Challenge 4th Generation Battle Facilities Discussion and Records

[Carloss97]

Hi! Here comes a new run of the Link mode of the Arcade.
This was done, as always, in spanish retail copies of the games and with the inestimable help of 6arc1, using once again the updated version of team Syzygy in doubles, with Metagross as the 4th member instead of the Swampert used in the previous attempt. This time the streak was of 167 battles won in a row.



*Carloss97's side:

Garchomp (M)
Ability: Sand Veil
EVs: 4 HP / 252 Atk / 252 Spe
Jolly Nature
IVs: 1 SpA
- Outrage
- Earthquake
- Fire Fang
- Swords Dance


Metagross
Ability: Clear Body
Shiny: Yes
IVs: 31 / 31 / 31 / 7 / 31 / 31
EVs: 84 HP / 252 Attack / 4 Defense / 4 Sp.Defense / 164 Speed
Adamant Nature
- Iron Head
- Earthquake
- Bullet Punch
-Thunderpunch



*6arci's side:

Latios (M)
Ability: Levitate
EVs: 4 HP / 252 SpA / 252 Spe
Modest Nature
IVs: 29 HP / 21 Atk / 15 Def / 23 SpD / 29 Spe
- Dragon Pulse
- Psychic
- Thunderbolt
- Surf


Raikou
Ability: Pressure
Shiny: Yes
EVs: 252 SpA / 4 SpD / 252 Spe
Rash Nature
- Thunderbolt
- Aura Sphere
- Shadow Ball
- Hidden Power [Ice]



I would say that the difference between this streak and the last comes not only by a marginally better (still not great though xD) skill at stopping the roulette but mostly the better synergy provided by Metagross, as with his great performances in other modes (compared to the previously used swampert version), we knew we could get a longer streak here.

We also did this run, not only to improve it with Metagross, but the main purpose was to regain some of that feeling of familiarity against the link sets of PTHGSS as we just spent almost 900 battles facing the much manageable and less varied sets of the D/P modes, and that could impact our decision making if we were to continue that other streak we still have ongoing at 203 on the PtHGSS tower, as I said before, we prefer to battle by memory stopping only to slowly reconsider the situation by looking up external resources when the battle gets really tricky, so we would be biased in our thinking towards those D/P mons potentially leading us to fatal mistakes, and thus we decided to do this one first as right now we had less stakes here (none really until we started to go past our personal best) in an attempt to engage again with the improved sets in a more stress free enviroment.

This was not accomplished on the first try though, as I fucked up the roulette, landing on battle 30 something on the "switch teams" option against a team which I can't quite remember entirely (but had almost no chance at beating ours, as they were all slower mons with little super effective moves apart from an ice beam vaporeon in the back if we recall correctly), and even though it is never easy to lose in this way and it's not really relevant to the streak or the technical analysis of it, the fact that I was to now face my team from the other perspective during this late part of the journey and seeing them how easily they pounced this other shittier team, made me even more aware of the way those poor thousands of Npcs might have been feeling since the start of this project. This brief moment of pride made it quite easier to not feel too upset at the loss so we could quickly start a new streak.

I would also want to mention something I failed to notice on the first streak, (probably because of its brevity so it might have not come into play as much then as this time, plus we were too focused on playing any given mode and then quickly diving into the next one without giving any of them too much thought) and that’s that this modality cannot only seem easier (at least for Syzygy) compared to doubles because of the option to focus on one side of the field to convert the battles into 2 vs 1, but also because 2 of the worst options in the roulette, the self-infliction of sleep and freeze, which incapacites just one mon (I guess because of the overwhelming influence they can exert compared to the others) in both formats, and that means 1/3 of the team gets nullified in doubles compared to "only" 1/4 in here in link. Which was still no good news when it happened, but much more manageable than before. This also means it's a lesser advantage when you give them to the rival teams (but I see this as being less impactful or at the very least felt that way, as I rarely sought it purposefully as a mean to beat them, compared to the frustration of it happening to me, maybe beacuse of the way my team operates where that set back puts me in worse position than most other teams which might not be so reliant on hyper-offense)

Also on a much more anecdotical note, another difference between this particular streak and most other ones I did before in the same facility, is that I was certainly luckier when we landed on the "item for our team" slot, as before I could swear that the item pool was skewed in a way were most of the times I would get a lagging tail or iron ball (almost guarantying me a loss against a somewhat capable team) but this time they didn’t appear once, and other items such as the magnifying glass and scope lens seemed much more frequent. Even then, we were forced to play with a choice band once for most of the round but luckily we made it trough. This is to say that I no longer hold the impression that some items are more favored than others when landing on this option.




Now for our loss on battle 168:


- Turn 0 (Roulette): I set up hail vs aerodactyl (lead)/ Houndoom (back) & Forretress (lead)/Scizor (back)

- Turn1: Aerodactyl outspeeds and kills chomp with a crit dclaw. Then latios gets the revenge with a t-bolt, while forretres uses spikes.

- Turn 2: Next comes a houndoom which overheats to kill Metagross (maybe i should have bullet punched here to get a little chip damage) and latios fails to kill it with d-pulse (here the better move was probably surf but I still don't think it would have been enough to get the kill by iself seeing it has to spread the damage being "doubles", plus I wasn’t sure if maybe he would use sunny day to override the weather and thus would weaken my water move further). So in the end I think I should have made that hypothetical combo of bullet punch + surf which (only if they both were to be near max rolls) would have killed the houndoom before it could knock out my Meta so i would still keep a mon on both sides of the field. After all this (most certainly) wrong string of decisions, forretress puts the cherry on top by KOing latios with pay-back.

- Turn 3: I send Raikou which, as Metagross did before, gets chipped by the spikes, then kills houndoom but gets hit by a pay-back which leaves us in the red portion of the HP bar after also getting hit by the hail, and with only enough life to live another turn

-Turn 4: forry gets killed by a single T-Bolt, before Raikou succumbing finally to the inclement weather that I slopilly set up (not entirely on purpose obviously, I just aimed to a cluster of red and grey options of the roulette and happened to land there), and without even getting to face Scizor. Nor that we were going to have options at killing him anyway as only a crit would have made him die to an unboosted (as we had no specs due to the mode) T-bolt and only if it was a variant without priority (bullet punch or quick attack).

So I would say this was a somewhat deserved death which may have been prevented by better aim of the roulette and that other aproach to maybe kill houndoom.

That being said a completely different battle would have taken place if aero didn’t crit as Chomp would have been very useful if my initial gameplan were to be fulfilled, as him or latios could survive the dclaw (which I now only kills any of them if helped by the crit), then chomp fire fangs the forretress weakening it a lot, before latios tbolts the aero. Next turn with an EQ houndoom probably dies and if not latios finishes him or KOs forretress too. Then with only one side active (and probably just one mon left) against our whole team this was a sure victory.
So I think that complete deviation from the gameplan might have made me rush a little bit much in the decision making of the next turn, giving them a more pronounced advantage.

Or he could have been the Ice Fang variant and the same scenario would have ultimately occured without them even needing to crit LoL.

So I don't think I can complain too much after all the good luck in previous runs xD.

Now for the closing thoughts I must admit that even though this might be our worst perfoming facility, is certainly one of the most fun for us, the uncertainty of the roulette makes for very varied scenarios which is such a breath of fresh air after so many battles under the same, almost sterile conditions (not at all helped by my insistence about still using the same team over and over xD) and even taking into account that the rounds were slower and the roulette still requires a level of attention between battles that makes it less suitable for my otherwise usual approach at this challenges (which for those not familiar, I would explain it as in almost not paying attention, specially between fights in a way were the experience makes the battles feel as they are being blended together aiding me in getting into that kind of flow state were they get to be labeled as "background activity" by my brain, letting me to do them while doing other IRL duties most of the time).

That being said this is nothing compared to the complete change of mind that the castle requires of me, as that "between-battle" time, is the opposite of what one encounters here in the roulette: a slow as fuck and strategic consideration, instead of the more random and quicker nature of the external events here. Why I say this? Beacuse the most logical step for us now might be to revisit our link streak there for a while before revisiting the tower one in order to keep regaining said familiarity with the sets.
But I must admit this is more of a 6arc1 idea as for much sense it may make, I really dread going back there after my beautiful but certainly painful and slow experience there, by myself in doubles. So If we end up revisiting that facility first, I don't think we will do as many battles as we did here even if the streak doesn't break.

Whichever one we end up tackling now, we will update you when it's done, but in the meantime: take care and have fun everyone!

 

[average fella]

267 in tower

streak

None of the spreads or team is original, but it's apparently high for a non-trick scarf team.

team

Star (Starmie) @ Expert Belt
Ability: Natural Cure
Level: 50
EVs: 4 HP / 252 SpA / 252 Spe
Modest Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Surf
- Psychic
- Thunderbolt
- Ice Beam

Tar (Tyranitar) @ Lum Berry
Ability: Sand Stream
Level: 50
EVs: 4 HP / 252 Atk / 252 Spe
Jolly Nature
- Crunch
- Dragon Dance
- Earthquake
- Rock Slide

Gar (Garchomp) @ Choice Scarf
Ability: Sand Veil
Level: 50
EVs: 160 HP / 252 Atk / 96 Spe
Adamant Nature
- Outrage
- Earthquake
- Fire Fang
- Crunch

Starmie stays in on anything it can beat, ttar mostly comes in on fast ices/psychics that starmie can't beat and garchomp can't switch in on and beats em or dies so garchomp can, dragon dance usage is fairly rare, limited to things that basically can't touch it and dd happens until I eat the lum or get to about 50%. Garchomp beats a fair amount of stuff, don't remember using crunch or fire fang, or getting any sand veil bs, but this was 3 years ago.

My not-very-detailed play-by-play of the loss to cradily4/sceptile4/breloom?:

 

[Carloss97]

Hi!
Sorry to bother you again (while also repeating some of the context from the prevous post) but I have a couple questions for you.

Does anyone here know how to play Link battles in emulator?
And if so, could someone please guide me in the process?

(Either here or through DMs, preferably the latter way as knowing myself quite well, I'm afraid it will take me quite some time and tries to set up everything correctly. So I don't want to clog up the thread throughout what might be a long process. But if it does not go against the terms of the thread or you think your information will be helpful to others, let's keep the conversation here).

I ask this because at the moment I'm interested in continuing our PTHGSS Tower Streak, but since we spent the last 800+ battles against the much manageable D/P sets, I'm afraid we could misplay and break it if we were to incorrectly asses the biggest threats by mixing up the different games' sets.

And since we don't plan on touching D/P anymore, nor want to risk losing in a stupid way the streak that took us a lot of time, my first solution was to go back to PTHGSS and replay the link arcade with the Metagross variant of Syzygy, and we already did going beyond our previous PB while also having a lot of fun with that (this is more detailed in that already mentioned previous post).

My next idea was going to go to our castle link one to keep up the practice, but I really don’t feel like going to the castle for now (as its in my opinion not the most difficult one, but surely the most tedious and where i got burnt out the most because of my doubles run, even more than the longer ones in tower that have been at least like double in length LOL). Or at least i don't see us spending the amount of time there that would really help me regaining the familiarity with the sets.

So the thing is that I am now really pondering doing this practice in emulator as I might get the most milleage from actually playing the mode I want said practice in (as the pressence of the gimmicks makes the other modes more different that it might seem at first), and that i still have patience for. I'm thinking about at the very least doing 100-200 of the hard battles independent of the streak lengths I get, as they might vary a lot depending on the threats encountered.

So in case this is possible I wouldn't mind doing it that way while at the same time streaming it (as I guess that wouldn't be as much as a hassel as doing it on retail) so it might also have the added benefit of helping anyone wanting to analyze our gameplay (either because you want to replicate it or because you are still paranaoid that we were fake).

So having already completed the bulk of our initial project, I feel not longer as opposed as before to alter my "playstyle" for a little while, as now Its something that I see will benefit us when playing the streaks I really care about in the way we truly enjoy (the retail ones). Also seeing as these emulated ones won't be submitted because they would be treated as practice, I no longer fear that they can break if I loose focus by playing in what I would consider a not ideal enviroment for me, nor I see them as robbing me time and energy from my previously planned project (they will in fact potentially help us now in this regard).

So to summarize, i will greatly appreciate if any of you could help me step by step in setting up an emulator where I could play and stream Link Tower PTHGSS games so i can get some practice with my team before continuing our real cartridge run.

 

[ItoI6]

I've done some practice on emulator and this is as good as I'm gonna get, if I come back to it later I'm just gonna forget everything again. So im gonna play live until i lose or 300 at least

EDIT: alright i lost at 291 wins lol, i couldve let the board run out and hit a neutral tile but i aimed for enemy burn against a difficult team and poisoned my whole team instead. I could still have maybe won, but the enemy metagross got a meteor mash attack raise and hit through paralysis, I think once the battle started there was really nothing i couldve done, the only other path I couldve taken was wait for a paralysis while subbing as articuno but i didnt think that was more likely than the other path which was metagross kills articuno, i get one sd up as garchomp and sweep his whole team which is a win with no mm attack raise or crit + hes paralyzed as well.

I played like a few hundred games on emulator and only lost like 3 times so I'm kinda bummed out I lost so quickly on console, but I think the hardest thing is that it's just so boring when the battles go this slowly lol. Its kind of amazing to me people have like 2500 game streaks in other facilities. Unless its truly that brainless and impossible to lose, how do you not just zone out after a while? Like the sheer amount of time just doesn't make any sense, I played like 12 battles and my stream was over an hour, and I don't like stop to think for more than 30 seconds at most and even that's pretty rare. I can't be too mad though, there were many times earlier where I should've lost so it was bound to catch up to me.

Once I get past 49 wins in a facility that's it, I am not trying again because it's an insane time sink, so it was pretty miraculous that I didn't lose for that long, best of luck for anyone trying to beat that, I am glad that it's over and that I don't need to think about ever coming back to it.

 

[Carloss97]

Hi! Here comes a new run of the Link mode of the Arcade.
This was done, as always, in spanish retail copies of the games and with the inestimable help of 6arc1, using once again the updated version of team Syzygy in doubles, with Metagross as the 4th member instead of the Swampert used in the previous attempt. This time the streak was of 167 battles won in a row.



*Carloss97's side:

Garchomp (M)
Ability: Sand Veil
EVs: 4 HP / 252 Atk / 252 Spe
Jolly Nature
IVs: 1 SpA
- Outrage
- Earthquake
- Fire Fang
- Swords Dance


Metagross
Ability: Clear Body
Shiny: Yes
IVs: 31 / 31 / 31 / 7 / 31 / 31
EVs: 84 HP / 252 Attack / 4 Defense / 4 Sp.Defense / 164 Speed
Adamant Nature
- Iron Head
- Earthquake
- Bullet Punch
-Thunderpunch



*6arci's side:

Latios (M)
Ability: Levitate
EVs: 4 HP / 252 SpA / 252 Spe
Modest Nature
IVs: 29 HP / 21 Atk / 15 Def / 23 SpD / 29 Spe
- Dragon Pulse
- Psychic
- Thunderbolt
- Surf


Raikou
Ability: Pressure
Shiny: Yes
EVs: 252 SpA / 4 SpD / 252 Spe
Rash Nature
- Thunderbolt
- Aura Sphere
- Shadow Ball
- Hidden Power [Ice]



I would say that the difference between this streak and the last comes not only by a marginally better (still not great though xD) skill at stopping the roulette but mostly the better synergy provided by Metagross, as with his great performances in other modes (compared to the previously used swampert version), we knew we could get a longer streak here.

We also did this run, not only to improve it with Metagross, but the main purpose was to regain some of that feeling of familiarity against the link sets of PTHGSS as we just spent almost 900 battles facing the much manageable and less varied sets of the D/P modes, and that could impact our decision making if we were to continue that other streak we still have ongoing at 203 on the PtHGSS tower, as I said before, we prefer to battle by memory stopping only to slowly reconsider the situation by looking up external resources when the battle gets really tricky, so we would be biased in our thinking towards those D/P mons potentially leading us to fatal mistakes, and thus we decided to do this one first as right now we had less stakes here (none really until we started to go past our personal best) in an attempt to engage again with the improved sets in a more stress free enviroment.

This was not accomplished on the first try though, as I fucked up the roulette, landing on battle 30 something on the "switch teams" option against a team which I can't quite remember entirely (but had almost no chance at beating ours, as they were all slower mons with little super effective moves apart from an ice beam vaporeon in the back if we recall correctly), and even though it is never easy to lose in this way and it's not really relevant to the streak or the technical analysis of it, the fact that I was to now face my team from the other perspective during this late part of the journey and seeing them how easily they pounced this other shittier team, made me even more aware of the way those poor thousands of Npcs might have been feeling since the start of this project. This brief moment of pride made it quite easier to not feel too upset at the loss so we could quickly start a new streak.

I would also want to mention something I failed to notice on the first streak, (probably because of its brevity so it might have not come into play as much then as this time, plus we were too focused on playing any given mode and then quickly diving into the next one without giving any of them too much thought) and that’s that this modality cannot only seem easier (at least for Syzygy) compared to doubles because of the option to focus on one side of the field to convert the battles into 2 vs 1, but also because 2 of the worst options in the roulette, the self-infliction of sleep and freeze, which incapacites just one mon (I guess because of the overwhelming influence they can exert compared to the others) in both formats, and that means 1/3 of the team gets nullified in doubles compared to "only" 1/4 in here in link. Which was still no good news when it happened, but much more manageable than before. This also means it's a lesser advantage when you give them to the rival teams (but I see this as being less impactful or at the very least felt that way, as I rarely sought it purposefully as a mean to beat them, compared to the frustration of it happening to me, maybe beacuse of the way my team operates where that set back puts me in worse position than most other teams which might not be so reliant on hyper-offense)

Also on a much more anecdotical note, another difference between this particular streak and most other ones I did before in the same facility, is that I was certainly luckier when we landed on the "item for our team" slot, as before I could swear that the item pool was skewed in a way were most of the times I would get a lagging tail or iron ball (almost guarantying me a loss against a somewhat capable team) but this time they didn’t appear once, and other items such as the magnifying glass and scope lens seemed much more frequent. Even then, we were forced to play with a choice band once for most of the round but luckily we made it trough. This is to say that I no longer hold the impression that some items are more favored than others when landing on this option.




Now for our loss on battle 168:


- Turn 0 (Roulette): I set up hail vs aerodactyl (lead)/ Houndoom (back) & Forretress (lead)/Scizor (back)

- Turn1: Aerodactyl outspeeds and kills chomp with a crit dclaw. Then latios gets the revenge with a t-bolt, while forretres uses spikes.

- Turn 2: Next comes a houndoom which overheats to kill Metagross (maybe i should have bullet punched here to get a little chip damage) and latios fails to kill it with d-pulse (here the better move was probably surf but I still don't think it would have been enough to get the kill by iself seeing it has to spread the damage being "doubles", plus I wasn’t sure if maybe he would use sunny day to override the weather and thus would weaken my water move further). So in the end I think I should have made that hypothetical combo of bullet punch + surf which (only if they both were to be near max rolls) would have killed the houndoom before it could knock out my Meta so i would still keep a mon on both sides of the field. After all this (most certainly) wrong string of decisions, forretress puts the cherry on top by KOing latios with pay-back.

- Turn 3: I send Raikou which, as Metagross did before, gets chipped by the spikes, then kills houndoom but gets hit by a pay-back which leaves us in the red portion of the HP bar after also getting hit by the hail, and with only enough life to live another turn

-Turn 4: forry gets killed by a single T-Bolt, before Raikou succumbing finally to the inclement weather that I slopilly set up (not entirely on purpose obviously, I just aimed to a cluster of red and grey options of the roulette and happened to land there), and without even getting to face Scizor. Nor that we were going to have options at killing him anyway as only a crit would have made him die to an unboosted (as we had no specs due to the mode) T-bolt and only if it was a variant without priority (bullet punch or quick attack).

So I would say this was a somewhat deserved death which may have been prevented by better aim of the roulette and that other aproach to maybe kill houndoom.

That being said a completely different battle would have taken place if aero didn’t crit as Chomp would have been very useful if my initial gameplan were to be fulfilled, as him or latios could survive the dclaw (which I now only kills any of them if helped by the crit), then chomp fire fangs the forretress weakening it a lot, before latios tbolts the aero. Next turn with an EQ houndoom probably dies and if not latios finishes him or KOs forretress too. Then with only one side active (and probably just one mon left) against our whole team this was a sure victory.
So I think that complete deviation from the gameplan might have made me rush a little bit much in the decision making of the next turn, giving them a more pronounced advantage.

Or he could have been the Ice Fang variant and the same scenario would have ultimately occured without them even needing to crit LoL.

So I don't think I can complain too much after all the good luck in previous runs xD.

Now for the closing thoughts I must admit that even though this might be our worst perfoming facility, is certainly one of the most fun for us, the uncertainty of the roulette makes for very varied scenarios which is such a breath of fresh air after so many battles under the same, almost sterile conditions (not at all helped by my insistence about still using the same team over and over xD) and even taking into account that the rounds were slower and the roulette still requires a level of attention between battles that makes it less suitable for my otherwise usual approach at this challenges (which for those not familiar, I would explain it as in almost not paying attention, specially between fights in a way were the experience makes the battles feel as they are being blended together aiding me in getting into that kind of flow state were they get to be labeled as "background activity" by my brain, letting me to do them while doing other IRL duties most of the time).

That being said this is nothing compared to the complete change of mind that the castle requires of me, as that "between-battle" time, is the opposite of what one encounters here in the roulette: a slow as fuck and strategic consideration, instead of the more random and quicker nature of the external events here. Why I say this? Beacuse the most logical step for us now might be to revisit our link streak there for a while before revisiting the tower one in order to keep regaining said familiarity with the sets.
But I must admit this is more of a 6arc1 idea as for much sense it may make, I really dread going back there after my beautiful but certainly painful and slow experience there, by myself in doubles. So If we end up revisiting that facility first, I don't think we will do as many battles as we did here even if the streak doesn't break.

Whichever one we end up tackling now, we will update you when it's done, but in the meantime: take care and have fun everyone!

Hello everyone!

I was earlier today re-reading my last streak post while trying to understand the mechanics of the move payback as, for the first time, it is something that I'll have to look out from now on as a threat to the team seeing how detrimental was to us on our last battle. And before going into detail I would like to first say that the way I (incorrectly) thought the move worked before any of this, was by increasing its damage ONLY after hitting the USER (not unlike avalanche or counter). Which apparently is not, as the power boost (going from 50 BP to 100 BP) happens as long as the attack goes last (even if you targeted the teammate). I had no idea before this match and no confirmation until i looked it up today.

I must also admit that although Forretress has gave me some little problems in the past almost always by crippling or killing latios with bug bite or gyro ball (although most of times after receiving a t-bolt), Chomp with counter if the sash was no longer there, or even exploding. It never could open such a big hole, so the ones that survived could easily take care of him. Garchomp by fire fang if he didnt have occa, risking the EQ (if I wanted to damage a teammate in doubles or just assuring some chip without risking a miss of the FF) or treating it as one of the few set up fodders for sword dance (if facing it by himself, with no teammates, and having full HP and the sash intact). But also he never had nothing to do against Raikou's thunderbolt specially seeing as he was almost always crippled beforehand.
He might have even hit Latios before with payback but I guess never before I crippled him in the turn he sets some hazard up, so if he got the kill I wouldn't be able to see how much damage it really does if I had already lost HP before as he would have done it without the bar being full so I couldn’t register that as a meaningful threat yet.

What I'm trying to share here are the reasons why I felt compelled to ignore him while having an aerodactyl (a clear priority threat, similar to weavile in that he's faster and potentially super effective against half my team at least) besides him, and trying to clear one side of the field next (thinking that I was going to be able to take houndoom out of commision and raikou could safely clean scizor with t-bolt during the endgame).


As I tried to explain before (even if for some of you is still hard to understand) this are truly the moments where I try to reflect on what happened and the closest I get to spend time carefully making analysis to a similar enough extent to what some of you like doing almost every turn during a streak (and even then not that close xD). Only when a lot of things go bad in ways that seemed preventable, and specially after that means the loss of a big-ish streak, those are the moments where i really pause to rethink and learn the most. Not wanting to encourage or discourage either approach, just explaining mine, so people that follow my journey might get a glimpse of my thought process.

The thing is, by running the calcs now to understand the way it really works, I have noticed a couple of minor inconsistencies with said write up that I would like to address (one particular to said post and another one that also aplicable to some of my previous publications).


The first one pertinent to Raikou's death as by using turskain's damage calculator I notice that (btw we are talking about "Forretress 508" as it's called there) assuming I'm doing everything correctly, the move deals between 37.5% and 44.8% of damage to my thunder tiger. Which wouldn't put us anywhere near the lower bounds of the HP bar as it happened in the real battle.

So here I want to ask you if the calculator is really taking into account that if forry goes last, the power should double? I guess it does, as it implies so. But just in case there's a discrepancy there I would like to point that out so you can let me know before i keep trying to find another explanation for what I witnessed.

Assuming the calcs are correct though, the only logical conclusion I could come up with is that there I got hit by a crit, and between being dumbfounded for the second time in a row by how much that move was doing, and seeing that the first time (when latios got hit by it on turn 1) I was as surprised, my brain was too focused trying to explain it to me by saying something like: "this payback thing must also be powered to ridiculous levels after I fire an attack even if you don't target the user, and I must be stupid for treating it like counter, should I have focus on forry instead of houndoom? Nah, I was fucked from that first crit, but then I shoud have surfed for sure seeing as houndoom didn’t use sunny day, he was killing meta either way, as I stupidly relied on an occa berry which is not here right now for the first time in 1200+ matches, that means the bullet punch was the clear better play instead of Earthquake. Also forry would have been more chipped, but does that matter? I guess not really. And now scizor is not only going to kill me with or without priority but, am I now in range of hail? The spikes mattered for once! Fuck all of this! I'm beyond dead :( "

And i know for sure all those thoughts were racing through my mind at that moment , specially going from not entirely understanding how I was triggering that power boost but feeling there was not only one unknown factor present, but that it was also consistent in both instances while knowing the first one was not a crit, I can see how I could have missed the prompt while I was thinking about all that shit and my fate was already sealed, believing that hidden interaction was clearly the culprit.
I say this as I can remember clearly that incredulity when the HP bar went beyond orange and the defeat I felt after seeing the hail hit and not expecting to survive after another, while at the same time having no clear recollection of said crit that must have happend in between.

If 6arci1 was present in this particular instance, i could rely on his memory to confirm all of this, but sadly he was not present at this session. Also I'm pretty sure he could have warned me about the absence of the occa, and we could have made together less rushed decisions (not saying we would for sure have won as a team, just admitting I lost here by myself. Oh and apparently several crits xD).
But yeah here is one more aspect I've noticed and would like to bring attention to while having played the Link modes both ways: by yourself you can make the streak grow faster but as a team, being able to decide by contrasting opinions, you do it more safely which I would argue is more valuable (apart from fun). So sorry 6arc1 this time for losing a streak we were growing together by not playing the best I could when I was by myself.

And now for the second incosistency: while doing all this calcs and looking very closely into my mons' stats I just realize something that (at least I think) is very trivial, but nonetheless worthy to point out. This one also revolves around Raikou ad it's about me having slopilly stated throughout who knows how many posts, that he is a flawless all 31 Ivs LOL, which makes no sense for an HP Ice one as mine is. In this case it's because he really has 30/30 in its physical attack and defense, which I don't think makes ultimately much of a diference but for the sake of consistency I should point that out.

And before any of you from the paranoid crowd gets a hard-on by thinking I'm saying this as a cover up after a big fuck up, I'm so sorry to shatter your delusions once more but you can see from my first post (at the very least) that his spread was correctly stated there, as it's from other evidence I provided such as the proof pics and videos. Don't worry, I will edit all those posts where I was wrong, but not for some days, so you have time to verify everything I'm saying It's true.

The reason for this I think is that I was playing around with my mons in showdown where I don't care about the restrictions in IVs, Natures and such as much as I told you I do in this OG games. And that’s because I treat it as an extension of the modern gens, where I know those can be 'canonically' changed by mints, bottle caps, etc. So I have no problem with that there, but knowing that’s not possible to do here in legit ways, I never bothered just for the consistency of my headcannon. So i guess after doing that and trying to copy/paste the data to import it from those other teams into the one I wanted to share within this posts, I can see how i could slowly and patiently change Latios set so it matches the one in game (knowing it was veeery far from the optimized version), then went to Chomp who was either already done correctly (as I used him as a a physical attacker there too) or knew the change was in just one stat (so an easy and quick fix) and just went to change Raikou's nature without even checking the IVs (as I was probably already bored with the task hahahaha, sorry, but you know I hate this shit).

All that being said, thanks for reading my thoughts once more and please, keep battling as long as the fun is still there!

 

[magpie ai]

I've done some practice on emulator and this is as good as I'm gonna get, if I come back to it later I'm just gonna forget everything again. So im gonna play live until i lose or 300 at least

EDIT: alright i lost at 291 wins lol, i couldve let the board run out and hit a neutral tile but i aimed for enemy burn against a difficult team and poisoned my whole team instead. I could still have maybe won, but the enemy metagross got a meteor mash attack raise and hit through paralysis, I think once the battle started there was really nothing i couldve done, the only other path I couldve taken was wait for a paralysis while subbing as articuno but i didnt think that was more likely than the other path which was metagross kills articuno, i get one sd up as garchomp and sweep his whole team which is a win with no mm attack raise or crit + hes paralyzed as well.

I played like a few hundred games on emulator and only lost like 3 times so I'm kinda bummed out I lost so quickly on console, but I think the hardest thing is that it's just so boring when the battles go this slowly lol. Its kind of amazing to me people have like 2500 game streaks in other facilities. Unless its truly that brainless and impossible to lose, how do you not just zone out after a while? Like the sheer amount of time just doesn't make any sense, I played like 12 battles and my stream was over an hour, and I don't like stop to think for more than 30 seconds at most and even that's pretty rare. I can't be too mad though, there were many times earlier where I should've lost so it was bound to catch up to me.

Once I get past 49 wins in a facility that's it, I am not trying again because it's an insane time sink, so it was pretty miraculous that I didn't lose for that long, best of luck for anyone trying to beat that, I am glad that it's over and that I don't need to think about ever coming back to it.

Yeah Emulator runs are about a million times easier to livestream or record.

I realise "but that's not the actual run i'm submitting - my actual run is on retail" - but imo the proof of "are you good enough at the game to do this" does not have to be the literal streak, it can just be showing practice (and again, i dont think i'd even care about practice recordings where the user loses to a mistake - so long as they themselves note "oh yeah i should have done X and i would have done it on a real run" and this particularly applies to some scenario where its like there is a clear and obvious win but it would take 30 turns of stalling).

Like my initial concern (and to be clear again this isnt *aimed* at anyone its just a general concern) is people claiming the record who have no where near the basic strategical skill to get it (aka struggling to get like 150 wins in practice when the claim is 500) , not people who are "good enough to get 150 wins but they cheat and claim 175 wins " (this would be exceptionally difficult to spot and the main reason why (if playing on emu where streaming/recording is easy) its a good idea to just stream the entire thing if possible)

I hate to knock your efforts but (a lot like carlos' IRL video) its incredibly hard to tell whats going on. It also looks very awkward to play to try and get the camera on the DS screen. I dont' dismiss the video or the effort that went into making it, its just that i find it hard to follow in a "i would have to spend 3 hours watching this 1 hour video to follow all the decisions and events".


I also dont think live comm is that necessary and "talking out loud about your flow of consciousness" is not a skill most people practice. The average person will sound somewhat stupid if randomly requested to basically live commentate something they are doing - and I don't want that to negatively mix with the actual decision making.


Again; good play kinda speaks for itself. A noob would make trivial errors. Someone with hundreds of battles (played while actually fearing a loss) with a team will know what is a good/bad lead matchup (for whatever lead you are using) basically immediately and would know what to switch to. Someone new to the frontier running a non-trick team would also be aware of the high level of danger that a lead exeggutor3 or gliscor3 or metagross4 produces, whereas anyone who has played a lot will just be immediately familiar with that even if they've never actually lost to it. You don't need to say any of this on live comm; it is (imo) obvious just from watching gameplay. And again i think "everyone here knows what i mean by this"; the stuff you expect to be an issue when teambuilding is rarely the only issues that you face.

So yeah; genuine players have nothing to fear here. You may not realise it but your decision making will speak for itself. an hour or two (perhaps even a lot less with speedup) of silent emulator practice is going to communicate more than enough to other people who know what to look for.


e.g.

You don't need to watch the above video for very long to spot that:
1) The player obviously lacks the skillset required for 2k+ (a lot of the skills obviously not here are not exactly hard, its stuff like counting to 10, unironically)
2) The player obviously lacks a lot of set insight not just on opponents but on what they are using also
3) The general play is pretty much exactly what I think it looks like when "i'm just gonna play some offline pokemon, if i lose i'll just load a savestate, so no need to think that much or care about how a decision could cost me my 300+ hour 2k console winstreak"

it's only 40 minutes and there is no speedup (so its only 7 battles lol) but this alone is conclusive evidence in my eyes that the player / streak is cheated.
The games probably look ok to a casual observer and yeah most comments dont seem to notice any big issues. But they are completely obvious evidence cheating to anyone here who plays the frontier.


Equally 40 minutes of legit gameplay is very hard to fake unless you have "suffered in the frontier for a long time etc".

It's also true that if your streak is frankly kinda meh, that your "proof video" can be full of mistakes. tbh who even cares about a proof video at that point, its not like anyone is going to get into a discussion on e.g. a streak of 100 wins unless the team is obviously absolutely terrible in ways that basically no submitted team ever has been.

The tower video above is claiming 2k which requires a minimum level of skill. I would say the same of getting like 300+ (random number, could argue higher or lower) in basically any facility except perhaps hall singles. Like let me pretend someone got 750 in Castle Doubles; I would be more interested in seeing that person play the game for 30 minutes than i would be in the actual team they used. 750 isnt a random number; its roughly my total gamecount in castle doubles so i feel like i know certain things to look for. And i do think that i (among many people in here) could tell if someone has 750 games of legit experience or just 750 games of "yolo i'm going to load my savestate if i lose"

I think the hardest thing is that it's just so boring when the battles go this slowly lol. Its kind of amazing to me people have like 2500 game streaks in other facilities. Unless its truly that brainless and impossible to lose, how do you not just zone out after a while?

if we're talking about jumpman and peterko - they themselves talk at length about how they would play while doing other things.

And again "you learn faster when you are actually fearing losses" etc - Jumpman and peterko knew exactly what was/wasnt a threat and knew how to play against "everything else". So yeah something like 95% of battles are autopilot. Not brainless but autopilot. Neither of them played perfectly but they achieved the minimum level of care to not lose (and again both of them had multiple, multiple streaks well below 1k where they learned and adjusted stuff like how to play.

But yes its probably the most impressive thing about very long streaks (the concentration)

 

[ItoI6]

Yeah Emulator runs are about a million times easier to livestream or record.

I realise "but that's not the actual run i'm submitting - my actual run is on retail" - but imo the proof of "are you good enough at the game to do this" does not have to be the literal streak, it can just be showing practice (and again, i dont think i'd even care about practice recordings where the user loses to a mistake - so long as they themselves note "oh yeah i should have done X and i would have done it on a real run" and this particularly applies to some scenario where its like there is a clear and obvious win but it would take 30 turns of stalling).

Like my initial concern (and to be clear again this isnt *aimed* at anyone its just a general concern) is people claiming the record who have no where near the basic strategical skill to get it (aka struggling to get like 150 wins in practice when the claim is 500) , not people who are "good enough to get 150 wins but they cheat and claim 175 wins " (this would be exceptionally difficult to spot and the main reason why (if playing on emu where streaming/recording is easy) its a good idea to just stream the entire thing if possible)

I hate to knock your efforts but (a lot like carlos' IRL video) its incredibly hard to tell whats going on. It also looks very awkward to play to try and get the camera on the DS screen. I dont' dismiss the video or the effort that went into making it, its just that i find it hard to follow in a "i would have to spend 3 hours watching this 1 hour video to follow all the decisions and events".


I also dont think live comm is that necessary and "talking out loud about your flow of consciousness" is not a skill most people practice. The average person will sound somewhat stupid if randomly requested to basically live commentate something they are doing - and I don't want that to negatively mix with the actual decision making.


Again; good play kinda speaks for itself. A noob would make trivial errors. Someone with hundreds of battles (played while actually fearing a loss) with a team will know what is a good/bad lead matchup (for whatever lead you are using) basically immediately and would know what to switch to. Someone new to the frontier running a non-trick team would also be aware of the high level of danger that a lead exeggutor3 or gliscor3 or metagross4 produces, whereas anyone who has played a lot will just be immediately familiar with that even if they've never actually lost to it. You don't need to say any of this on live comm; it is (imo) obvious just from watching gameplay. And again i think "everyone here knows what i mean by this"; the stuff you expect to be an issue when teambuilding is rarely the only issues that you face.

So yeah; genuine players have nothing to fear here. You may not realise it but your decision making will speak for itself. an hour or two (perhaps even a lot less with speedup) of silent emulator practice is going to communicate more than enough to other people who know what to look for.


e.g.

You don't need to watch the above video for very long to spot that:
1) The player obviously lacks the skillset required for 2k+ (a lot of the skills obviously not here are not exactly hard, its stuff like counting to 10, unironically)
2) The player obviously lacks a lot of set insight not just on opponents but on what they are using also
3) The general play is pretty much exactly what I think it looks like when "i'm just gonna play some offline pokemon, if i lose i'll just load a savestate, so no need to think that much or care about how a decision could cost me my 300+ hour 2k console winstreak"

it's only 40 minutes and there is no speedup (so its only 7 battles lol) but this alone is conclusive evidence in my eyes that the player / streak is cheated.
The games probably look ok to a casual observer and yeah most comments dont seem to notice any big issues. But they are completely obvious evidence cheating to anyone here who plays the frontier.


Equally 40 minutes of legit gameplay is very hard to fake unless you have "suffered in the frontier for a long time etc".

It's also true that if your streak is frankly kinda meh, that your "proof video" can be full of mistakes. tbh who even cares about a proof video at that point, its not like anyone is going to get into a discussion on e.g. a streak of 100 wins unless the team is obviously absolutely terrible in ways that basically no submitted team ever has been.

The tower video above is claiming 2k which requires a minimum level of skill. I would say the same of getting like 300+ (random number, could argue higher or lower) in basically any facility except perhaps hall singles. Like let me pretend someone got 750 in Castle Doubles; I would be more interested in seeing that person play the game for 30 minutes than i would be in the actual team they used. 750 isnt a random number; its roughly my total gamecount in castle doubles so i feel like i know certain things to look for. And i do think that i (among many people in here) could tell if someone has 750 games of legit experience or just 750 games of "yolo i'm going to load my savestate if i lose"

if we're talking about jumpman and peterko - they themselves talk at length about how they would play while doing other things.

And again "you learn faster when you are actually fearing losses" etc - Jumpman and peterko knew exactly what was/wasnt a threat and knew how to play against "everything else". So yeah something like 95% of battles are autopilot. Not brainless but autopilot. Neither of them played perfectly but they achieved the minimum level of care to not lose (and again both of them had multiple, multiple streaks well below 1k where they learned and adjusted stuff like how to play.

But yes its probably the most impressive thing about very long streaks (the concentration)

When I rewatch it it seems like I fucked up and had my mic pick up from multiple sources which makes the commentary unlistenable unfortunately. I feel like the cause of this animosity between you and carlos, and maybe me, is because there is a fundamental misunderstanding about what this game means to me and you.

To submit a streak, please state the length of your streak (this will be the number of consecutive wins in most cases), the method of play (retail vs. emulator) and the facility/mode in which you achieved the streak. Also include details of your team. If possible, it would be useful to include a screenshot displaying your win streak and/or a recording of your losing battle. However, the best proof you can provide for a streak is simply to demonstrate your knowledge of the game and how your team works: discuss your team, including your team building process, general strategies, and known threats and how you play against them. War-stories are also a great thing to include in a write-up if you have any interesting battles and/or close calls from your streak you want to share.

When I was playing years ago the standard of proof was you explained your team and gave some example battles. If you didn't think anyone's explanation was good enough you just rolled your eyes and thought they were a dumbass. To come in years later and say that actually the standard of proof is meeting some arbitrary measure of good play years after the fact is just too late. I didn't even know it was gonna be serious like that. When I hit a team switch square my first thought wasn't, "Wow this is gonna me look so bad because that wasn't a good play", it was "Wow that was hilarious." I've already played the game and did what the standards of proof was back then, and I can't go back now and show you what my play looked like.

It's probably really frustrating to see someone who looks like they don't care or the same level of intricate knowledge get a high streak but I just really don't think it's that important to actually winning, I just don't. It might help sometimes, but I mean it's pokemon, there's really only so many things you can do to change the outcome. I would say the total amount of time you have playing the game and just rolling the slots again and again is a way bigger predictor for how you're actually gonna perform once you reach a baseline level of skill.

I've looked at this thread and I've seen some really obvious lies, but like if Carlos is playing this much, it really doesn't surprise me at all that he could get a high streak like that even if you don't think he's playing perfectly. I would be very careful to call someone a cheater, especially without real proof and just because you think you're better than him and he has a higher streak than you. I wouldn't even be surprised if this japanese guy is legit as well. There's like 10 people on each leaderboard we have here who have played beyond their first attempt at a streak that died after getting the symbol. It's just not very representative of what an average vs a very lucky run looks like, and you can't really know what that is without a huge population trying the challenge because it takes such an absurd amount of time to get a decent streak going.

I was trying to play more seriously but it ended with worse results than what was basically trolling lmao. I'm really sad that I ran into such a bad team so quickly, which was a Metagross lead that had meteor mash with gliscor/honchkrow in the back, because I think I really could've easily tacked on like another hundred at least if things went well. If you want to see what me playing for a long time and winning looks like you can check out that 3 hour video I did of me playing to 105 in 1 sitting, I got nothin else.

If you want the rigor of proof to be some other standard you'd better make that clear now rather than later when some guy shows up with a higher score than you because that's not fair to them.

 

[Carloss97]

When I rewatch it it seems like I fucked up and had my mic pick up from multiple sources which makes the commentary unlistenable unfortunately. I feel like the cause of this animosity between you and carlos, and maybe me, is because there is a fundamental misunderstanding about what this game means to me and you.



When I was playing years ago the standard of proof was you explained your team and gave some example battles. If you didn't think anyone's explanation was good enough you just rolled your eyes and thought they were a dumbass. To come in years later and say that actually the standard of proof is meeting some arbitrary measure of good play years after the fact is just too late. I didn't even know it was gonna be serious like that. When I hit a team switch square my first thought wasn't, "Wow this is gonna me look so bad because that wasn't a good play", it was "Wow that was hilarious." I've already played the game and did what the standards of proof was back then, and I can't go back now and show you what my play looked like.

It's probably really frustrating to see someone who looks like they don't care or the same level of intricate knowledge get a high streak but I just really don't think it's that important to actually winning, I just don't. It might help sometimes, but I mean it's pokemon, there's really only so many things you can do to change the outcome. I would say the total amount of time you have playing the game and just rolling the slots again and again is a way bigger predictor for how you're actually gonna perform once you reach a baseline level of skill.

I've looked at this thread and I've seen some really obvious lies, but like if Carlos is playing this much, it really doesn't surprise me at all that he could get a high streak like that even if you don't think he's playing perfectly. I would be very careful to call someone a cheater, especially without real proof and just because you think you're better than him and he has a higher streak than you. I wouldn't even be surprised if this japanese guy is legit as well. There's like 10 people on each leaderboard we have here who have played beyond their first attempt at a streak that died after getting the symbol. It's just not very representative of what an average vs a very lucky run looks like, and you can't really know what that is without a huge population trying the challenge because it takes such an absurd amount of time to get a decent streak going.

I was trying to play more seriously but it ended with worse results than what was basically trolling lmao. I'm really sad that I ran into such a bad team so quickly, which was a Metagross lead that had meteor mash with gliscor/honchkrow in the back, because I think I really could've easily tacked on like another hundred at least if things went well. If you want to see what me playing for a long time and winning looks like you can check out that 3 hour video I did of me playing to 105 in 1 sitting, I got nothin else.

If you want the rigor of proof to be some other standard you'd better make that clear now rather than later when some guy shows up with a higher score than you because that's not fair to them.

This is roughly what I was trying to convey this whole time.

It's not like I wouldn't understand somewhat wanting gameplay or asking NICELY if someone would be willing to provide more proof just so you can make sure that you believe truly in what you are going to try to replicate and wanting to study the material for said learning and aim to suffer less in your later attempts. That’s fair.

But I wish some of you would understand how jarring is to be treated like you didn't do something that you clearly did just because our levels of understanding or approach at this challenges are so vastly different from each other.
Specially after thinking you complied perfectly with the requirements needed and believing that's going to be enough for the sharing of those details witg the rest of the community and for its benefit. And even more so when you try (and maybe that was my first error) to accomodate to further standards you never agreed previously, just to try to appease an specific person (because I genuinly thought at that time that you had good intentions).


And when the only thing you do after the fact is accusing that individual instead of just trying his team/style and be curious and willing to learn, respecting the idea that you might not agree with said approach entirely, and conveying said opinions like: "well i could see the merits here" or heck, even something like "I still don't see how this happened, (but without the relentless snark) or an added "but I think I've come up with a better idea, (and maybe here's how it went)", you end up just looking bitter and envious. Or making the impression that you are going after said person to take them down for whatever ulterior and twisted motive.


I can get your frustrations (even if I still don't see how someone like Itol6 or myself could have cheated on retail) at the way the system in place works, but when your method of looking for change consists on trying to take down individuals willy-nilly, instead of talking to those that can change it and reason with them or just asking the community as a whole if it would be better to make said changes, you just end up breeding a level of unhealthy paranoia and divissivness which might not scare most of those already engaged, but will for sure prevent new and scared players from getting involved.

Look no further than how I tried to convey my discomfort at seeing I had to compete against emulator runs with speed-ups.

I just ran with it while playing, then I talked about the massive difference I was able to see it makes after countless hours of gameplay, and only then launched the question to the whole community.

But never once I tried to take down any streak or talked about any specific individual as I clearly stated my problem didn’t lie with them or their approach directly, but with the system that tries to put us under the same box. (And this point is even "funnier" when one sees how you play exactly that way, Magpie, but you never voiced your opinion on the matter while still being obnoxious about your "jihad against potential cheaters" making one think that you don't care as much as you say about standards, you just seem like your goal is to attack those that don't fully agree with your ideas).

 

[magpie ai]

I'm going to politely draw a line under the whole "magpie doesnt like fun and doesnt have fun playing and we do" discussion and all the closely related rhetoric and parallel points. I have ignored it/let it slide the first few times but I think thats enough.

I could make you both look incredibly stupid for this and I could draw a very strong line for several points that would be a very bad look for you both and I'm choosing not to. I'm doing this in good faith, because I primarily think the legitimacy of a user is based on the actual in-game viability of their streak, and because i still think there is a non-zero chance that one or both of you didnt cheat, and because i think maybe one or both of you dont actually mean it in the way it comes across.

So here I want to ask you if the calculator is really taking into account that if forry goes last, the power should double? I guess it does, as it implies so. But just in case there's a discrepancy there I would like to point that out so you can let me know before i keep trying to find another explanation for what I witnessed.

Carlos I will be honest; I cannot understand how after thousands of battles, you can be so clueless about something you must have seen a lot of times. In both singles and doubles, there are multiple pokemon with payback which must have used the move on raikou or latios. or if not payback, at least crunch

I will actively forget all of this and more if you can get the emulator working though. May I suggest if you have trouble with multi wifi emulation; just play 4v4 doubles in tower on a single emulator... it would be more than enough for now I think.

When I was playing years ago the standard of proof was you explained your team and gave some example battles. If you didn't think anyone's explanation was good enough you just rolled your eyes and thought they were a dumbass. To come in years later and say that actually the standard of proof is meeting some arbitrary measure of good play years after the fact is just too late. I didn't even know it was gonna be serious like that. When I hit a team switch square my first thought wasn't, "Wow this is gonna me look so bad because that wasn't a good play", it was "Wow that was hilarious."

This is not true. "explain your team and give some battles" has never been the proof requirement. It's always been; post your team (and strategies or whatever) and have [the community] believe it. For the majority of the thread's relevancy this meant you could have jumpman, peterko, drdimentio, etc ask you specific questions or even just outright say "you are lying your team is shit and you have no idea how to play".

I'm not calling anyone out here (particularly not atsync) but the absence of an antagonistic voice is a problem. It's not easy or fun to say "i think this record is bullshit" and then get into an argument over it. But if this thread is going to maintain legitimacy in the way it always has then the responsibility of proving the streak is real is always going to fall on the player submitting it because it is fucking insane to believe that someone else should have to potentially play for hours with various teams across the leaderboard just to check if they line up with the post. You can do like 99% of the work for "everyone else" by sharing as much and being as honest and helpful as possible. livestreamed evidence is the best for this for reasons already discussed.

So yeah at times maybe the thread was slow, or a lot of people went "huh thats a pretty long streak but i dont want to call it out" and then that became "well no one called it out so i guess everyone believes it"

I do not understand why you are bothered by this. Again, a legit streak has nothing to hide. Because its legit. It should be reproducible in part in the hands of a "similarly good or better player". There is an honest and simple answer to everything which doesnt devolve into shit throwing, because sometimes an honest answer is something like "oh yeah i guess i do lose to X, luckily i didnt face it". If nothing else, a legit player is comfortable in the knowledge that they know they are legit.

I've looked at this thread and I've seen some really obvious lies, but like if Carlos is playing this much, it really doesn't surprise me at all that he could get a high streak like that even if you don't think he's playing perfectly. I would be very careful to call someone a cheater, especially without real proof and just because you think you're better than him and he has a higher streak than you.

I don't think you understand the issue.

I have no idea how much Carlos actually plays (the same is true for most people on the leaderboard*). He could be playing 10 hours per day and have done so for months; aka he could be the person with the most experience actually playing the game this year by over a factor of 10. That's definitely possible.
Equally he could (I emphasize the word could) have like 10 hours total in the frontier over the past year. Pkhex allows you to manually edit your streak number directly into your save file on emulator or your retail copy of the game. I could get a winstreak of 9999 and post a picture and all it would cost me is like 5 minutes. (its not just pkhex, people could do this back in 2007 through various means which i'm not going to advertise here)

So how am I meant to figure it out? Well, I need to read his posts, hear his insight into his team, what works, what doesnt, any changes to the team he made to improve it. I need to see what specific trainers and pokemon or sets he mentions as being a problem to the team and what he did when he faced them or how he narrowly beat or lost to them. I need to fill in the blanks of "does this read like someone who has played for hundreds of hours, by implication of what is being said and not said".

If someone could say "oh no I'm telling the truth and I have 3000 hours in this game" and that would be sufficient then we allow any potential cheater - past present or future - to get away with absolutely anything so long as they can say this. So no, I'm not going to suddenly agree with X just because X promises me that actually, he didnt cheat.

* - this is the other thing you don't understand. The level of proof has always grown to require more for larger streaks and record holders. The narrative of "oh i accidentally beat the record by a lot whoops" doesnt quite hold true as the second you pass the current record you should at minimum be aware that "ok i guess this run will be a big deal for the thread; maybe i'll make some actual notes"

A lot of very good players have tried the same facilities with similarly good teams and come literally no-where near in terms of streak length. That's weird. It's not necessarily bad weird! its just weird. what is different here, thats what im trying to figure out.

It's probably really frustrating to see someone who looks like they don't care or the same level of intricate knowledge get a high streak but I just really don't think it's that important to actually winning, I just don't. It might help sometimes, but I mean it's pokemon

You are mistaking this as a "me vs you" thing.

Let me pull things back slightly; we have a very very large number of strong players (even drop the "strong" part if you dont think it matters that much) who struggle a lot to get any kind of meaningful streak and the ones that do very rarely do it immediately and without some meaningful lessons and losses first.

Before you replied I had some combination of the following as justifications for why 273+ was possible; [very good at the roulette]/ [team is much stronger (than what I could do) if played by an expert]/ [wasnt actually the first streak despite what the post suggested]/ [very lucky]

It seems like only "very lucky" remains after watching the videos provided. At the end of the day, there's always going to be some tiny % that anything not totally beyond reason is possible. So yes, "I got lucky" is an argument that is theoretically always going to work. The question is whether or not the wider community believe it (not believe that it was lucky; most records are axiomatically going to be lucky; but believe that the luck was within reason and not more likely simply cheated).

I wouldn't even be surprised if this japanese guy is legit as well. There's like 10 people on each leaderboard we have here who have played beyond their first attempt at a streak that died after getting the symbol. It's just not very representative of what an average vs a very lucky run looks like, and you can't really know what that is without a huge population trying the challenge because it takes such an absurd amount of time to get a decent streak going.

I'm going to do you a favor and be as good faith as possible; the above message in regards to the japanese player is an extremely bad look. I'm going to hope you said that out of animosity for me and that you havent watched the video. You can disagree with me on other points without dramatically impacting your credibility but i wouldn't push here. I doubt the above play pattern could even hit a 100 winstreak and I would hope that you can not only see that but also see why thats a problem for a claim of _2000_.

The number of people who played on beyond the symbol is not "10". The old thread is full of people saying how they lost shortly after gold and saying what teams they used for all golds. You know why the players who played on after gold arent listed? its because the vast majority die before like 70 and dont bother writing it up.
A better estimate at the number of users since 2008 who got gold in the arcade and kept going is probably more like 200. My guess is that most of them lost 50-56 and were caught out by the new roulette speed (its hard to practice it on retail without spending hours going back to 49)

I was trying to play more seriously but it ended with worse results than what was basically trolling lmao. I'm really sad that I ran into such a bad team so quickly, which was a Metagross lead that had meteor mash with gliscor/honchkrow in the back, because I think I really could've easily tacked on like another hundred at least if things went well.

It is just bizarre that you think a bystander would also believe this lol, let alone me. I'm not sure you realise how funny it is that the following narrative is what we're currently sitting on:
1. You list the record of 273, a lot more than anyone else in the history of arcade singles
2. I quote it and point out a few concerns and raise a few questions about stuff
3. You return to defend it and double down on it and say the roulette is easy
4. The offline evidence that you yourself opt into posting is [i freely invite the reader to draw their own conclusions and fill in whatever blank here]
5. You finally play live and you go 11-1

If you want the rigor of proof to be some other standard you'd better make that clear now rather than later when some guy shows up with a higher score than you because that's not fair to them.

Well what would you want it to be? I mean this unironically, what do you think the best standard of proof is for the thread?

If we accept anything legible that has an image of X wins, we open the doors to unlimited cheating. You may think "who is sad enough to cheat and lie about it here" - and according to the older threads, apparently a very large number of people. An insane amount were caught (this isnt gas-lighting accusations saying "i dont believe you"; caught as in they were caught with impossible images or impossible movesets or caught in outright lies). This includes people who previously held records in facilities and who were - for some amount of time - listed as legitimate.

You say you dont care and its just for fun but i have to assume you care _at least a little bit_ about the leaderboard and about your streaks, otherwise why go through the effort to play them, post them, and then return to talk about them more?

If we force everyone to livestream everything or write a thesis on every streak; then this probably ruins everyone's fun.

The obvious solution seems to be to keep doing whats always been done here and what is done on most speedrunning leaderboards, etc; which is demand a higher level of proof for larger claims and "almost nothing" for smaller ones.

But never once I tried to take down any streak or talked about any specific individual as I clearly stated my problem didn’t lie with them or their approach directly, but with the system that tries to put us under the same box.

Carlos there is nothing specific about you apart from the fact that you've posted some massive records that go well beyond anything the facility has seen before. If you had 0 records I don't think I would care enough to post on here.

I would have the exact same concern over Squilliams who also got a record recently; except squilliams livestreams everything and records the VODs, so I had to ask him basically nothing; the gameplay made it obvious.

(And this point is even "funnier" when one sees how you play exactly that way, Magpie, but you never voiced your opinion on the matter while still being obnoxious about your "jihad against potential cheaters" making one think that you don't care as much as you say about standards, you just seem like your goal is to attack those that don't fully agree with your ideas).

Carlos i have streamed over 500 hours in 2024 on twitch on emulator with a speedup button; what do you think my opinion is?

If you think that emulator play has an unfair advantage over console play then I am waiting to hear it. My opinion on speedup is that its actually a disadvantage because I sometimes cant read the text.

 

[Carloss97]

I'm going to politely draw a line under the whole "magpie doesnt like fun and doesnt have fun playing and we do" discussion and all the closely related rhetoric and parallel points. I have ignored it/let it slide the first few times but I think thats enough.

I could make you both look incredibly stupid for this and I could draw a very strong line for several points that would be a very bad look for you both and I'm choosing not to. I'm doing this in good faith, because I primarily think the legitimacy of a user is based on the actual in-game viability of their streak, and because i still think there is a non-zero chance that one or both of you didnt cheat, and because i think maybe one or both of you dont actually mean it in the way it comes across.
Carlos I will be honest; I cannot understand how after thousands of battles, you can be so clueless about something you must have seen a lot of times. In both singles and doubles, there are multiple pokemon with payback which must have used the move on raikou or latios. or if not payback, at least crunch

I will actively forget all of this and more if you can get the emulator working though. May I suggest if you have trouble with multi wifi emulation; just play 4v4 doubles in tower on a single emulator... it would be more than enough for now I think.
This is not true. "explain your team and give some battles" has never been the proof requirement. It's always been; post your team (and strategies or whatever) and have [the community] believe it. For the majority of the thread's relevancy this meant you could have jumpman, peterko, drdimentio, etc ask you specific questions or even just outright say "you are lying your team is shit and you have no idea how to play".

I'm not calling anyone out here (particularly not atsync) but the absence of an antagonistic voice is a problem. It's not easy or fun to say "i think this record is bullshit" and then get into an argument over it. But if this thread is going to maintain legitimacy in the way it always has then the responsibility of proving the streak is real is always going to fall on the player submitting it because it is fucking insane to believe that someone else should have to potentially play for hours with various teams across the leaderboard just to check if they line up with the post. You can do like 99% of the work for "everyone else" by sharing as much and being as honest and helpful as possible. livestreamed evidence is the best for this for reasons already discussed.

So yeah at times maybe the thread was slow, or a lot of people went "huh thats a pretty long streak but i dont want to call it out" and then that became "well no one called it out so i guess everyone believes it"

I do not understand why you are bothered by this. Again, a legit streak has nothing to hide. Because its legit. It should be reproducible in part in the hands of a "similarly good or better player". There is an honest and simple answer to everything which doesnt devolve into shit throwing, because sometimes an honest answer is something like "oh yeah i guess i do lose to X, luckily i didnt face it". If nothing else, a legit player is comfortable in the knowledge that they know they are legit.
I don't think you understand the issue.

I have no idea how much Carlos actually plays (the same is true for most people on the leaderboard*). He could be playing 10 hours per day and have done so for months; aka he could be the person with the most experience actually playing the game this year by over a factor of 10. That's definitely possible.
Equally he could (I emphasize the word could) have like 10 hours total in the frontier over the past year. Pkhex allows you to manually edit your streak number directly into your save file on emulator or your retail copy of the game. I could get a winstreak of 9999 and post a picture and all it would cost me is like 5 minutes. (its not just pkhex, people could do this back in 2007 through various means which i'm not going to advertise here)

So how am I meant to figure it out? Well, I need to read his posts, hear his insight into his team, what works, what doesnt, any changes to the team he made to improve it. I need to see what specific trainers and pokemon or sets he mentions as being a problem to the team and what he did when he faced them or how he narrowly beat or lost to them. I need to fill in the blanks of "does this read like someone who has played for hundreds of hours, by implication of what is being said and not said".

If someone could say "oh no I'm telling the truth and I have 3000 hours in this game" and that would be sufficient then we allow any potential cheater - past present or future - to get away with absolutely anything so long as they can say this. So no, I'm not going to suddenly agree with X just because X promises me that actually, he didnt cheat.

* - this is the other thing you don't understand. The level of proof has always grown to require more for larger streaks and record holders. The narrative of "oh i accidentally beat the record by a lot whoops" doesnt quite hold true as the second you pass the current record you should at minimum be aware that "ok i guess this run will be a big deal for the thread; maybe i'll make some actual notes"

A lot of very good players have tried the same facilities with similarly good teams and come literally no-where near in terms of streak length. That's weird. It's not necessarily bad weird! its just weird. what is different here, thats what im trying to figure out.
You are mistaking this as a "me vs you" thing.

Let me pull things back slightly; we have a very very large number of strong players (even drop the "strong" part if you dont think it matters that much) who struggle a lot to get any kind of meaningful streak and the ones that do very rarely do it immediately and without some meaningful lessons and losses first.

Before you replied I had some combination of the following as justifications for why 273+ was possible; [very good at the roulette]/ [team is much stronger (than what I could do) if played by an expert]/ [wasnt actually the first streak despite what the post suggested]/ [very lucky]

It seems like only "very lucky" remains after watching the videos provided. At the end of the day, there's always going to be some tiny % that anything not totally beyond reason is possible. So yes, "I got lucky" is an argument that is theoretically always going to work. The question is whether or not the wider community believe it (not believe that it was lucky; most records are axiomatically going to be lucky; but believe that the luck was within reason and not more likely simply cheated).

I'm going to do you a favor and be as good faith as possible; the above message in regards to the japanese player is an extremely bad look. I'm going to hope you said that out of animosity for me and that you havent watched the video. You can disagree with me on other points without dramatically impacting your credibility but i wouldn't push here. I doubt the above play pattern could even hit a 100 winstreak and I would hope that you can not only see that but also see why thats a problem for a claim of _2000_.

The number of people who played on beyond the symbol is not "10". The old thread is full of people saying how they lost shortly after gold and saying what teams they used for all golds. You know why the players who played on after gold arent listed? its because the vast majority die before like 70 and dont bother writing it up.
A better estimate at the number of users since 2008 who got gold in the arcade and kept going is probably more like 200. My guess is that most of them lost 50-56 and were caught out by the new roulette speed (its hard to practice it on retail without spending hours going back to 49)

It is just bizarre that you think a bystander would also believe this lol, let alone me. I'm not sure you realise how funny it is that the following narrative is what we're currently sitting on:
1. You list the record of 273, a lot more than anyone else in the history of arcade singles
2. I quote it and point out a few concerns and raise a few questions about stuff
3. You return to defend it and double down on it and say the roulette is easy
4. The offline evidence that you yourself opt into posting is [i freely invite the reader to draw their own conclusions and fill in whatever blank here]
5. You finally play live and you go 11-1
Well what would you want it to be? I mean this unironically, what do you think the best standard of proof is for the thread?

If we accept anything legible that has an image of X wins, we open the doors to unlimited cheating. You may think "who is sad enough to cheat and lie about it here" - and according to the older threads, apparently a very large number of people. An insane amount were caught (this isnt gas-lighting accusations saying "i dont believe you"; caught as in they were caught with impossible images or impossible movesets or caught in outright lies). This includes people who previously held records in facilities and who were - for some amount of time - listed as legitimate.

You say you dont care and its just for fun but i have to assume you care _at least a little bit_ about the leaderboard and about your streaks, otherwise why go through the effort to play them, post them, and then return to talk about them more?

If we force everyone to livestream everything or write a thesis on every streak; then this probably ruins everyone's fun.

The obvious solution seems to be to keep doing whats always been done here and what is done on most speedrunning leaderboards, etc; which is demand a higher level of proof for larger claims and "almost nothing" for smaller ones.

Carlos there is nothing specific about you apart from the fact that you've posted some massive records that go well beyond anything the facility has seen before. If you had 0 records I don't think I would care enough to post on here.

I would have the exact same concern over Squilliams who also got a record recently; except squilliams livestreams everything and records the VODs, so I had to ask him basically nothing; the gameplay made it obvious.
Carlos i have streamed over 500 hours in 2024 on twitch on emulator with a speedup button; what do you think my opinion is?

If you think that emulator play has an unfair advantage over console play then I am waiting to hear it. My opinion on speedup is that its actually a disadvantage because I sometimes cant read the text.

I understand that you want to act as the antagonistic voice of the community. But i don't think your are the best person suited for that. Why?

As we said to exhaustion you just dismiss any information or context other than those that suits your approach to this challenges. At least I know for sure you keep doing that to me.

Look at how I explained clearly in the post you are replying to why I wasn’t afraid of payback beforehand but you still act as if I didn’t just because you think: "well you should have been aware at this point" when the point is "I wasn’t in this exact position before" (paired with an explanation of why I think that was the case). And then you have the audacity to compare it with crunch, not getting that the main trouble for me was that I wasn’t fully aware of how the secondary effect of payback works, not that it can be a strong dark physical attack.
It surprised me when I started to see it was being powered up even when I didn’t attack forry. I admitted that it never was such a big problem before. As it wasn’t. If latios died i wasn’t surprised nor aware of the interaction as I assumed it was normal for a physical dark stab to do enough damage to him (even more so assuming a high roll, or that i was already damaged from a hit or drained from life orb), not to talk about how if that happened in singles the interaction worked as I thought it did at the moment (like counter, It seemed normal to me to be powered after I targeted HIM) so that didn’t challenge my preconceptions. Nor it did when when Raikou or the others weren’t too badly damged by it. Just this time where I sensed something weird happening amidst the chaos of bad decisions/mishappens is when i finally decided to take a closer look at it.


And I still don’t know if you do this out of malice or that you are truly incapable of thinking in our "more laidback" terms. But either way I think that’s exactly why it bothers me you keep trying to be the one who has to "judge and uncover cheaters" as you act as if only those aware of every single interaction and playing like you would, are the only ones that can be legit. But then I go and explain something that I know for sure it happened to me, and seeing you dismissing it like that is what truly exposes for me that you are incapable of even comprehending some plays/playstyles. And I tried to surrender and not be bothered by it anymore until I saw you kept doing that to others who end up feeling the same way.

So I would suggest you that you open your mind a little bit or at least stop acting as "only someone who has spent X amount of time here would know this I'm saying right now and if not they might be full of BS " when sometimes you show yourself to be the one incapable of understanding how someone who doesn't think that way does the things they do.

No one is trying to say "Magpie is no fun and he should try a little bit more", is more of a "Magpie is so knowledgeable but sadly too narrow minded to the point he starts seeing cheaters in everyone that is not as careful or takes this as seriously as him"

 

[magpie ai]

I reject this framing, it's nonsense. However intentionally snide it is or isnt, you don't gain any credibility by making up shit about my character. Stop trying to make this about anything except the game. I am actually much more open to believing you than I bet most people reading this are. I have not given up on that.

As we said to exhaustion you just dismiss any information or context other than those that suits your approach to this challenges.

Yeah I'm also tired of talking around in circles about nothing. It's obvious that you don't want to engage in the normal discussion points on streaks and teams.

Just go and livestream yourself in 4v4 doubles in the tower. Or 3v3 doubles in the Castle or Arcade. Or play singles. Or factory. In fact play anything in the Frontier except Hall. Try to break one of your world records on a livestream. Or break a different world record. You don't have to actually do it. Just genuinely try to do it in the same way that you tried and succeeded when you got the other records. I await actual evidence.

If you arent cheating the simple fact that you have streaks way longer than other people should tell you that (however you want to play) is way, way more effective than anyone else. Have some confidence in that because it will be immediately obvious and undeniable. I seriously believe that getting 361 in 3v3 Castle Doubles while just playing for fun must mean you are a lot better than you think you are. It's the same for 167 in Arcade; I know the approx. minimum level of roulette + play skill required for that. Maybe the secret to your success is just doing a lot of attempts quickly; in which case i'm assuming it should be quite easy and fast to get a 160 streak going in castle doubles or something. Or 200-300 in whatever multi it was you got over 800 in.

If you have been cheating then by now we probably both know that going to a decent sized streak (not a record, just a decent streak) is actually quite hard and its going to be undeniable basically straight away if you are also barely able to handle a small part of the claim. My assumption is that any cheater would want to do absolutely everything they could to dodge and avoid a live environment or if not completely avoid it then move the goalposts and make it as short as possible to obscure what can be concluded as much as possible.


I wouldn't ask this of basically anyone else because again; no one else exists at your level of multiple massive streaks in a short timeframe + bad writeup + massive amounts of claimed total playtime + very defensive about all this weird stuff that frankly, i dont care about. Maybe you think thats unfair; but you are the only modern record holder who has never played live and you also have some of the largest records in terms of "difference of 1st place vs 2nd place". Your refusal to produce a stream after weeks of it being requested cannot be because of a lack of time, effort or not caring (evidence for this is the past page or whatever of this thread). It also cant be because of a lack of equipment or knowledge on how to make a video and post it. Setting up multis may be more complicated but you don't need to play multis on emulator.


I will offer one final point in an act of good faith: if you really cannot figure out livestreaming yourself; I am willing to play your exact team, live on my own stream. You will be in the chat and tell me what moves to make each turn. This will be slower than playing yourself and I will probably insist that "we" play like 200-300 games and I will probably insist on the format (it will be 4v4 tower doubles or 3v3 castle doubles). It would be a colossal waste of both our time I am sure, but then so is this entire conversation.

 

[Carloss97]

Brother, I didn’t say anything of this to gain any credibility.

I'm genuinly trying tell you that as a person who knows what he did (not trying to make anyone beleive me blindly just because I say this BTW, is just so you may reflect a little bit on your own behaviour Magpie, this is no attack, just trying to be a wake up call for you), the way you convey your concerns is discouraging as fuck and would love if at least not with me, you will be more careful when trying to gather information before making accusations in the future. As with your current antics you are more likely to scare future players willing to learn than ousting any cheater. The latter ones could just ignore you and let the streaks be accepted. But the ones on the first group are lost as soon as you try to accuse them and you decide to ignore their explanations.

And seeing myself how much are you missing the mark with me makes me very hard to look seriously at your other attemps at dismissing streaks.

The fact I tried to collaborate with you from the start for you to still purposefully and consistently miss most of the information you asked for in the first place (like when you asked me what I did in castle even after wrtiting about it on my firsr post, and even trying to present and organice it a little bit more in a later one, you didn’t even respond), as if you only talk when you see things that don't add up in your head, but when they finally should you tend to say nothing. Do yo see how biased that makes you seem and in what a bad light does that leave the accused even if they are legit and do what they can to share all the info they have?


I will respond to everything else regarding emulators and how we can help each other in the most productive way going forward, all of that on a later post. Partly because I won't have much time until this afternoon but mainly because I don't want to drown the point made above, as that’s for me the most important thing right now, much more your than your opinion on my streaks. Even if you don't want to beleive me, please, I implore you, pretend to do it just for a moment while reading this, and hopefully you'll see how your behaviours can affect others.

 

[ItoI6]

Okay, I thought you were playing on console and trying to beat this, playing on emulator with speedups and not beating this by now is just criminal lmao. Dude the only thing that makes beating that record challenging at all is that it takes so long, if you take that aspect away like anyone could do it. Yeah its difficult but its not THAT difficult. If I open up this challenge to a large group of people who know pokemon and say hey ill give you a few hundred bucks if you can break 300 with this team and they can play on emulator with speedups, it'll happen like overnight. It's like 7-8 hours of good play? If you seriously think there's just no way anyone could achieve that without cheating then you just haven't been exposed to a real competitive environment before with lots of players. Realistically the record is actually probably held by some japanese guy who we don't know about who never reported it anywhere lol

I was talking about the number of people who got past the gold symbol, lost, and then actually cared enough to improve their streak after that, not the number of people who have beaten the arcade at all. Like of course a lot of people have beaten the arcade, my point was that not a lot of people actually care about getting a good record, and I don't think many of them were playing with good teams either. The sample size of people who actually tried to get a high score is very low.

You said you've played with my team before I'm curious, what was your best streak with it? And you had some questions about bad pokemon, like what am I gonna do I face lead gliscor with guillotine, or hypnosis gengar or whatever. Well the answer is I'll lose if they hit hypnosis and pick annoying moves, I'll lose if they hit guillotine. What am I gonna do if Metagross gets a meteor mash attack raise or crits garchomp? I'll lose, that's what'll happen lmao. I don't have some secret tech that prevents me from getting bad luck, I twave, and then I flash 6 times, and I try and sweep with one of my pokemon in the back. You need to know about some sturdy pokemon, clear body pokemon, and a few pokemon that are dangerous to let them get a few free turns so you should chip them with psychic so its in range for garchomp to kill, and that's about it.

I don't care about my record, my record will get beaten 100%, I care that my integrity is being called into question here when I feel like I've provided more proof and gameplay than like anyone I've seen in this thread.

EDIT: I'm sorry this is blowing my mind, you've been playing with speedups, with all this shit on the screen and haven't beaten that record??? What is that on the health bar??? For the record I think using damage calcs while you play is using an external tool which should be cheating, this is like going way beyond that. This is such an insane advantage, you're playing 4x the games that I did, while hitting the wheel with a computer mouse. No wonder you think everyone else is cheating lmao

 

[magpie ai]

Ok if we're finally gonna talk about pokemon then maybe this'll go somewhere.

Okay, I thought you were playing on console and trying to beat this, playing on emulator with speedups and not beating this by now is just criminal lmao. Dude the only thing that makes beating that record challenging at all is that it takes so long, if you take that aspect away like anyone could do it. Yeah its difficult but its not THAT difficult. If I open up this challenge to a large group of people who know pokemon and say hey ill give you a few hundred bucks if you can break 300 with this team and they can play on emulator with speedups, it'll happen like overnight. It's like 7-8 hours of good play? If you seriously think there's just no way anyone could achieve that without cheating then you just haven't been exposed to a real competitive environment before with lots of players. Realistically the record is actually probably held by some japanese guy who we don't know about who never reported it anywhere lol

I actually agree, in that I think openly inviting hundreds of people to play the arcade would be very revealing on the truth in aspects.

I think with the right approach and information that 300 will fall but I will say that you are probably ignorant of how well squilliams played in 263 and how well i played in 220. I guess "see below" on more of that. The number of people who know frontier sets and already know damage benchmarks well enough to actually play quickly without horrible mistakes and the number of people who actually know how to manipulate and bait the AI into making decisions that favor the player is small. On top of this I will say it as it is: in all your footage you were shit at the roulette. I don't think its a particularly difficult skill either and I am sure there are people a lot better at it than me.

And yes, I have no doubt that i will beat your record. The fact I am sure I will do so doesn't change my mind on how suspicious any of your gameplay or comments are. speaking of which...

I was talking about the number of people who got past the gold symbol, lost, and then actually cared enough to improve their streak after that, not the number of people who have beaten the arcade at all. Like of course a lot of people have beaten the arcade, my point was that not a lot of people actually care about getting a good record, and I don't think many of them were playing with good teams either. The sample size of people who actually tried to get a high score is very low.

So for the record, you do care and you think there is some skill to going beyond 49? I can promise you that none of the hundreds of users in the original thread intended or wanted to lose after getting gold. This is an extremely similar demographic to the kind of people who would be motivated to go after some bounty.

You said you've played with my team before I'm curious, what was your best streak with it?

140, and thats with much better decision making than mentioned below....

And you had some questions about bad pokemon, like what am I gonna do I face lead gliscor with guillotine, or hypnosis gengar or whatever. Well the answer is I'll lose if they hit hypnosis and pick annoying moves, I'll lose if they hit guillotine.

Gliscor3 is not a bad matchup in relative terms to be honest; pressure puts in easily enough work and its a lot more likely to hit a u-turn into cress which allows the player to setup either articuno or Garchomp. If it hits guillotine on cress this isn't bad news on its own either because of Pressure + substitute on articuno. It has to also immediately hit articuno. Even if it does all of that garchomp is faster and you get to swords dance since it has no sash in the Arcade. Gliscor must also hit guillotine first try there also.

The combined chance of all of this (factoring in the chance for the ai to use other moves) is under 1%. If you play against Gliscor poorly then yeah its a bigger problem, the fact you are naming it here makes me think you definitely dont do what i outline above.

Gengar2 has a 0% chance to beat your team. This one is so obvious that I dont need to explain it. Naming it here is embarrassing. Just how little have you actually played?

What am I gonna do if Metagross gets a meteor mash attack raise or crits garchomp? I'll lose, that's what'll happen lmao.

?????????

You stall Metagross4 out of 8 Meteor Mash PP via substitute Articuno and Metagross can only select the move explosion or MM into articuno and on top of this Metagross will _always_ be paralysed in this scenario and will never have its Quick Claw

The fact you mention bringing in Garchomp at all for Metagross4 is bizarre. Just how badly are you playing this team?

To be honest give me enough attempts with your team, I think maybe I do go well into the 200s. I think the chance that you do this is close to 0 - and i think you know it, and i think everyone reading this also knows it.

I don't have some secret tech that prevents me from getting bad luck, I twave, and then I flash 6 times and I try and sweep with one of my pokemon in the back. You need to know about some sturdy pokemon, clear body pokemon, and a few pokemon that are dangerous to let them get a few free turns so you should chip them with psychic so its in range for garchomp to kill, and that's about it.

I don't care about my record, my record will get beaten 100%, I care that my integrity is being called into question here when I feel like I've provided more proof and gameplay than like anyone I've seen in this thread.

Ok so to be clear; you think playing the roulette badly in offline videos and then getting 11 wins in a row is the good kind of proof?

You think that saying Gliscor3 is a problem helps legitimize the claim?

EDIT: I'm sorry this is blowing my mind, you've been playing with speedups, with all this shit on the screen and haven't beaten that record??? What is that on the health bar???

It slightly surprises me that you've never seen "ruler strats" before. there was a guide posted by peterko back in 2007 about how to do this with an actual ruler. This is not new.

For the record I think using damage calcs while you play is using an external tool which should be cheating, this is like going way beyond that. This is such an insane advantage, you're playing 4x the games that I did, while hitting the wheel with a computer mouse. No wonder you think everyone else is cheating lmao

This is a weird comment to throw at me specifically because i do not use damage calcs for like 99% of my games with this team because that's literally how familiar i am with these 3 pokemon after years of competitive singles - but I dont expect everyone to know that i guess. Regardless, this thread has always done and supported playing slowly within the rules of the game.

I don't know what a computer mouse has to do with physically tapping a button lol. You press a button to stop the roulette, thats it

 

[ItoI6]

I mean it just kind of feels ridiculous to argue with someone who is so certain they're right when it's just factually incorrect, like I didn't cheat, now I gotta go back and try and rationalize what's already happened. You seem very confident in your ability to tell who's cheating and it's just wildly off the mark. I was referring to how I lost in the set, which was a battle where i was poisoned so i cant stall out metagross with articuno, but even then you need to sac something or play risky to get it in.

And I know gliscor is likely to do strange things like u-turn and counter against cresselia, my point is that if it does choose guillotine there's really nothing I can do. There's a bunch of pokemon that are just gonna win if they pick the right moves, I just play the best I can and if I lose I lose.

Its just kind of hard to sit here and take this disrespect when you're playing with insane advantages and still have not beaten a 1 try record set while doing chores around the house years ago lol. Either your immense skill doesn't actually matter that much, or you're wildly overestimating how well you play. Like what is there even to be arrogant about? It's an ingame challenge where a very a small group of people have genuinely tried to get a high streak on.

As to why I didn't hit the wheel that well? I dont know. I practiced on emulator and it didn't feel the same as playing irl. I played a lot of games in a row years ago and I was warmed up on it. Again it feels so strange to argue against someone who is so confidently incorrect. It already happened, if you really don't think its possible after what I've provided so far, then I don't know what to tell you.

 

[Squilliams]

I feel like I've provided more proof and gameplay than like anyone I've seen in this thread.

I personally take a lot of issue with this statement. So many players in this thread (and the old records thread) have provided way more evidence for their streaks than your original posts did, whether it be full recorded video of all/most of the streak, detailed battle logs, or analyses of multiple specific battles throughout their streak. I briefly looked through the thread and compiled all the posts I could find that have included full recordings of their streaks, since you apparently can’t be bothered to look for them yourself.

Streaks with full recorded video (not including my own posts)

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...s-discussion-and-records.3663294/post-8825786

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...s-discussion-and-records.3663294/post-8923968

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...s-discussion-and-records.3663294/post-9065585

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...s-discussion-and-records.3663294/post-9354249

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...s-discussion-and-records.3663294/post-9548856

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...-discussion-and-records.3663294/post-10030107

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...-discussion-and-records.3663294/post-10068804

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...-discussion-and-records.3663294/post-10151396

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...-discussion-and-records.3663294/post-10213312

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...-discussion-and-records.3663294/post-10222949

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...-discussion-and-records.3663294/post-10332698

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...-discussion-and-records.3663294/post-10334863

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...s-discussion-and-records.3663294/post-9294029

I appreciate the effort you’ve gone to in order to provide additional evidence, and I would encourage others to draw their own conclusions from what you’ve provided after being prompted. However, it’s not fair to everyone else to say you “provided more proof” than anyone else here.

For the record I think using damage calcs while you play is using an external tool which should be cheating

You’re entitled to this opinion, but I think you will find that almost everyone else who uses this thread disagrees with you. Damage calculators are literally listed in the original post of this thread as a resource for players to use.
You yourself also use a spreadsheet to look up sets during gameplay. I don’t really understand how you can count set-lookup as a fair and legitimate resource to use during gameplay, but you draw the line at using a calculator?

 

[Carloss97]

I reject this framing, it's nonsense. However intentionally snide it is or isnt, you don't gain any credibility by making up shit about my character. Stop trying to make this about anything except the game. I am actually much more open to believing you than I bet most people reading this are. I have not given up on that.
Yeah I'm also tired of talking around in circles about nothing. It's obvious that you don't want to engage in the normal discussion points on streaks and teams.

Just go and livestream yourself in 4v4 doubles in the tower. Or 3v3 doubles in the Castle or Arcade. Or play singles. Or factory. In fact play anything in the Frontier except Hall. Try to break one of your world records on a livestream. Or break a different world record. You don't have to actually do it. Just genuinely try to do it in the same way that you tried and succeeded when you got the other records. I await actual evidence.

If you arent cheating the simple fact that you have streaks way longer than other people should tell you that (however you want to play) is way, way more effective than anyone else. Have some confidence in that because it will be immediately obvious and undeniable. I seriously believe that getting 361 in 3v3 Castle Doubles while just playing for fun must mean you are a lot better than you think you are. It's the same for 167 in Arcade; I know the approx. minimum level of roulette + play skill required for that. Maybe the secret to your success is just doing a lot of attempts quickly; in which case i'm assuming it should be quite easy and fast to get a 160 streak going in castle doubles or something. Or 200-300 in whatever multi it was you got over 800 in.

If you have been cheating then by now we probably both know that going to a decent sized streak (not a record, just a decent streak) is actually quite hard and its going to be undeniable basically straight away if you are also barely able to handle a small part of the claim. My assumption is that any cheater would want to do absolutely everything they could to dodge and avoid a live environment or if not completely avoid it then move the goalposts and make it as short as possible to obscure what can be concluded as much as possible.


I wouldn't ask this of basically anyone else because again; no one else exists at your level of multiple massive streaks in a short timeframe + bad writeup + massive amounts of claimed total playtime + very defensive about all this weird stuff that frankly, i dont care about. Maybe you think thats unfair; but you are the only modern record holder who has never played live and you also have some of the largest records in terms of "difference of 1st place vs 2nd place". Your refusal to produce a stream after weeks of it being requested cannot be because of a lack of time, effort or not caring (evidence for this is the past page or whatever of this thread). It also cant be because of a lack of equipment or knowledge on how to make a video and post it. Setting up multis may be more complicated but you don't need to play multis on emulator.


I will offer one final point in an act of good faith: if you really cannot figure out livestreaming yourself; I am willing to play your exact team, live on my own stream. You will be in the chat and tell me what moves to make each turn. This will be slower than playing yourself and I will probably insist that "we" play like 200-300 games and I will probably insist on the format (it will be 4v4 tower doubles or 3v3 castle doubles). It would be a colossal waste of both our time I am sure, but then so is this entire conversation.

Well regarding emulators, first of all, you know perfectly my opinions on them as you have responded to the posts where I expressed it, but you decide to ignore that part as most of the information that don't go in favor of your narrative. For anyone interested, it Is the one where I posted about my PTHGSS tower Link when I got the WR. But a quick summary is that I respect their use and the need of some people to want to play with speed-ups, but then we maybe shouldn't pretend the level of difficulty is the same vs retail, (also I'm sorry you have trouble reading may I suggest you to maybe try a lower multiplier if x12 speed-up is giving you problems in that regard).

And this is the type of attitude that keeps me irked about you, even if you sporadically try to say you are in good faith. You know that I already responded you, but you keep behaving as If I didn’t. Either by asking again or outright ignoring my answers when you don't know how to attack them. And I want you to see how fucked up that is.

That’s why It also bothers me that you keep throwing the "you are being deffensive card" not only with me, but with most others that try to respond you. I could do the same by looking at the first parragraphs of your last 2 posts and trying to dismiss you that way. "You seem deffensive" but then I try to empathise (which for you seems to still be a bit hard) and see it as the result of hearing something you are not agreeing with, you try to correct it as that’s a basic human response, but trying to use that as an argument every time is childish at best. What do you want someone to do there? To fully agree with you when they clearly don't?
And when they don't, why it's your conclusion: "see they are defenssive, because they might be a fraud"?
No, brother, we just trying to argue with you and by making it hard you are not winning any argument, you are just trying to manipulate the situation to put us in a bad light.
So please, stop dismising the explanations of people repeteadly in an attempt to trigger them by doing it repeatdly until they get frustrated and then trying to spin said frustrations as "evidence of bad faith". That’s a very messed up tactic.

Also when I say "not caring" is that I don't take this as seriously as you, refering to the records. For me they were "cute" motivators to use as a goal during a self-imposed challenge. If I didn’t get there, no big deal. Am i willing to start once more? I f so i kept going. If not I accepted the death, but I didn’t get devastated (your concerns and specially the way you choose to voice them have bothered me more than any loss). So when I say to not take it so seriously, no, I'm not talking about these arguments we are having, so don't get confused (or stop trying to confuse others) I told you from day one that I wanted you to treat people more fairly and that's why I have kept arguing about this, In hopes that you finally see the negative impact you are making and see if you can undertune it a bit.

I don't care about them to the extent that if had know that their price was to record (by footage or writing) everything from the start, or to then having to make an in-depth written analysis up to your personal and unreasonable standards instead of "just" the time spent, I wouldn't have bothered trying much less sharing them (as for me those ways are not fun) . I cared about them during the experience, not much about them now (apart from trying to help others with theirs in the ways I can, or finishing the ones already started), and much less not enough to do it twice just so you personally have no doubts. So again, please already get it/ stop being disingenuous.


Regarding all the other motives you mention about you wanting more proof for my streaks, I can get behind those and why at first glance they can make you question them more thoroughly.

About me playing emulator I don't know if a misunderstanding took place or you are trying to be disingenous once more.
But you were not months waiting for that to happen, I told you from the start that wouldn't take place from my part and gave you reasons why. There was no "moving of goalposts" they wer always firmly planted. And our last "agreement" consisted in that you were going to try the team and then you would ask me. What I responded to you was something along the lines of: "fine, but i won't sit through the entirety of your streaming. You give me timestamps for what you want to ask me and I will, but when I can, not when you decide".

I will treat this as you thinking I didn’t want to submit myself to live scrutiny, instead of understanding my real intention about not me wanting to have to play on your terms. But then again, a response conveying that to me could have solved that pretty quickly.

Instead I was still waiting to see you trying Syzygy and your impressions while you might have thought that I was ignoring you or something. If this was really the case and is not you trying to spin the situation again, then I'm sorry but even if that was the case, here I see a prime example of how you going with the mentality of "he's trying to hide things" since you started to question matters, made you irrevocably make that unnecesary mistake instead of politely trying to get to an agreement, which should be the mature attitude of someone trying to fulfill that role.


So I must make clear that no, until recently i didn’t even entrentain the idea of me emulating/streaming (and you know perfectly that and why as you read my previous posts), I just recently asked if someone was willing to help me step by step to set up one for the sole purpose of practicing PTHGSS multis, something that came out of my own volition after seeing how fucked-up my brain was after almost 900 hundred battles on DP (the trigger was not inmediatly realizing the occa was no longer on Meta so he went to perish to houndoom. Which has more to do with the intricancies of the mode than the game per se, but for me it signaled a level of disadjustment regarding the sets that could potentially make me loose again if I were to continue the streak expecting the same previous conditions, and so I wanted to replicate them in the most similar way).

That’s why I asked for that particular mode. If I wanted to practice tower doubles I can do that on cartridge more comfortably, so I'm not going through the hassle of emulating + streaming for that. I specifically wanted Link as the aproach is ultimately different (and I even think more beneficial for such an aggressive team as mine).

But reading your response, and the lack of submitted streaks throughout the years, I must assume Link might be even trickier to set up, so If noone knows how to help here doing it in an easy enough way, I guess I"ll have to give up on that. I hope I'm wrong and we could have here the best solution for both.

If that’s not finally the case, I think I see your last proposal seem for me the best way to make me more than willing to comply with your demands. But not without some suggestions on my part and please read my explanations before trying to see malice or "fear of getting caught". I have fear, that's true, but fear of you wanting to keep misrepresenting me or my decisions. Let me explain some of the points:

-I hope you can see how a PTHGSS doubles streak is not the same as a Link one (which I explained you how is easier by virtue of the posibility of converting things into 2vs1 "early" in the match as well as less full thematic teams as they are esentially 2 different ones) and even less similar to a D/P one (for the easier sets). If you were to offer one of the latter options I would see how you can try and extrapolate results later, but I don't want you trying to justify anything stemming from a streak that we both now will not be near as long as the ones that concern you. I didn’t even tried making a meaninful streak there knowing all of that.

-Something similar happens in Castle. As i told you before, this is the one facility where I grinded beyond the point of fun. To the point were dozens of streaks were needed until I could get past the hundreds (even though let's be fair, I was trying to very stingy with the amount of castle points, so maybe being easier on those expectations wouldn't be as strenous but, would that lend to the accumulation os castle points necessary to stand till 300? I don't know as the only time i got there was by doing exactly that). So for the sake of my mental health I would like you to not select this one, although I see how you trying it so much, and getting so many loses even with your superior knowledge, coupled with this alleged burn- out on my part, and knowing your mentality, could raise more suspicions in you. But for the time being I prefer that you keep thinking that way than me having to face that shit again, just to appease you. That’s how much strain it put on me. And that’s how hard I want people to perceive this one as compared to the others.
So if somehow I would find the energy to help you here in the future, at least acknowledge that those numbers you propose might be a tad unrealistic (as I already told you since i did it) within just a few streaks. So please understand it' not a "it's impossible, I couldn’t ever do it" but a "It's certainly and eventually doable, trust me, I did when I was focused, but Fuck you if you want me to do it all over again in one setting just because you are paranoid to the point you don't trust my retail proves. I'm not interested in suffering here another time, at best I could guide you if you want to try it yourself. And if you don't, that's your problem, not mine"

- Factory I have no comment as I told you I was never interested on not using MY pokémon. So i mingled almost nothing with that. And here i would also stress that I will accept any question about my sets, but please understand i wouldn't be able to help you as much with other teams.

-Arcade: you know what, after my last array there I must say it's one of the funnest and I wouldn't mind doing that, but take into consideration my PB there in doubles was "just" 99 and after some tries.

So in essence if I were to guide you through a stream of yours, let's select first the facility and the mode, then please tell me how many battles you expect in a row and if we agree on a realistic and representative number, we can go ahead. Also I think another way would be to "fragment" this test run, meaning that I'm proposing to maybe just do 1-2 rounds per session instead of the 100+ in one setting so it's easier to accomodate our schedulings. If you have any problem with that just tell me and why. But for now I don't see any and this might be the best approach for both.

But my most important request would be to also ask you to make me very clear beforehand what kind of explanations and or suggestions on my part you would deem as "evidence" in your eyes. What are you willing to accept or dismiss?.

This is something I tried to warn you before as one of the aspects where I feel that by virtue of our difference in mentality, if you keep expecting that by just having played a lot, my mind were to operate like yours, and only then you would say: "yeah you know what you're doing" but if you think my suggestion was too hyper-offensive (which all of them are going to be tbh) you are going to try to misrepresent it as: "if you really knew, you wouldnt be so reckless" when I'm already warning you since the beginning that I was reckless every time and that might be why I could get so much luck in the end.

And the best way to clear that is by you, right now (well actually I prefer if you waited until saturday for this part of the response, as tomorrow i'll be very busy and I wouldn't want you to think I was taking too much time to answer), trying to present me a battle scenario with my team so i can explain you in the way I would, what my approach could be. And only then if you are accepting of my explanation and you promise you won't change your standards during the test run I will agree to go ahead. But if you aren't willing to understand this point right now we can both agree that we shouldn't waste more time talking to each other. I really hope this is not the case.


So please let me know if you agree with my requests and if not, don't shut up so you can keep dismissing me later based on misrepresentations. Tell me what you think about my requests so we can keep working towards an agreement. And don't think I want to play with you and dodge scrutiny here, i just want to avoid one made in bad faith, as you tend to do.
It's not that "I don't have enough faith in my abilities" as you are trying to tirelessly imply, but more that "I don't trust in your ability to judge anything fairly as I feel that you have a continuous tendency of misrepresenting and dismissing people and their opinions/suggestions when they don't allign with your preconceptions".

 

[magpie ai]

When you posted asking for help on multi on emu (please someone help him with this if he hasnt got it setup) I very much assumed "ok that means Carlos is willing to play on emulator; great; he can also stream his practice or stream other things to help clear things up". I see now we are back to "Carlos is not going to play on emulator". To be clear, you don't have to do it and there is no time requirement, I have never said that there was. I just think its the simplest, most direct and most fair way forward.

I have concerns over "playing through me" though and it is mostly to do with how incredibly slow I realise it will be because each turn is:

1. Carlos must look at the situation on the screen
2. Carlos must decide on a move and a target of the move for 2 pokemon
3. Carlos must write this in chat clearly, and without any way it could be misread
4. I must read and interpret the instruction correctly
5. We wait for the entire turn to happen
6. I must wait for Carlos to catch up with stream delay on twitch
7. [If me or carlos is distracted, everything takes longer]

That's going to be at least a minute per turn on average, probably more. We're not going to do 7 battles inside an hour. I suspect the entire process will take a month of daily streams.
I also think there is a very, very high chance that some level of miscommunication happens. Maybe you are distracted and dont see what happened during a turn (e.g. Garchomp got confused and if you had known, you would have switched). Maybe its my fault and I assume "switch out" means switch out Garchomp and not switch out Latios.

This is a problem because it is going to take a very large number of games to provide evidence either way. Even bad teams can win 21 games in a row (and this team is not that bad). I would estimate at least 200, probably more like 300+. The only way that the test is short is if it is immediately obvious that something is wrong (e.g. lose 2 times before 50 wins). I have a few hours after work on weekdays but I dont have 40+ hours to dedicate to this with my current schedule.

I am thinking therefore that one of the following is a better solution:
1. I play alone and livestream it. When I lose, you can say if you would have done something different that would have won, or if you would have also lost. I do this "enough" that the answer becomes clear on whether the record is possible. The thing is though; I'm not doing Castle or Arcade for this because I think too much of the skill in those facilities does not happen in battles. So it will be DP Tower or Plat Tower.
2. You livestream it yourself. If not emulator, a camera or phone livestreaming. I know "you dont want to do it" but I will be candid; this is the most fair test. Both because it eliminates so much of "what can go wrong" but also because its your own job to make your own streak believable.
3. I set up some way of you playing that doesnt involve a human having to be there. Probably, some code that you control by typing into chat. So very similar to playing with me, except i'm not there to misread or make a mistake. This is the same as you playing alone except its more inconvenient and slower.
4. You get someone else to livestream play the game with you giving them instructions in chat. Make them aware that this will probably take over 40 hours and it will be very boring.


#1 and #3 will probably not be available for at least a month. I have a lot of other things I want to stream and do first. I doubt #4 will ever exist beyond someone doing it with you once and realising how much of a grind it will be.

If you are at all worried about me doing #1 then I encourage you to do #2 first.
Because if I do #1 and I do e.g. 300 wins, 2 losses - i am going to say a winstreak of 500 or 800 is most likely cheated. And I'm going to say this regardless of if those 2 losses were my fault because a part of losing is misplaying. I will not intentionally play your team badly, but I'm not going to spend half an hour on a difficult decision. If you start crying about excuses, I am going to bring it back to this conversation and point out that a very reasonable alternative was offered. I will also claim that 1 cheated streak likely means all streaks are in serious question.

 

[Carloss97]

When you posted asking for help on multi on emu (please someone help him with this if he hasnt got it setup) I very much assumed "ok that means Carlos is willing to play on emulator; great; he can also stream his practice or stream other things to help clear things up". I see now we are back to "Carlos is not going to play on emulator". To be clear, you don't have to do it and there is no time requirement, I have never said that there was. I just think its the simplest, most direct and most fair way forward.

I have concerns over "playing through me" though and it is mostly to do with how incredibly slow I realise it will be because each turn is:

1. Carlos must look at the situation on the screen
2. Carlos must decide on a move and a target of the move for 2 pokemon
3. Carlos must write this in chat clearly, and without any way it could be misread
4. I must read and interpret the instruction correctly
5. We wait for the entire turn to happen
6. I must wait for Carlos to catch up with stream delay on twitch
7. [If me or carlos is distracted, everything takes longer]

That's going to be at least a minute per turn on average, probably more. We're not going to do 7 battles inside an hour. I suspect the entire process will take a month of daily streams.
I also think there is a very, very high chance that some level of miscommunication happens. Maybe you are distracted and dont see what happened during a turn (e.g. Garchomp got confused and if you had known, you would have switched). Maybe its my fault and I assume "switch out" means switch out Garchomp and not switch out Latios.

This is a problem because it is going to take a very large number of games to provide evidence either way. Even bad teams can win 21 games in a row (and this team is not that bad). I would estimate at least 200, probably more like 300+. The only way that the test is short is if it is immediately obvious that something is wrong (e.g. lose 2 times before 50 wins). I have a few hours after work on weekdays but I dont have 40+ hours to dedicate to this with my current schedule.

I am thinking therefore that one of the following is a better solution:
1. I play alone and livestream it. When I lose, you can say if you would have done something different that would have won, or if you would have also lost. I do this "enough" that the answer becomes clear on whether the record is possible. The thing is though; I'm not doing Castle or Arcade for this because I think too much of the skill in those facilities does not happen in battles. So it will be DP Tower or Plat Tower.
2. You livestream it yourself. If not emulator, a camera or phone livestreaming. I know "you dont want to do it" but I will be candid; this is the most fair test. Both because it eliminates so much of "what can go wrong" but also because its your own job to make your own streak believable.
3. I set up some way of you playing that doesnt involve a human having to be there. Probably, some code that you control by typing into chat. So very similar to playing with me, except i'm not there to misread or make a mistake. This is the same as you playing alone except its more inconvenient and slower.
4. You get someone else to livestream play the game with you giving them instructions in chat. Make them aware that this will probably take over 40 hours and it will be very boring.


#1 and #3 will probably not be available for at least a month. I have a lot of other things I want to stream and do first. I doubt #4 will ever exist beyond someone doing it with you once and realising how much of a grind it will be.

If you are at all worried about me doing #1 then I encourage you to do #2 first.
Because if I do #1 and I do e.g. 300 wins, 2 losses - i am going to say a winstreak of 500 or 800 is most likely cheated. And I'm going to say this regardless of if those 2 losses were my fault because a part of losing is misplaying. I will not intentionally play your team badly, but I'm not going to spend half an hour on a difficult decision. If you start crying about excuses, I am going to bring it back to this conversation and point out that a very reasonable alternative was offered. I will also claim that 1 cheated streak likely means all streaks are in serious question.

You are conflating 2 things here, man:

1-That I asked if anyone could help me set up an emulator so I could get quick practice in my mode of interest (and then if it wasn’t too dificult I thought it would be cool to stream those particular battles, just because I thought so, not because you kept insisting on anything similar), before going to retail to finish the real streak. (This hasn't happened yet). And I was talking here 100-200 rapid fire matches at most. Not going for a full run on emulator LoL, I never was interested in that.


2-YOUR paranoia about my streaks for which I shouldn't be burdened by.
I'm sorry that you are envious that I could provide picture proof (later backed up by videos) of my retail streaks and those are enough to back up my records by the previously agreed on standards of the community, while you think you are required to stream for playing on emulator (because there it's easy to cheat) and you think that is not fair (for me it is, as I don't think it's possible to cheat on retail, while seemingly easy as fuck on emu).

So no, no one went back on anything. You're just trying to misrepresent my words once again.

If you are so bitter by the last point that you prefer atacking me, instead of believing my claims and use them as inspiration for your own challenges, I can do little more than to please, suggest you tone down your envy and paranoia, try replicating the streaks and if you struggle, I might then try to help you.

Which is to say that I only accept part of your #1 suggestion (you play and then you come to discuss if you loose) but again, stop with those unrealistic and unfounded conclusions, its hilarious to think that if you break two 300 hundred wins chains in your first 2 attemps, 500 would be out of the table. That’s just a ridiculous premise.

And don't use those results to judge other mode or game that I already told you its way different. (So dont play doubles and say that those runs make you qualified to judge the 800 I got in Link. Or dont play PTHGSS and then go to complain about the D/P ones)

You're already being ridiculous. But sure if those are going to be your claims, go ahead, you will only discredit yourself.

Also I'm not entertaining the others right now (#2- #4) just because I see it as outright insane that you expect from us, retail players, to have to do the whole streaks twice (and in ways you even admit are slower and inconvenient) just so you personally can wrap your head around our claims. So no, just because you offered them that doesn't make them "reasonable alternatives" (And you know that).

I only offered to guide you (live environment or not, your choice) until you got the gist of the team (which again is not that difficult), so you could eventually get the amount of battles necesary to understand that my claims were legit.

I don't care, I told you already what I did, I showed you proof and then spent more time than I should trying to reason with you. If you are still unsatisfied, that's from now on only your problem, sorry for not being able to help you there anymore.

 

[Carloss97]

Also this will be my final message adressing your attitude, Magpie. I'm just bothered that you keep trying (and failing) to appear as a voice fairness when you are just blindly defaming people without properly doing any meaningful resesesarch on their streaks, which you should do first by:

1- Repeatedly playing those teams on the same modes if you want to start to question anything. Stop talking about shit you didn't even experience.


2-Only when things seem to not add up to you, ask about them in a humble and respectful way (as the real problem might lie in your misjudgements/misplays), so a fair discussion can start.


3- Even after all that, accept that you are only one meaningless datapoint. As you said once, wait untill others repeat the process so a truer picture can be painted, and things can finally and truly be understood by the "weigth of time".


With me, you skipped #1 and went to #2 directly (invalidating it's initial purpose) in the douchiest way possible, forgoing that humility on your part . And you didn't even wait to see #3.

So please, Magpie, if you are so interested in defending your right to judge, follow that proccess and if not stop making a fool of yourself while repeatedly trying to falsely accuse legit players (even if you eventually get to fulfill your power fanatasies of catching a cheater, I don’t think It would have been worthy to any of us, specially all the others that we knew were legit, but who still had to endure your insistence of dragging us through the mud just so you could some day feel good with yourself for exposing a cheater in a children's game Lol. At this point I think your attitude is as sad and ridiculous as those of the hypothetical cheaters you keep chasing).


If you don't learn from this, I'll have to point to it every time you try to misjudge me or others, so they realize you are not interested in fair discussions, just baseless and bitter defaming.

 

[magpie ai]

I'm going to ignore the rude, solipsistic and delusional parts of those posts.

Which is to say that I only accept part of your #1 suggestion (you play and then you come to discuss if you loose) but again, stop with those unrealistic and unfounded conclusions, its hilarious to think that if you break two 300 hundred wins chains in your first 2 attemps, 500 would be out of the table. That’s just a ridiculous premise.

This is the most important part of this entire discussion and I think the decision on what constitutes a sufficient level of doubt from a trusted observation (this is, a streak that is done transparently and with no clear bias either way (this means not intentionally losing but also not cheating)) compared to the original claim is actually an important thing to decide on. If nothing else constructive comes from this, let this at least be a thing the community decides upon.

And don't use those results to judge other mode or game that I already told you its way different. (So dont play doubles and say that those runs make you qualified to judge the 800 I got in Link. Or dont play PTHGSS and then go to complain about the D/P ones)

I'm sorry but if someone cheated on A, I would no longer trust them on B. I think at minimum a caught cheater would lose all their current records and then have to provide more proof in the future, assuming they werent outright banned.

Cheating isnt like some kind of points game. You aren't allowed 1 cheated streak for every 2 legit ones. If you are proven to be cheating anywhere, its ridiculous to expect people to go and test all the other streaks with the same amount of time and energy.

I cannot believe you disagree on this point (forget about yourself and this argument, just think about the general point and what it means among various games, etc)

Also I'm not entertaining the others right now (#2- #4) just because I see it as outright insane that you expect from us, retail players, to have to do the whole streaks twice (and in ways you even admit are slower and inconvenient) just so you personally can wrap your head around our claims. So no, just because you offered them that doesn't make them "reasonable alternatives" (And you know that).

I've never said this. I don't have a problem with 99% of retail players. I've already explained why in your case specifically, your original evidence amounts to very, very little. As far as I'm concerned, retail players can continue as normal and so long as their posts and discussion match up with reality, they dont have to worry about livestreaming proof on an emulator.

you are just blindly defaming people without properly doing any meaningful resesesarch on their streaks

I'm going to be transparent; I have already done preliminary testing with your team. I have enough respect for the "proper process" to not include that in any kind of official test; but if I was to include it then it would be a massive red mark against you.

I'm saying this because you keep repeating and alluding to this same point that i have no idea what I'm saying - and I want to remind anyone else reading this thread that it isn't true.

2-Only when things seem to not add up to you, ask about them in a humble and respectful way (as the real problem might lie in your misjudgements/misplays), so a fair discussion can start.

Unlike some other users, I do not edit my posts after I make them. You and everyone else can see exactly what my open line of questions and suggestions was originally, both on this thread and on the gen 3 thread.

Even after all that, accept that you are only one meaningless datapoint. As you said once, wait untill others repeat the process so a truer picture can be painted

Circling back to this, it's just not how things are going to work.

Here's the reality of the situation:
- all testing needs to be transparent (i.e. live and recorded) to avoid anyone losing on purpose to try and "prove a cheater" or cheating to win more to do the opposite.
- all testing can be subject to meeting some kind of minimum ability to play the team. You have previously said you dont do a lot of analysis, but lets acknowledge this minimum level of skill does exist
- Provided the above 2 are met, there are no meaningless datapoints. All the data that is accepted matters.
- Who is going to test? Well testing takes a lot of time and effort. Most of the time, it's only going to be people who strongly want to prove the streak is legit (often the original user...) or fake (in this case, thats me and maybe a few others). You are not going to play. I don't think anyone else is either. It's very likely just going to be me.
- the result of the data and bernoulli/CI/statistical analysis is going to spit out a number like "14% for this to be cheated" or "87% for this to be cheated", depending on how much I play. It's not going to be "yes - its a cheater" or "no - its not a cheater". I don't know or decide what % is enough to exclude a user from the leaderboards.
- The reason why we are not going to get a yes/no answer is because fundamentally, any team could get unbelievably lucky compared to what its average should be.
- the above result and analysis can change with more data but again, i seriously doubt (particularly if my testing has quite a damning result) that anyone is going to "come and save you" there in terms of submitting more data apart from yourself. And really there is nothing unfair about this; it is usually the user's prerogative to provide such information and not someone else's.

You would have a better case for "I just got lucky" if there was only 1 lucky streak submitted.


Your other point seems to be "well if someone gets ~250 winstreaks twice, they can get 500".
My response to this is in 2 parts:
1. Unless the user is still improving, that's a bold claim. 250 is a totally different ballpark to 500.
2. The argument would be more convincing if the original claim of 500 wins also involved multiple long attempts. The problem is the timeline for this breaks down for retail play. 500 wins is close to 50 hours of gameplay. If we are to assume that the 500 streak included (unreported) 200 streaks too (to be clear by unreported, it is common for someone to include previous streak attempts and details - you havent done this. at most you've said you "tried a few times" but certainly not for every run and certainly not for significant tries) then this becomes upwards of 100 hours. Even if the person is pretty much only playing pokemon, this runs into issues of your posting timeline. We know roughly how much you were playing and we know roughly how fast you were playing because you say in various posts that you are continuing the previous streak mentioned earlier.


Or in other words; you have already made too many strong, definite statements about your timeline to go back on this. The answer cannot be that you got lucky once or twice, there isnt enough time or attempts for that. "I got lucky a lot of times" is still a valid case and if it comes to that, we can combine the results of multiple tests across different streaks and investigate just how believably lucky it is.

 

[tobiuo]

but like if Carlos is playing this much, it really doesn’t surprise me at all that he could get a high streak like that even if you don’t think he’s playing perfectly.

I want to take a moment to push back on this take a bit. This is something that might be hard to appreciate if your experience of facilities is dominated more by the early rounds where the difficulty is still ramping up overall than the phase where the opponent distribution is near-constant, but it is actually quite hard to push a streak by repeated attempts without dramatically improving your play.

The basic intuition goes something like this (instantiated the sets-of-7 context): since the opposition for each set after 49 is independent and identically distributed (up to RNG correlations), we can reasonably model the number of sets you clear before losing as a geometric-tailed distribution parameterized on your probability of losing in a set. Concretely, if you play a team in a way that, given no other information, wins segment of 7 battles with probability p (→ loses with prob 1-p), then it wins a segment of 14 battles with probability p^2 (→ loses with prob 1-p^2) and a segment of 7k battles with probability p^k (loses with prob 1-p^k) in general.

The immediate implication is that (unless you’re just guaranteed not to lose), the streak numbers you can expect to reach are not simply proportional to how much you play, because the “difficulty” (inverse chance of success/expected number of attempts needed to attain) of a streak goal is, as modelled, literally exponential in the target number.

But it gets worse, because it turns out that it often does not take about the same amount of time to play 14 battles as it does to take 7 battles. In fact, the former tends to take maybe in the rough ballpark of something like about twice as long as the latter. Grossly simplifying, in order to reach a given streak goal, the expected number of battles you’d have to play is the number of attempts it takes to achieve that streak count times times the average number of battles in streaks that end before your goal.

The following estimator falls out: the expected time to reach a particular streak number N is proportional to the average streak length up to N divided by odds ratio of reaching N.

That’s a bit abstract, but concretely this tells us that, compared to achieving a median performance at a particular level of play, it takes ~3x as long to achieve 1.5x that, ~8x to double it, ~28x to triple it, ~74x to quadruple it, ~172x to quintuple it. (The expected attempt time continues to “slightly more than double” for each multiple of the median streak we add on top; this asymptotically approaches exponential.)

It should be clear that outperforming your level of play by sheer number of attempts is not particularly tenable, because it would just take too long to play out enough attempts to get that lucky. This is why we’re interested in understanding the kind of play that actually attains high streak counts in the first place; the fact that you can make it that far strongly implies that you’ve got to be doing something right.

 

[Carloss97]

I'm going to ignore the rude, solipsistic and delusional parts of those posts.
This is the most important part of this entire discussion and I think the decision on what constitutes a sufficient level of doubt from a trusted observation (this is, a streak that is done transparently and with no clear bias either way (this means not intentionally losing but also not cheating)) compared to the original claim is actually an important thing to decide on. If nothing else constructive comes from this, let this at least be a thing the community decides upon.

I'm sorry but if someone cheated on A, I would no longer trust them on B. I think at minimum a caught cheater would lose all their current records and then have to provide more proof in the future, assuming they werent outright banned.

Cheating isnt like some kind of points game. You aren't allowed 1 cheated streak for every 2 legit ones. If you are proven to be cheating anywhere, its ridiculous to expect people to go and test all the other streaks with the same amount of time and energy.

I cannot believe you disagree on this point (forget about yourself and this argument, just think about the general point and what it means among various games, etc)
I've never said this. I don't have a problem with 99% of retail players. I've already explained why in your case specifically, your original evidence amounts to very, very little. As far as I'm concerned, retail players can continue as normal and so long as their posts and discussion match up with reality, they dont have to worry about livestreaming proof on an emulator.
I'm going to be transparent; I have already done preliminary testing with your team. I have enough respect for the "proper process" to not include that in any kind of official test; but if I was to include it then it would be a massive red mark against you.

I'm saying this because you keep repeating and alluding to this same point that i have no idea what I'm saying - and I want to remind anyone else reading this thread that it isn't true.
Unlike some other users, I do not edit my posts after I make them. You and everyone else can see exactly what my open line of questions and suggestions was originally, both on this thread and on the gen 3 thread.
Circling back to this, it's just not how things are going to work.

Here's the reality of the situation:
- all testing needs to be transparent (i.e. live and recorded) to avoid anyone losing on purpose to try and "prove a cheater" or cheating to win more to do the opposite.
- all testing can be subject to meeting some kind of minimum ability to play the team. You have previously said you dont do a lot of analysis, but lets acknowledge this minimum level of skill does exist
- Provided the above 2 are met, there are no meaningless datapoints. All the data that is accepted matters.
- Who is going to test? Well testing takes a lot of time and effort. Most of the time, it's only going to be people who strongly want to prove the streak is legit (often the original user...) or fake (in this case, thats me and maybe a few others). You are not going to play. I don't think anyone else is either. It's very likely just going to be me.
- the result of the data and bernoulli/CI/statistical analysis is going to spit out a number like "14% for this to be cheated" or "87% for this to be cheated", depending on how much I play. It's not going to be "yes - its a cheater" or "no - its not a cheater". I don't know or decide what % is enough to exclude a user from the leaderboards.
- The reason why we are not going to get a yes/no answer is because fundamentally, any team could get unbelievably lucky compared to what its average should be.
- the above result and analysis can change with more data but again, i seriously doubt (particularly if my testing has quite a damning result) that anyone is going to "come and save you" there in terms of submitting more data apart from yourself. And really there is nothing unfair about this; it is usually the user's prerogative to provide such information and not someone else's.

You would have a better case for "I just got lucky" if there was only 1 lucky streak submitted.


Your other point seems to be "well if someone gets ~250 winstreaks twice, they can get 500".
My response to this is in 2 parts:
1. Unless the user is still improving, that's a bold claim. 250 is a totally different ballpark to 500.
2. The argument would be more convincing if the original claim of 500 wins also involved multiple long attempts. The problem is the timeline for this breaks down for retail play. 500 wins is close to 50 hours of gameplay. If we are to assume that the 500 streak included (unreported) 200 streaks too (to be clear by unreported, it is common for someone to include previous streak attempts and details - you havent done this. at most you've said you "tried a few times" but certainly not for every run and certainly not for significant tries) then this becomes upwards of 100 hours. Even if the person is pretty much only playing pokemon, this runs into issues of your posting timeline. We know roughly how much you were playing and we know roughly how fast you were playing because you say in various posts that you are continuing the previous streak mentioned earlier.


Or in other words; you have already made too many strong, definite statements about your timeline to go back on this. The answer cannot be that you got lucky once or twice, there isnt enough time or attempts for that. "I got lucky a lot of times" is still a valid case and if it comes to that, we can combine the results of multiple tests across different streaks and investigate just how believably lucky it is.

You still seem to be insistent on being dense and misrepresenting my words on purpose.

So I'm not going to engage with you anymore than this.

Of course I want this to be something the community decides based on reasonable evidence, and that’s exactly why I keep asking you to not be so biased and insisting in spewing the same hypothetical points over and over and start compiling evidence to back up your suspicions instead.

"Meaningless" was probably a bad word choice on my part. What I really meant to say there, is that yours will be just part of it, so please, even when you end up gathering evidence for my case or any other, just present it and compare it to the others before thinking you already saw the big picture, as for now in my case, you are fram from it (and that’s what I keep calling you out on).


Also I can't beleive that me sometimes editing my posts after writing them bothers you too. I do it if I catch any spelling or grammar error when reading them after the fact, so the discussion is easier to follow. And If I want to change something fundamental about the texts you already saw me creating replies or even announcing the edits in advance (so you can make sure I make the edit I said) instead of the editing. Do you not remember english is not my first language?

Also note, that point where you talk about: "you aren't allowed 1 cheated streak for every 2 legit ones" is complete nonsense. Of course I'm also of the opinion that if one streak from someone is proven to be cheated all the others should come into question. So here we have another one of your tries at manipulating the narrative. I would advice anyone reading you, to take a look at the entirety of our exchanges before beleiving you at face vaule, as you keep this misreprenting attitude every time, even if I implore you to stop and be unbiased in your analysis.

What I mostly wanted to make clear is that, please, don't use streaks I didn’t even play in to extrapolate the results you get there. Play the streaks I did, with the team I did, in the games I did (which I insist, there's a big difference between them) and you'll start to see how there is no single cheated run in my claims.

At this point I'm even more glad that I insisted on reusing the same sets every time, so the collecting data for you (or multiple others) should be easier and more representative.

I truly encourage that not only you, but whoever else wants, tries those runs with this team so you can see how well they go, and then the data can be analysed too. Hopefully someone can also get to break some of them along the way (as I feel most of them happened in underexplored categories).

So go ahead and don't be afraid, you might need some luck, but not as much as Magpie wrongly implies.

That he thinks any streak was so lucky that it must have taken me 200 attempts just keeps showing how wrong he is with his assumptions. And why he needs to try those modes I say first and not form his opinion based on wrong preconceptions.

 

[hotdogturtle]

2-YOUR paranoia about my streaks for which I shouldn't be burdened by.

Hi, I've been reading this topic silently for a while and trying to stay out of this discussion, but I feel the need to comment on this point in particular. As the person posting the score, you are entirely burdened by providing proof to back up your claim. You are free to show as much or little proof as you choose, however, other users are free to believe or disbelieve your streak based on what you provide. If someone chooses to disbelieve your proof, that is entirely your own fault, not theirs. Because you are the person in control of providing the information. As has been previously established, you are not formally obligated to post anything more than you've already posted, nor to engage in this conversation at all, but the fact remains that it is entirely due to your own actions why this issue continues to be discussed for so many pages. So to reiterate, your point here is wrong, you should be burdened by other people's skepticism, and you do not have the right to tell people to stop questioning you in this instance.

 

[Carloss97]

Look, for the past couple days there has been an user (who I won't name unless they want to come forward themeselves) who has reached to me and explained various things regarding my situation.

The first and most important is that he roughly explained me the way a streak can be faked even on retail. And that has been to me an eye-opener as I previosly thought that was imposible and therefore that my proves were more than enough to back up what I did. Now that I've come to understand that it is not really the case, I must say that I'm sorry for having tried to use that point. I really thought that they were spewing that version out of malice or ignorance (when I was the one operating with the latter regarding this topic).

And that leads me to the next point which is that no, I wasn't bothered by the suspicions, I tried take them as compliments to my efforts from the very start, and even if I wouldn't, I get it, everyone is entitled to their opinion.

And so I stated several times, including to Magpie (if you didn’t get that, please re-read my posts and you'll see), whom around revolves my biggest concern, as I kept saying, in the way that he voices them.

Firstly, he keeps throwing accusations everywhere (not only to me) in a very discouraging way, plus he didn’t even play the games were he has the most doubts, and that was what I tried to keep making him understand. That please, try that first and then form your opinion.

So that’s all i wanted to tell him, that I get he wants to mantain some standards, but noone needs to be as needlessly abrassive as him.


Look at this other person for contrast. They reached to me first, without making any public statement. They told me they tried my team and their thoughts plus ways in which it could be improved. Then they offered me the help I've been trying to get around setting up emulators/streams. And after 2 days of tests (were they went above and beyond to help me with everything as I feel i wouldn't have been able to do all that by myself) we weren’t able to get it done, nor through twich, nor discord (streaming melonDS) as aparently my laptop is shit. Nonetheless, I will try the 3rd method they mentioned in the next days, which was to try and stream from my cellular (which seems to be more powerful than the laptop WTF), and try to do it through by recording my DS screen and send it to a discord channel. We'll see how that goes. I hope that I get a good enough streak on DP doubles so you can see me playing and understand I was always truthful.

Forget the part where they even tried to help me with all that technical stuff (which I don't think anyone is entitled to) but the rest of their behaviour was exemplar, unlike others. And that’s for me the most important thing I tried to convey from the start (again I apolgise for arrogantly thinking I already gave unequivocal proof) that I don't think accusing others from the begining, with harsh language and without trying to properly explain things (I kept asking how the fuck was it possible to cheat on retail, as I was truly under the impression of its impossibility, and the only thing I got was a "trust me it's possible" from a person that kept saying things I know were wrong, and in very bad manners, so why would I have to believe them without further explanations?) Is the correct way.


That means I hope this whole situatuon serves all of us to learn how to do things properly.

Now that I know (as this anonymous user told me too) that my pics/videos really mean shit, I see how doing better write ups and general recording of information could have helped me in avoiding suspicions, and I won't submit any new ones where I don't bother to do such things.

But I also want to stress that some members of the community should also rethink the ways they approach their communication of said suspicions and the gathering of information. As I never had any reason to not try and colaborate with that other person, as they seemed reasonable enough (and I never asked them nor was told by them if they really beleive me or not, and frankly I don’t care, at least they took a propper approach to the matter), where others don't try to be even slightly friendly and look how the responses of the ones being accused by them tend to go (always devolving into heated arguments).

So whatever opinion you end up having on me or others, I don’t think the current trend of some users to breed paranoia and suspicion throughout the community, instead of collaboration and understanding (without having to blindly believe anything, of course), is the correct way going forward.