A Vision of Pokemon as an ESport

Iggeh

NOTICE: Put as nicely as possible, this thread is just a childish fantasy. Something I personally wanted to express, something that a few others may empathize with, but mainly totally unrealistic. I would not be able to contribute in any way, financially or otherwise, to make this happen. With that said, if you don't care for this topic feel free to move on. Mods, I understand completely if this isn't really appropriate and gets closed.


Now for a brief introduction. I played on Netbattle from sometime around 2005-2008 and on Shoddy in like 2009-2010. Since then, I haven't kept up with Pokemon in the slightest, so no I have no clue what's what in the newest generation and how the community has changed in the past years. I am an avid fan of Starcraft II nowadays. Only very recently have some of my friends got me thinking about Pokemon again. And I'm thinking it would just be so cool if Pokemon could become a widely popular competitive strategy game; perhaps, an ESport.

To that end, I think something vital needs to be implemented first: Make Pokemon battles be a Best of X series. Why? Well, to answer that I will unfortunately need to use my rusty, outdated knowledge of Pokemon; in other words, making references to old generations. In the first three generations, the metagame was more or less 'fixed', variation between teams of Pokemon were relatively minor, due to OU Pokemon being, well... overused and overpowered. Deviating from the standard set of Pokemon and their moves would significantly lower your chances of winning. Then came DPP, and... things got out of hand, or at least it did for me. I would say that in 4th generation, the number of possible Pokemon + Moveset combinations you could see in any given OU match were roughly 3-4x more than in Advance generation. And, perhaps because of this, 4th generation battling put a much greater emphasis in the Team Building phase. Now, I'm just assuming that 5th generation is just as convoluted as, if not more so than, 4th gen was and that the same principle holds.
Which brings me back to my BoX suggestion. Yes, pitting two people, each with their own team, in a 1-game situation is great. It shows a lot of skill in battling and team preparation. However, is it really the best way to differentiate two players? There's always the ladder system, of course, but I feel that, especially in 4th generation, it put a lot more emphasis on just understanding current metagame trends and reacting to them to accrue wins.

So what's different about making a match a BoX series? Well, there's a catch. The first game in the series would be normal. But every game afterwards, both players are allowed to create a brand new team for the next game. Now, this would be plain stupid in the first three generations. But I'm thinking, hoping really, that 4th and 5th gen are dynamic enough to actually make this work. Sure, both players can just stick with their one team. But couldn't the loser of the first game, with extensive knowledge of the game, be able to build a new team that's much more capable of winning against the one they just lost to? And then the mind games begin: can't the winner of the first game switch to a team that shares none of the weaknesses of their predecessor? Suddenly, on top of just showing skills in preparing and battling, you have competitors actively reading into the opponent's minds, and racking their own to create a completely new team to achieve their goals. Even if both players were to simply both load up two new premade teams (which I'm sure would happen a lot if this were to actually be implemented), surely even that would add more depth, have the potential of showing a larger understanding and a greater set of skills than a simple Bo1 battle?
Showing off player's skills, and differentiating the great from the greatest, is just the tip of the iceberg. An ESports is nothing without hype, and a BoX series provides entertainment far better than a single battle could hope to achieve. I watch Starcraft II competitively, and if you watch that or any competitive game you know how much better watching a game gets with high quality casting.A Pokemon battle itself could be pretty hyped up by good commentary, such as comments on move predictions, switches, action consequences etc, not to mention going absolutely bonkers over game changing hax. But something I would really, REALLY love to see is commentary while two players are building new teams. I want to see the fate of Pokemon battles being decided while two players are creating their first second third etc Pokemon, and I want someone with a very deep background in competitive Pokemon to go crazy over it. I'll cop out and leave examples of this to your own imagination (sorry I'm not that good!).

Hype is good and all, but another thing ESports needs are popular figures. Casters help fulfill this role, but more importantly you need great players. And by great players I don't just mean skillwise, but players that stand out and can be loved by a fanbase. The BoX series would help in this department as well, firstly because as I argued before it would show more raw talent, but the team building phase of it in particular would help develop and differentiate player styles, something that I think was sorely lacking back when I played. Skipping RBY and GSC to Advance generation, I can list MAYBE three distinct styles: Standard, Offensive, and Gimmicky (aka bad). DP opened up a few more playstyles, but it's again restricted by the 1-battle system, and it's not nearly enough to differentiate a large pool of competitive players to the point where you're an avid fan of one player and not another. Now imagine the BoX system. You can already differentiate players by whether they start from scratch on a new team every game or whether they stick to their one tried and true team. And then you start factoring in competitive team building elements. Maybe Player X likes stalling, maybe Player Y likes going balls to the wall with all their teams. This player always uses a special sweeper, another always uses Pikachu. You can start getting really funky and unique, like never using Leftovers, or always fitting a Fire-type on your team. As a player you can develop your own quirks through your team building, and it's all stuff that fans will lap up and love you for (goodness I can still remember watching MoP clean out scrubs with Heracross in Netbattle and loving it).

Unfortunately, I have to address reality. I would assume there's basically zero preexisting infrastructure for develop Pokemon like this. I would also have to assume that as a community, the leap from a casual pasttime to hardcore competitive Pokemoning would just as a whole not work. Hell, I don't even know if it's humanly possible to know so much about Pokemon as to actually pull out new, competitively viable teams out of nowhere on the fly. And again, I wouldn't be willing to make this work either, and I apologize profusely for putting this out there and having to say that. I really wanted to share this though, because if it happened... god it would be so sick, and if there would be anybody in the world that'd agree with me, it'd be here on Smogon.
 
I can't see Pokemon gaining a mainstream sort of appeal on the level of an "eSport." Like, in my wildest dreams I could maybe see it attaining Magic: The Gathering status? Which is still amazing, by the way, but Starcraft is an entirely different beast to which few games can even hope to aspire.

I agree with most of your basic points though. I tried to hammer "Bo3 sets as the tournament standard" into the community repeatedly throughout late fourth gen, but like you I have literally paid like... 1% attention to the current state of the community, so I don't know if anyone really caught on to that (I don't think so though). Allowing players to create entirely new teams on the fly (which sounds like what you're suggesting) doesn't seem very feasible, though I do enjoy the idea of somewhat limited counterpicking.

I also think the community could really benefit from some interesting live commentary. I recently got into watching Chess Network, which is literally some guy just playing blitz chess all day. It's... crack. The commentary is so fantastic that it 100% justifies watching the channel for hours, even though I have a limited understanding of the game itself. Anyway, this could be a really cool direction for the community to take. I feel like SDS is still running Smogcast or whatever, but that seems to mostly just be metagame analysis? I think it would be more interesting to see someone just stream commentary of the Smogon Tour, or the ladder or something.

I'm not really sure that the community is interested in these things though. Like if they were, they would probably have been done a long time ago?
 
I'm presuming you're talking about singles because VGC already is kind of an e-sport. I totally agree with the BoX thing, and won't address that here. In any case, reasons this won't happen (and a reason I think it shouldn't):

1. Money

There is no one both willing and able to put in the money for this kind of venture. Everyone on Smogon is doing the work on the site for free, except Articuno64 and chaos, maybe Zracknel, and most don't seem to care enough to change this. The aforementioned are currently probably in the best position to provide this money other than maybe TPCi itself, but considering how recent disputes have resolved, it's simply not going to happen. At least, I'd half-hope it wouldn't happen in the wake of all that because that would be pretty suspicious imo. As for TCPi, apparently they have problems with what we allow to happen on the site (e.g. pretty girls thread has porn, places have unregulated swearing) and I'm of the opinion that such things shouldn't be sacrificed for a venture like this. But more of that on point #3.

2. Ruleset culture

As far as competitive gaming communities go, Pokémon is quite a bizarre one, both for the game developers and for the end user competitive enthusiasts. Both sides regulate the game to an obsessive degree. As an RPG, it takes a huge amount of effort just to gain some semblance of an "optimal" Pokémon (e.g. level 100, with appropriate IVs/EVs/nature), and the developers have used some pretty extraordinary measures to prevent "shortcuts". This has caused us to depend on simulators, which in turn has drastically altered our outlook on rule making. Why deal with a glitch, oversight, or "broken" element from the games when we can just ignore it in simulator implementation? The problem is that the resulting over-regulation has had the community devolve into politics. In my view, the politics is fundamentally unnecessary, but because different people have different views on how to regulate a game, the politics is a necessary part of how we do business.

What does this have to do with e-sports? Everything, really. In another game, I'd only have to worry about beating the other guy using whatever tools I have at my disposal. However, in Pokémon, I can't do this. I have to learn rules that I can only assume are arbitrary (from an outsider's point of view) and aren't actually enforced by the game. I have to deal with various things that have nothing to do with actually playing the game, and everything to do with playing a game in a way that enough powerful people think "feels right" or is "intended". The game has become more about politics than about actual playing, and I don't believe that a sport could feasibly spring out of that. If anything that has to occur after it becomes a sport :P

3. Commercialism

Let me level with everyone here. I tend to resist an attempt to turn something that I consider a hobby, and especially one that I'd like others to have unrestricted access to, into a money-making commercial franchise. Quite frankly, I dislike that it has been done to StarCraft. It upsets me that I have to pay for something that, once upon a time, I and others could enjoy for free, without hassle. I feel that it becomes about the hype and how much money some company can vacuum out of our game-addicted wallets. Presumably, most of them already paid for the damn game.

Commercializing a competitive community puts the power into a central conglomerate of organizers and sponsors. They can shape the game, how it's played, and how it's viewed, however they want (leading to point #2). The competitive game should be about the competitors and the enthusiasts. I simply don't want a competitive game to turn into baseball or basketball or hockey, where players are paid millions, more because of the hype and profits that they have caused than because they have contributed positively to society by playing a popular pastime.
 
Pokémon will never be a comeptitive esport for a number of reasons. The main reason being that Nintendo don't have the first clue about making a balanced, competitive game. It's still marketed towards children despite the majority of the competitive player base being 16+ (see vgc masters attendance for evidence). The competitive aspects of the game have to be regulated by online communities because Nintendo don't understand their own metagame and have made very little effort to enforce a ruleset that makes any sense over the years.

Also it's just a shitty game. I'm pretty sure starcraft matches aren't settled on an 80% chance to hit folllowed by a 25% chance to paralyze followed by a 0.2% chance something fucking retarded will happen and it does. No popular esports are as luck reliant as pokemon. That will never be addressed though, and so pokemon will never be truly competitive. That's coming from somebody who won an all expenses paid trip to Hawaii playing "competitive" pokemon.
 
I can, hypothetically, beat every user on this site, if I got some luck ch's with my cb'd garchomp using outrage

this isn't the case with starcraft.... or halo, gears of war, rainbow 6 vegas, etc.
 
Regarding your "both players make a new team after the first battle" point: As Kinneas will certainly verify, there is already a TON of psychology in the Video Game Championship format of bring 6, choose 4. You can see what 6 mons your opponent has raised specifically for this event, but he can also see yours, and now you have to pick which 4 will best suit the strategy you had in mind when making this 6-man squad while countering your foe's attempts to defeat you. After pool play, the US National and world championships use a Bo3 bracket to determine who advances as well, and there are shoutcasters on hand for these events as well. "Ladies and gentlemen, there is RAIN falling on the FIELD."

Bearing all of this in mind, Pokemon does not lend itself to becoming an e-sport simply because the developers themselves pay zero attention to the development of the metagame. You don't see occasional "patches" being released to fix game balance like you do with League of Legends or Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
 
You know, i know firsthand just how annoying the luck factor can be in Pokemon, but at the same time many majorly televised sports contain elements of luck. Look at basketball. No one has a 100% chance of making that game winning free-throw. Its all about preparation, teamwork, percentages, and yes luck.
 
mattj said:
You know, i know firsthand just how annoying the luck factor can be in Pokemon, but at the same time many majorly televised sports contain elements of luck. Look at basketball. No one has a 100% chance of making that game winning free-throw. Its all about preparation, teamwork, percentages, and yes luck.
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Yes, but it's 100% player skill that determines the free throw chance. If somehow my skill as a pokemon player was related to my hit chance, people wouldn't complain about misshax at all.

Not to say you're point is totally invalid though, things like "lucky bounces" happen all the time.
 
Balanced is not a necessary condition for competitive.

I haven't followed Pokemon since Gen 4, but I do think the general trends at the time toward a ladder system (the shotgun approach to competitive play, basically, much like hands in poker) as well as a Best of X tournament system rather than single matches has made the game pretty competitive.

People are far too quick to bash games for being luck based. It is the most frustrating part, by far, especially in tournament scenarios, but it evens out the more matches you play. A ladder system, ideally, is designed to de-emphasize single matches.

by the way E-Sport is a stupid name. Game is much better.
 
Like capefeather mentioned, VGC already has the beginnings of this. I don't think Pokemon will ever hit the point where people play it as a full-time thing and I don't think I want it to be anyway. However, the pieces are in place for it to become more of a spectator game than it used to be when you played. We have tournaments by the game publisher on both a local, national, and international scale with prizes. The higher levels of these tournaments are conducted in a best of three format where you get to shift around your Pokemon in between (bring 6, pick 4).

Now, the rest of your post has to do with coverage which is something a media outlet does. That's us. We've been slowly stepping up our livestream coverage since 2010. This year we're hoping to have higher quality streams during US and Canadian Nationals as well as Worlds. If possible, we'd also like to do commentary throughout.

We're re-launching the podcast project to help put out personalities in the community for people to get to know. We have the Spotlight series as well as The Competitor e-zine.

There's a lot more to get done, but yes you have missed a decent amount while being out of the community. I think more cooperating between TPCi and us would be great (WiFi access during events for example would be a huge help and something we should start talking to them about). Every year is getting better than the last. We will never be Starcraft and the size of this community won't reach that of the Fighting Game Community, but I think we can look to how the Smash Bros. and Fighting Game Community do things to make this more of an entertaining spectator game.
 
Pokemon will never make it as an esports, and there are many, many reasons as to why. Comparing it to starcraft to see why because lacks so much of what makes starcraft a sucessful game.

First off, RNG. Games that involve randomness never will be competetively viable. When the outcome of a match can be boiled down to one critical hit or miss, something that is outside of the control of the players, it makes the outcome much less meaningful. In starcraft damage is fixed, there are no misses, everything is under the control of the player. Build order wins happen, but they can be prevented by the player to a certain degree. There are other issues in the game, but this is probably the main one.

Monetizing pokemon is necessary for it to be successful. This will never happen though. Who is going to sponsor a pokemon player? What company would sponsor a player knowing the target audience isn't mature enough to even have a job? Starcraft already has sustainability issues despite teams/tournaments pulling in 200k+ views and having major name sponsors. The scene needs to have money pumped into it, and tournaments that have respectable prize pools, it'll never happen.
 
imagine if you were in the finals of a pokemon tournament, 126 of the best players in the world down, you and me left, 10 grand on the line, and your about to win with banded terrakion.

and then BAM stone edge miss

imagine
 
If this game became a sport, and like every sport, there is money involved, I would probably be trying again.

Like somebody else here said, the problem is the money.
 
Another thing is, turn-based games don't have the omgineedtowatchthislive factor that RTS games do. Starcraft matches can be genuinely exciting and fast-paced, whereas even at live pokemon events the only real "excitement" comes from luck (and occasionally good switches/prediction). I'd personally rather read a warstory or watch a replay than see it live, waiting for people to make their moves. There's a reason live chess spectating is less popular than live boxing.
 
Also, pokemon still carries the stigma that it's a "children's game" (contrary to all statistics that dictate otherwise, looking at our competitive base), and people are/will be hesitant to get into it (using myself as a case study here, still in the closet with VGC). Although, it would probably be pretty popular with a good number of university students if it ever gets big.

Also, as many Firestorm already mentioned, Nintendo doesn't have the first clue about how to establish a competitive metagame. They release the games primarily to cater to the younger audience, while ignoring the competitive aspect of it. The only real source of E-sports we have for singles (arguably) are Smogon's sanctioned tournaments (ST, Tour, WCOP, SPL etc).
 
I didn't say Nintendo doesn't know how to define a competitive metagame. That was others and I disagree.
Manafii101 said:
Another thing is, turn-based games don't have the omgineedtowatchthislive factor that RTS games do. Starcraft matches can be genuinely exciting and fast-paced, whereas even at live pokemon events the only real "excitement" comes from luck (and occasionally good switches/prediction). I'd personally rather read a warstory or watch a replay than see it live, waiting for people to make their moves. There's a reason live chess spectating is less popular than live boxing.
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I don't think it's fair to say this without actually watching an event. I'd much rather catch a livestream or be at a VGC event than read a warstory or watch a replay. Hell, I'll even take a live play by play over hearing about it later. It's definitely a "omgineedtowatchthislive" for me. Not for Smogon tournaments on a simulator, but for actual events.
 
Pokemon really lacks the mainstream appeal that led to the competitive success of games like Starcraft I/II, DotA, et al; it's still (quite rightly) viewed as a children's game. Personally I like the Pokemon scene where it is; competitive, without alienating the casual player.
 
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