of clicks.

Again, Pokémon != good competitive game, but it's not due to lack of Skill. And I only mentioned one hits because they are one of the banned items. I should have been more general. 
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: WarpRattler on March 16, 2011, 03:44:58 AM
Assessment, planning, and adjustment are all strategy, and the actual execution is what requires skill.

There's one primary factor those three elements of strategy have in common that sets them apart from the sole element of skill: assessment, planning, and adjustment are all thinking, while execution is doing.

Look at rhythm games, which, as I previously stated, require only skill. Say I'm playing beatmania IIDX, and I start playing "Time to Air." What situation is there to assess? I'm playing "Time to Air"; it won't be any different from the last ten times I played it. What course of action would give me the most positive outcome? Be as accurate as possible, obviously - that's the entire premise of the game, so I don't even have to think about that. And what strategy is there to adjust? None, because there's no strategy actually involved. That leaves the execution - playing the song - as the only actual part of the game, and that's straight-up skill.

Executing a single action in an RTS might only be a couple of clicks, but you can't just select a cluster of units and tell them to go rape your opponent's base, unless you want to lose every game you play. You've got to have good micromanagement and macromanagement skills to do well at anything except low-level play; suddenly "a couple of clicks" become a feverish storm of mouseclicks and keystrokes, as you command your units to attack your opponent's expansion base, telling them exactly where to move to increase their efficiency, and at the same time queue up more units, structures, and research, and work on your own expansion, using hotkeys to rapidly jump between views of different spots on the map to keep an eye on everything at once. All of that's execution - skill. Meanwhile, things like knowing what units and structures to build and knowing how to react to various things going on around the map fall firmly into the realm of strategy.

Instead of describing anything related to fighting games I'm just going to link to this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS5peqApgUA). That is skill, distilled to its purest form and shining as brilliantly as a newly-cut diamond.

Chess is a turn-based game, and doesn't involve skill because the only thing you do in chess in terms of execution is move pieces around the board, something most people can do as easily as they'd dial a phone or open a door. Instead, it requires a great deal of strategy to play well. Moreso for Go.
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: CoconutMikeNIke on March 16, 2011, 05:16:41 PM
Okay, so I don't see us agreeing on what makes something a skill. I don't think of skill, in a broad, not-game-exclusive sense, as purely physical. Skill is the ability to see, think and act in a given situation. And I just don't think you are giving credit to the thought that goes into your every action, even if it's not at a concious level. 

As for the SF vid, Daigo's given interviews about that. He's said that it wasn't the first time he's done that, and he could do it with a couple of characters.

I want to start by saying that it was [darn] impressive, I'm sure we all agree on that.  

I'm assuming he did have a stratagy thought out when they chose their characters. He knew Chun Li's moves, her timing, the range, and the same for Ken's. But when in the middle of the fight, it's not his stratagy to have to perfectly block each hit from the super, he's just responding in the way that is best for the situation. He had to think to determine that it was the only way to win, and he had to time it just right for it to work, so that by the time his fingers actually hit the buttons, he was past it.

His stratagy was the overarching plan laid out on how he intended to win, and what to expect
His skill, his tactical ability, was knowing what each moment required from him, and doing it.  

... But yeah, how about that ExtremeSpeed Arcanine, huh? 
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: Lizard Dude on March 16, 2011, 05:44:06 PM
and it looks like Storm/Sent/Mags is where 3's heading again.
Why do you say that?

Top 3 Finishers at Winter Brawl 5
She-Hulk / Amaterasu / Tron Bonne
Magneto / Dormammu / Sentinel
Hulk / Sentinel / Phoenix

Top 3 Finishers at Final Round XIV
She-Hulk / Taskmaster / Spencer
She-Hulk / Amaterasu / Tron Bonne
Magneto / Zero / Sentinel

Furthermore, with the damage reduction and hitstun reduction of combos, MvC3 negates much of the reason those characters even became dominant in MvC2.

Furthermoremore, it took years for the metagame and discoveries of MvC2 to settle down. Making a prediction on anything after one month seems short-sighted.
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: BP on March 16, 2011, 07:42:39 PM
I couldn't believe it when pro players were whining about which characters were overpowered and broken before the game came out. It's like, geez, just admit you don't want to bother with anything that's not Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and shut it. You don't need an excuse for that, no one should be expecting you to.

Aren't the world champions supposed to be examples of non-scrubs? It feels wrong knowing more about the development of tiers and stuff than anybody who has made a name and reputation playing anything, when I don't
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: CoconutMikeNIke on March 16, 2011, 08:35:45 PM
Well, I don't have the game, and I think that the majority of the info I get on it comes from old MvC2 players who were sticking to their old standbys. So to me it seems like it where it is heading. I apologize for the assumption. 
Title: Re: Competitive Pokémon
Post by: bobman37 on March 16, 2011, 09:18:23 PM
Regarding Daigo's linked EVO 2004 losers bracket victory:

Most pros have the skill to manually block each one of Chun Li's kicks. Daigo was aware that she was able to do the move, therefore, he was expecting to have to block it. Which many pros can do without a second thought. The impressive part was how Daigo seemed to throw round 2 and most of round 3 just to keep it interesting.