Whims of Fate: An OU Warstory

[Head Smash]

Thanks for all the positive comments.

I should probably have forewarned people that this was my first hour of battling on Shoddy in over 7 months (before Latias and before many new sets had been devised), so I was out of touch with the metagame.

The quality of the match wasn't the reason for the warstory being written. I'll add a warning at the top of my post regarding that for future readers.

 

[Legacy Raider]

This was excellent. I really enjoyed reading it and kept with it all the way through, 5 stars for sure, and I'm in support of this being archived. Plus the links for the crosses gave me a chuckle. (I used to use my bebo to link things from before I discovered photobucket :P)

Also, one last thing-

252 Atk Adamant Flygon Outrage vs 44/0 Breloom: 79.41 - 93.75%

You had the game won as soon as you sacrificed your Heatran to his Flygon :). Breloom's under-appreciated base 80 Defense really pays off in situations like this.

Great job once again, I'm looking forward to reading more from you :).

 

[Tarquin]

A Fantastic warstory!

Involving, interesting and gripping, plus the team you made really seems to come together, even though it is just a team of personal favourites =D

5/5!

 

[Huntofthelion]

Nice job.

 

[Iris]

Increible warstory and a nice read.
Excellent work

 

[Head Smash]

I honestly didn't even consider Roosting with Scizor because I expected to be OHKO'ed by Outrage so I didn't see much point. Obviously a very sore oversight on my part.

As for using Overheat, that's due to my being out of touch with the metagame and Shoddy in general. I forgot that Machamp had 85 SpD--I remembered it being 40 or 50, actually, and I thought Overheat would pack a lot of power.

252 Atk Adamant Flygon Outrage vs 44/0 Breloom: 79.41 - 93.75%

You had the game won as soon as you sacrificed your Heatran to his Flygon :). Breloom's under-appreciated base 80 Defense really pays off in situations like this.

Wow, good to know.

Also, I realized after this warstory was written that my Scizor wasn't holding an item. Oops.

 

[WJC3688]

STAB Thunderbolt is actually slightly more powerful than Overheat against neutral targets.

 

[Head Smash]

You're right; I just checked and Thunderbolt has 95 base power rather than 75, like I thought it did.

 

[yysame]

a nice read
i enjoyed the pictures and the comments

 

[Zach]

Awesome! Nice comments, suspense etc.

 

[Staraptor Call]

At the end, when you said that the odds of winning were in your favor, they actually weren't. Lorerer would have won if Flygon had either moved through its confusion or snapped out. The sum of those two probabilities is over 50%. Other than that, this is an excellent warstory, and possibly archive material. Your comments really let the reader get inside your head.

 

[macle]

Great warstory. Nice enjoyable read. I might read it again sometime.

 

[Kai-Miz]

At the end, when you said that the odds of winning were in your favor, they actually weren't. Lorerer would have won if Flygon had either moved through its confusion or snapped out. The sum of those two probabilities is over 50%. Other than that, this is an excellent warstory, and possibly archive material. Your comments really let the reader get inside your head.

Not quite, didn't you see this?

Also, one last thing-

252 Atk Adamant Flygon Outrage vs 44/0 Breloom: 79.41 - 93.75%

You had the game won as soon as you sacrificed your Heatran to his Flygon :). Breloom's under-appreciated base 80 Defense really pays off in situations like this.

 

[Head Smash]

At the end, when you said that the odds of winning were in your favor, they actually weren't. Lorerer would have won if Flygon had either moved through its confusion or snapped out. The sum of those two probabilities is over 50%. Other than that, this is an excellent warstory, and possibly archive material. Your comments really let the reader get inside your head.

Oh, I forgot to consider snapping out. I was only taking into consideration whether or not it would hit through confusion, the probability of which occurring twice in a row is only 25%.

Apparently Breloom would have survived, though.

 

[lati0s]

nice warstory

however you understanding of probability is faulty, flygon attacking through confusion one turn does not make it more likely to fail to attack the next turn. if the chance of attacking through confusion is 50% then the chance of attacking twice in a row is 25%, however the chance of attacking twice in a row once you have already attacked successfully once is 50%

 

[Scepticallistic]

It was a good warstory, especially for your first shot at one. :D

But I felt Sporing Machamp would really have been the best option. I know after seeing the battle, we can always say, "Oh, doing this would have been better." But in this case, I really feel I can sincerely say even I would have felt Sporing Machamp would have been the best possible choice at that time (woot, awkward sentences). Even if it was a strange Rest-talk set like you feared,
1. Even with Sleep Talk, the chances of selecting a favorable move isn't exactly great.
2. If he WAS Resttalk, it wouldn't have mattered if he was asleep because then his only move would be Payback. What's he doing to you with that?

Even though it didn't really matter because Breloom would have survived Outrage (and ultimately caused more suspense), it's good to learn for the future, leaving your Substitute intact for protection. XD

 

[Head Smash]

however you understanding of probability is faulty, flygon attacking through confusion one turn does not make it more likely to fail to attack the next turn. if the chance of attacking through confusion is 50% then the chance of attacking twice in a row is 25%, however the chance of attacking twice in a row once you have already attacked successfully once is 50%

Each is an independent event, yes, so the chance of Flygon being successful on a given turn is 50%.

However, this is occurring on a multi-event basis--before his first attack, the probability of Flygon hitting successfully through confusion twice was 25%, so the odds were indeed in my favor that he wouldn't succeed two times in a row (ignoring temporarily the possibility that Flygon could have also snapped out of confusion, because I neglected to consider that in my original post).

Or, put in a different way, the more times one repeats an event, the closer one should come to the true probability of that event occurring (law of large numbers). In this case, it was a small leap, from the event being tested once to being tested twice, but probability still sided with me (A-B is more likely than A-A, basically).




And yes, I really should have Spored there. But if I had Spored, I probably wouldn't have warstoried this. =p

EDIT:

HOLY CRAP.

My Scizor had Swarm instead of Technician!

*facepalm*

 

[WJC3688]

Damn. U-Turn would have owned his Flygon then.

 

[VashTheStampede]

Lmao @ you just realizing mistakes with Pokemon. :P I do that sometimes too and just bang my head on the desk. :\

Excellent warstory, and would vote for this to be archived if I could, as this is, as mentioned, possibly the best first-post + first-warstory on Smogon. The other newbies could learn.

 

[august]

Pretty cool warstory, and it's cool to see people using my ST5 team heh.

Great first post, keep it up 8)

 

[shipship]

Or, put in a different way, the more times one repeats an event, the closer one should come to the true probability of that event occurring (law of large numbers).

This is not how it works.

What you are suggesting is that if you flop 5 heads in a row you are more likely to get tails on the next flip because "things are supposed to even out." This is not how it works.

 

[Stathakis]

fantastic warstory, especially considering it's your first post. welcome to the forums!

 

[Griffin]

Nice warstory!

This was the last place I'd expected a gambler's fallacy though.

 

[Head Smash]

This is not how it works.

What you are suggesting is that if you flop 5 heads in a row you are more likely to get tails on the next flip because "things are supposed to even out." This is not how it works.

No, I was actually saying that the chance of getting six heads in a row is less than the chance of getting three heads and three tails, not that getting five heads directly implies an increased probability of getting a tail on the next flip.

Since the events are independent, I understand why people are disagreeing with the statement at hand, but the law of large numbers dictates that the more times an event occurs, the closer the events' average should come to being the true value (probability) of the event.

This is not saying that it's more or less likely that each individual event will slide one way or another, but that, for additional events, the overall string should be around 50% for one event and 50% for the other.

An example given by Wikipedia to illustrate the Law of Large Numbers:

Another example is the flip of a coin. Given repeated flips of a fair coin, the frequency of heads (or tails) will increasingly approach 50% over a large number of trials. Almost surely the absolute difference in the number of heads and tails will become large as the number of flips becomes large. That is, the probability that the absolute difference is a small number approaches zero as number of flips becomes large. Also, almost surely the ratio of the absolute difference to number of flips will approach zero. Intuitively, expected absolute difference grows, but at a slower rate than the number of flips, as the number of flips grows.

Perhaps my wording in my original post is off, but this is the principle that I was attempting to illustrate, even though it mostly applies to large numbers and not the small leap made from one to two numbers.

edit: I removed the comment since it seemed to be bothering people
__________________

 

[Potential]

First of all, nice Warstory! Formatting was simple and easy to read, and commentary was very good. Though you did seriously overanalyze the situation in a couple of parts...

Anyway, about the gambler's fallacy problem: I think the controversy came when you said it after the first (relevant) move. Where you had placed the comment made it seem (to me, too) that you thought that the chance of Flygon hitting would actually be less. But I know what you're talking about, and I also know that you know what you're talking about.

And congratulations on a good game with a great Warstory.