Adopting VGC rules for OU

[coyotte508]

Oh, if it's misunderstanding what "mechanics" mean you should have said so in the first place.

The Pokemon Company International choosing to use the IR mode is not a mechanic. It's their chosen medium for competitive play. We were under the assumption they would use Local Wireless.

Smogon chose WiFi for Generation V. That had nothing to do with TPCi's choices for competitive play. TPCi using different rules has absolutely no bearing on Smogon's OU metagame. If they did, we wouldn't be playing Singles with only Pokemon that a majority of our best players like.

I have tried to get a full list of what IR can do but the only person I've found on this board with a Japanese copy of the game, the ability to understand it, and access to other people to the game is Chou and he has limited access to that.

If you want to push no team preview, it would be less hypocritical and easier to support if you did the research to find out what IR can do, and put forth an argument for what it offers over WiFi which seems to be our established standard.

Yea but from what Doug said wireless/IR is not an option anymore as you couldn't do smogon tournaments that way (unless IRL, but...)

So this boils down to what Wifi can do. I've tried to follow OmegaDonuts's possible method, you can see the progress in that thread.

In short as of now it seems like Nintendo will be able to hold online wifi tournaments without team preview (and they will only use that mode, as it seems), but only Nintendo. Kind of ironic.

 

[jrrrrrrr]

You can tell by his replies he didn't do much research on the subject. I honestly like team previews and believe that they make the game more dependent on skill rather than team matchups and shots in the dark but I've already said all of this in previous threads. I think we've gone too far with team previews already and it'd be stupid to change the way we play now. Even if it comes to a vote people have already gotten so used to it that it will be unanimous.

It's hard to do research when the game is only available in Japanese. I've been following the thread but there isn't much else I can do other than ask people. And just keeping the status quo because people are used to it seems lazy to me, especially since we actually have guidelines to go by now (when we started our server, we didn't even have the initial Nintendo rules). Changing 4 generations of precedent is what changed the way we play, going back to our original ruleset wouldn't be nearly as big an issue as you imply it is.

And I still don't understand how team previews makes the game more skill based when it takes away any reason to not use standard teams and eliminates consequences for playing recklessly, can someone explain that to me in a PM?

If you want to push no team preview, it would be less hypocritical and easier to support if you did the research to find out what IR can do, and put forth an argument for what it offers over WiFi which seems to be our established standard.

Which is exactly what the point of this thread was...

I wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything. As a matter of fact I explicitly stated that I intended this to be a pros/cons list of doing each option, and not to argue the merits of removing or retaining team previews until we established that we were willing to consider it.

 

[cim]

if you're going to argue against team preview could you not be so roundabout with it? here for a second i thought you were actually trying to argue for Smogon to play the VGC metagame, then i realized you were talking about singles play and I had no clue why you wanted to make singles kind of sort of like vgc but not the much more important partsof it (that it's doubles, that it's 5th gen only)...

then i read locopoke's post. seriously, please don't try and come up with backwards justifications to mask the actual issue you're arguing

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also if you admittedly don't know what you're talking about why do you feel qualified to try and make pokemon policy

 

[Destiny Warrior]

The title is very very misleading, no offense....

While team preview admittedly removes the element of managing your information so as not to give it away completely to your opponent, in exchange, it adds the element of long-term thinking about what you need to prioritize to KO and what you need to prioritize to preserve.

In the end, the whole team preview issue comes down to what skill set you favour, and it is entirely personal preference. Basically, this issue devolves to: Do you want to preserve the element of scouting, or are you willing to embrace the element of long term planning?

 

[TAY]

The vast majority of cartridge Pokemon battles played by users of this forum will still be played with team preview (i.e. via wifi). We are a collection of players from likely hundreds of different countries across the world, so it seems silly to me that we would officially endorse a format that, in general, cannot be played between user 1 and user 17. While it is true that we have no obligation whatsoever to follow nintendo's ruleset, we do have an obligation to actually simulate cartridge battles (the site's position on this issue has been made quite clear).

Given the option, we should probably go with the mechanic that correctly simulates probably over 95% of battles between smogon users.

 

[Chou Toshio]

Does infared always have miracle shooter? j/w

By my fiddling with the game, yes.

 

[coyotte508]

The vast majority of cartridge Pokemon battles played by users of this forum will still be played with team preview (i.e. via wifi). We are a collection of players from likely hundreds of different countries across the world, so it seems silly to me that we would officially endorse a format that, in general, cannot be played between user 1 and user 17. While it is true that we have no obligation whatsoever to follow nintendo's ruleset, we do have an obligation to actually simulate cartridge battles (the site's position on this issue has been made quite clear).

Given the option, we should probably go with the mechanic that correctly simulates probably over 95% of battles between smogon users.

I agree. But why was it different for gen 4?

By my fiddling with the game, yes.

I don't understand something. VGC obviously won't have miracle shooter, yet VGC battles are done with only DSes and not Boxes from what i've seen on the VGC thread. Isn't it possible to use that option? Not that it's related because infrared is a no go anyway...

 

[Chou Toshio]

I agree. But why was it different for gen 4?

Frankly speaking, no one gave it serious enough consideration, and everyone wanted to use the new forms competitively. Even in Wifi, the "allow forms" Action Replay code ran rampant, there was a great desire to use rotom, and many wifi community battles happened with it on.

 

[Synre]

It's worth noting the topic title is still pretty disingenuous- we don't actually know for certain that VGC won't have team preview. Liesik apparently has the option to toggle it on or off on-site and hasn't made the call yet. It's mostly irrelevant to this discussion, where everyone is just picking the most self-serving logic available anyway, but...

EDIT: I guess that answers the miracle shooter thing too. It was implied that there's some sort of option TPCI can enable to give a custom ruleset with flags they can toggle, presumably emitted via wifi on-site, though we don't actually have that information. Given that we likely won't have access to this without a simulator when we aren't on-site it doesn't seem to make very much sense to emulate "our" rules based on them.

 

[jrrrrrrr]

So the general feeling I get is that we should put this topic on hold until we're more certain of the official rules. I really don't see how I was being misleading or disingenuous, I thought everything I posted described my reasoning pretty clearly. This was a heated topic of conversation before and I thought it would be appropriate to revisit it given recent announcements. The one thing that stands out as disingenuous is the people who advocate team previews telling me that I'm trying to be sneaky by posting this thread that everyone can see and post in, instead of contributing to the actual discussion. I think this topic has at least done something positive (spread awareness) but I don't know how much else we can do until more information comes in. I'll try to keep this updated when things come in as it seems to have at least brought about some good discussion in an otherwise slow PR forum.

 

[Firestorm]

EDIT: I guess that answers the miracle shooter thing too. It was implied that there's some sort of option TPCI can enable to give a custom ruleset with flags they can toggle, presumably emitted via wifi on-site, though we don't actually have that information. Given that we likely won't have access to this without a simulator when we aren't on-site it doesn't seem to make very much sense to emulate "our" rules based on them.

That's basically what Liesik said, yeah. They have a lot more controls than we do.

 

[Veedrock]

So the general feeling I get is that we should put this topic on hold until we're more certain of the official rules.

Um, no. The general feeling is this has already been discussed and decided upon.

Discussion for the sake of discussion is pointless.

 

[jrrrrrrr]

Quite a bit has changed since that thread, if you hadn't noticed. I know you have your occupation listed as "critic" but I really don't think you read any of this thread if you think this thread was the same as the one you linked to.