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Author Topic: Competitive Pokémon  (Read 8727 times)

« 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.
« Last Edit: March 09, 2011, 09:03:08 PM by Lizard Dude »

WarpRattler

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« Reply #1 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.

« Reply #2 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.
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« Reply #3 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.

« Reply #4 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.

WarpRattler

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« Reply #5 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.

Luigison

  • Old Person™
« Reply #6 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?
“Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know."

« Reply #7 on: March 08, 2011, 07:26:01 PM »
YYur  waYur n beYur you Yur plusYur instYur an Yur Yur whaYur

Turtlekid1

  • Tortuga
« Reply #8 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.
"It'll say life is sacred and so is death
but death is life and so we move on"

WarpRattler

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« Reply #9 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.

BP

  • Beside Pacific
« Reply #10 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.
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WarpRattler

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« Reply #11 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.

« Reply #12 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).

BP

  • Beside Pacific
« Reply #13 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.
All your dreeeeeeams begiiin to shatterrrrrr~
It's YOUR problem!

WarpRattler

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« Reply #14 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.

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