ADV Beat Up Revealing Nicknames

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Hipmonlee

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On the other hand, something like 'Cancel Mod' is a not cart-possible convenience feature,
Missed this earlier, but for the sake of posterity: arguing for 'Cancel Mod' is in fact where Cathy originally proposed the concept of an neutral judge.

So the idea is that you select your moves by informing the judge, the judge stops your timer and waits until both players have submitted a move before entering each move into the carts. But until both timers are stopped you can inform the judge that you wish to change your move, and they will restart your timer and wait for you to provide a new move.

Hence, this can be recreated on cart, even for cases like Imprison (to the best of my knowledge).
 

DaWoblefet

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DaWoblefet any potential update on this since allowing duplicate nicknames is not feasible?
I don't think the two arguments given against duplicate nicknames are very strong. Regarding Ctrl+F, suppose an entire team has each Pokemon nicknamed "HOLE", so you couldn't Ctrl+F by the nickname "HOLE". However, each individual Pokemon species is still searchable; you can still Ctrl+F for Tyranitar, Metagross, Blissey, etc. because my proposal would still not permit players to nickname their Pokemon the name of another Pokemon. In addition, if you're worried about Ctrl+F problems with nicknames, I don't see that duplicate nicknames really adds any additional problems. If I nickname my Pokemon "neYzFpLzKwicuBDjQE", "neYzFbLzKwicuDBjQE", "neYzFpLzKwiduDBjQE", "neYzFpLzKwicuDBjQE", "neYzFpLzKwicuDBiQE", and "neYzFpLzKwicDuBjQE", which is currently possible, I'd think this would screw with a player's ability to more easily identify which Pokemon was which. If you wanna say "I'll just copy and paste into Ctrl+F", that's fine, you can do that with species names too.

Regarding usage stats, I'd be somewhat surprised if the usage stats script actually would break for having duplicate nicknames on a team. Usage stats are able to handle multiple Pokemon with the same name in Anything Goes just fine, for example, and I would be really surprised if functionality depending on using the Pokemon's nickname rather than the species name. We can always ask the expert though - Marty, do you know if usage stats script would break with duplicate nicknames?

But besides all that, even if you don't like the idea of theoretical judge with independent nickname list + allowing duplicate nicknames, I still gave another possible solution in this thread, and I've seen two others that would respect cart mechanics. Namely:
  • Have the teambuilder automatically add nicknames for Pokemon that do not have nicknames.
  • Allow players to nickname Pokemon other species. This prevents an information leak with Beat Up because a Pokemon could possibly have another species nickname.
  • Ban Dugtrio / Arena Trap / Beat Up (though I will assume most ADV tournament players do not agree with this)
Players are talking about the precedence that already exists in modding the game, but if anything, I want to avoid setting a precedent for modding small interactions with minimal impact for convenience reasons when viable alternatives exist. Again, modding Beat Up with no caveats sounds exactly like allowing Shiny Battle Bond Greninja to me - both are aesthetic, preventable info leaks. Just because some mods exist does not warrant adding additional mods, as per tiering policy. If you don't like any of these four possible options, that's fine. I'm not a tournament ADV player, and I'm sure folks better in tune with ADV mechanics and the metagame can provide other creative ways to fix the Beat Up problem that respect cartridge mechanics.

I.) We play, to the best of our simulator's capabilities, with the mechanics given to us on the cartridge.
  • Some exceptions exist, such Sleep Clause and Freeze Clause (RBY / GSC), but they are to be avoided as much as possible (emphasis mine).
Really, I think it just depends on what is meant by "avoided as much as possible". These are some criteria I am assuming makes up this definition. Maybe these implicitly assumed criteria are mistaken.
  1. There is sufficient warrant for modifying the mechanic. It impairs the competitiveness of the game in some significant way.
  2. There are no, or at least no good, cart-possible solutions available.
Again, to be crystal clear, I am in agreement that Beat Up revealing your team's nicknames is a dumb mechanic. Of course it's dumb that Beat Up revealing nicknames makes it optimal to nickname all your Pokemon. But I think it's even more dumb to break cart mechanics over something which has many, in my mind, reasonable cart-possible solutions.

Missed this earlier, but for the sake of posterity: arguing for 'Cancel Mod' is in fact where Cathy originally proposed the concept of an neutral judge.

So the idea is that you select your moves by informing the judge, the judge stops your timer and waits until both players have submitted a move before entering each move into the carts. But until both timers are stopped you can inform the judge that you wish to change your move, and they will restart your timer and wait for you to provide a new move.

Hence, this can be recreated on cart, even for cases like Imprison (to the best of my knowledge).
I am unfamiliar with Cathy's original proposal concerning cancel mod. This is getting a bit off track from the thread, but I do think the judge analogy can go through, if you assume the judge always has full complete knowledge of each player's teams at any given time. However, in the end, I don't think it shows anything significant.

Consider Imprison. If I have Pokemon A with Imprison + Flamethrower fighting Pokemon B with Flamethrower + Thunderbolt, on cart, this is the scenario:

Pokemon B clicks Flamethrower - denied due to Imprison
Pokemon B clicks Thunderbolt - goes through and is locked in

So if I'm telling my moves to this neutral judge, it just means that, if I use Thunderbolt, the judge simply won't let me cancel my moves. If I choose Flamethrower, the judge would say "that won't work, they have Flamethrower", and you get to try again. This technically doesn't work for cases where you must Struggle, because all of your moves are inaccessible. If you selected Fight at all, the judge would not let you cancel and you'd be forced into Struggle. But Showdown in general doesn't support that generally, so I won't count that against your point (since your moves are immediately available without having to click Fight, it leaks Struggle and as a result opponent movesets early, and is basically a big "hey, switch out!" indicator).

A similar thing happens with trapping Abilities. To give an example, Magnezone has multiple different viable abilities. If a Steel-type attempts to check if the Magnezone is Magnet Pull, to do so, the player risks locking in their switch if the Magnezone really is Analytic. If it is in fact Magnet Pull, it would stop the player from switching. A neutral judge could similarly not let me cancel a switch if I attempted one.

However, even if Cancel Mod is a cart-possible convenience feature, it still wouldn't provide a positive reason to warrant modding Beat Up. Because if it is cart possible, then that's just it - it is cart possible, no problems here. But modding Beat Up to not display nicknames is not cart possible without conjoining another change to it. You mentioned it yourself in the post - you have to assume every Pokemon has the same nickname, which isn't currently possible with the restriction on duplicate nicknames, and why I offered that as a possible solution.
 

CyberOdin✝

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I am in favor of the change, the attack reveals information about the team that can be both false and true, and currently Beat Up, it is almost certain in a Dugtrio because of Blissey or similar pokémons that accompany it, everyone has preferred nicknames and yes I use a set that contains the beat Up and I must vary nicknames that differ monumentally from the ones I usually use since if they are similar, it could give indications of what pokémon I have hidden, patching it does not alter the mechanics of the game or the battles, to Unless they place an exclusive adv option, like the suspension clause, that allows players to activate it when challenged, this is your consent.
 

Hipmonlee

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Regarding usage stats, I'd be somewhat surprised if the usage stats script actually would break for having duplicate nicknames on a team. Usage stats are able to handle multiple Pokemon with the same name in Anything Goes just fine, for example, and I would be really surprised if functionality depending on using the Pokemon's nickname rather than the species name. We can always ask the expert though - Marty, do you know if usage stats script would break with duplicate nicknames?
My understanding is that in RBY you can have pokemon with the same name, and that it has been causing issues in the latest invitational with the moves stats. emma has been running that and can confirm the details.

But modding Beat Up to not display nicknames is not cart possible without conjoining another change to it. You mentioned it yourself in the post - you have to assume every Pokemon has the same nickname, which isn't currently possible with the restriction on duplicate nicknames, and why I offered that as a possible solution.
But this I dont follow, I think maybe you have misunderstood what I was proposing. What I think we should do is exactly what Eo described with far better clarity.

Also if you really want to fuck with ctrl-f you could name your pokemon 'opposing' or something.
 

Bughouse

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The game allows you to nickname all your Pokemon "A". PS doesn't but that's an arbitrary additional PS restriction. So there's not really a "mod" here at all.

The only "mod" that exists as far as I see it is that presumably players would like for PS to still allow them to nickname their Pokemon different things or indeed not nickname them at all, and still have the mechanic work as if they had nicknamed all their Pokemon A without PS literally forcibly renaming all Pokemon to "A" before starting a battle. But this is quite a hill to die on if you really think PS can't allow users to continue nicknaming their Pokemon unique things while simultaneously making Beat Up anonymous as if they had smartly named them "A". Similar to how Eo phrased it in terms of nicknames vs labels, I would argue that we can resolve this by thinking of things with two naming systems. PS can assume that every player has smartly nicknamed all of their Pokemon "A" so that no information about Beat Up damage or even a hint about whether Beat Up is on the team at all is provided to the opponent, and this would be the way to justify displaying the Beat Up damage similarly to more modern gens. Meanwhile, PS can also display a "nickname" that is not in fact the nickname the player has assigned in the game data (since this is assumed to be "A" for all Pokemon). PS can safely do this since, as far as I am aware, there are no other competitive implications of nicknames in a link battle outside of Beat Up.

Let's imagine that this game is occurring in person or with a phone call, etc.

Right now the game starts:

Battle started between McMeghan and tamahome!
Go! B.Y.O.B (Forretress)!
tamahome sent out Swampert!

Imagine instead that it starts:

Battle started between McMeghan and tamahome!
Go! A (Forretress)!
tamahome sent out A!

McMeghan: Hello tamahome, did I mention I also sometimes like to call my Forretress B.Y.O.B? But as you well know since you are a skilled ADV player it would be unwise for me to actually nickname it that in the game data in light of this generation's Beat Up mechanics, so I have nicknamed Forry A, but I like to call Forry by its other name in my head, and I hope you will think of it with that name too.
tamahome: Hello McMeghan, yes I am well-versed in these mechanics, and I agree that is a fun name! I will think of it as if it had that name. I am much more boring and don't have any additional names for my Swampert besides the nickname "A," which I have used for the same reason as you.
McMeghan: Great, I will think of your Swampert as just being named Swampert.

And PS just assumes this conversation is happening in real time and lets the players see the extra names they are telling each other.
None of this is anywhere even remotely as convoluted as the logic used to justify things like percentages vs 48ths with impartial judges, etc. Literally all you need here is a voice call or IRL encounter.
 

DaWoblefet

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To be clear, the nickname vs. label approach is exactly what I mean to describe in my theoretical judge nickname list scenario. There is no difference. As you all are saying, allowing duplicate nicknames avoids needing to mod Beat Up directly.
 

Irpachuza

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But besides all that, even if you don't like the idea of theoretical judge with independent nickname list + allowing duplicate nicknames, I still gave another possible solution in this thread, and I've seen two others that would respect cart mechanics. Namely:
  • Have the teambuilder automatically add nicknames for Pokemon that do not have nicknames.
May I highlight that this option seems to avoid complex theoretical and subjectively neutral player-nicknames-judge-rival interactions? And it seems unfairly ignored on the thread. Depending on the level of randomization and automatization, it could mean at most clicking one extra button when you finish your team.

No extra effort on thinking names, no plain numbered nicknames across the tier, no modding, no possible stat collecting issues. If the devs find the way, it even has the potential to become a funny and interesting characteristic of the sim that players at all levels and formats (maybe even in random battles too!) could enjoy.
 

Marty

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I thought Hip was talking about usage scripts used for tournaments, which I have never seen and am not sure how they work. It would be pretty crazy if Antar's usage scripts didn't consider duplicate nicknames, because he wrote them in 2012 and used them on PS while duplicates were allowed, until Nickname Clause started existing in 2015. Joim's comment on that commit is particularly hilarious now!

(I wrote the rest of this at 1 in the morning and woke up to see Bughouse has posted basically the same thing, whoops!)

My initial reaction when seeing this thread was "oh no", but then my first idea was to disable Nickname Clause in Gens 1-4, and have Beat Up only display the name of each participating Pokemon if Nickname Clause is on, in case people want to add the clause back in challenge games or whatever.
JavaScript:
if (this.ruleTable.has('nicknameclause')) {
    this.add('-activate', pokemon, 'move: Beat Up', '[of] ' + move.allies![0].name);
}
This comes with the assumption that the information Beat Up is giving you is totally useless if the opponent named all their Pokemon "SUPER" or something, which they would if they were using Beat Up optimally. To me this is no different than the sim completely preventing you from loading up a team with Beat Up until you've done just that. Nicknames are otherwise meaningless fluff, so we can just pretend everyone did do that in the interest of being a good player, instead of implementing some complicated stuff in the teambuilder that only people who read this thread will understand. In fact, everyone should be naming all their Pokemon the same thing just to bluff having Beat Up. And when everyone's named "SUPER", no one will be-- uh I mean, then you can shout nicknames at each other as your Pokemon are sent out and it's effectively business as usual.

Note that Nickname Clause just prevents duplicate nicknames; the inability to use nicknames that are another Pokemon's species name is hardcoded in the team validator.
 

Amaranth

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My understanding is that in RBY you can have pokemon with the same name, and that it has been causing issues in the latest invitational with the moves stats. emma has been running that and can confirm the details.
The problem is with the http://replaystats-eo.herokuapp.com site, which is used to get in-depth usage stats for tournaments, and has nothing to do with Marty's usage harvesting as I understand it.

The issue with the app in particular is as follows: when looking for usage stats on which pokemon is using which moves, the program simply scans for <nickname> used <move>. When multiple nicknames match, the program assigns all moves used by all pokemon with the same nickname to the first pokemon with that nickname; this results in the program thinking that a single lead pokemon used all the moves used by its entire team in that entire battle.

Hopefully it's clear that this issue is secondary to making good policy decisions, and it should be relatively easy to address if we find the need to allow multiple pokemon to have the same name. ADV is not my can of worms so I have nothing else to add, I just wanted to clarify the situation and shut down this specific non-issue
 
To be clear, the nickname vs. label approach is exactly what I mean to describe in my theoretical judge nickname list scenario. There is no difference. As you all are saying, allowing duplicate nicknames avoids needing to mod Beat Up directly.
I do not personally see why duplicate nicknames must be allowed under the proposed solution with a Judge reading off nicknames. Duplicate nicknames, as is allowed on cart, are necessary to completely mask info from Beat Up. However, the Judge's nicknames/labels are the ones which are displayed on Showdown in this scenario. What prevents us from then making up rules for the list you send to the judge? Unicode, no nickname that are other pokemon, no duplicates, etc.
 
So right now this is how nicknames are shown in battle:

~

Battle started between McMeghan and Fakes!

Go! Airmure (Skarmory)!

(then)

Airmure used Spikes!
Spikes were scattered on the ground all around the opposing team!

~

If duplicate nicknames are theoretically needed to “not break cart” then that’s okay but can we change the display? So instead of

“Airmure used Spikes!

it becomes

“Airmure (Skarmory) used Spikes!

If this is the case then command f should still work fine.
 

cityscapes

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However, an argument from purely aesthetics feels very, very weak to me. It's like saying "we should allow Shiny Greninja to have Battle Bond because Shiny Ash-Gren looks epic. Shininess doesn't impact play either, so there's no downside!". I think Shiny Greninja is way cooler than non-Shiny, but I hope everyone would agree that intentionally breaking set legality to allow for aesthetics would be an unwarranted deviation from cartridge.
by that logic, why is the nickname character limit set at 18 instead of 10 (12 after gen 6)? why do we allow players to use any trainer sprite rather than just the player character?

the slippery slope argument doesn't apply so much for cosmetics because it's more about cultural meaning and personal expression. i don't regularly play adv but to me, taking away gems such as Robots (2005) (Dialga), Second Impact (Tyranitar-Mega), monke (Slaking), and many many others would feel a lot worse than not being able to use shiny ash gren or whatever. theoretically the two cases are the same, but in practice one has more meaning to more people and the other is having a different color on ur frog.

i'd argue that this proposed mod is more in line with allowing 18 character nicknames, and there isn't any additional transgression of "set legality". the idea of separating nicknames from in-game limitations is the same.
 
i'd argue that this proposed mod is more in line with allowing 18 character nicknames, and there isn't any additional transgression of "set legality". the idea of separating nicknames from in-game limitations is the same.
I don't really like the direction this thread has been heading, but this post is particularly good. I think the comparisons to shiny greninja are inadequate in the sense that one is purely cosmetic and the other is a quality of life change to address a competitive inconvenience. Another example I'd like to bring up is the RBY Counter patch, which while different because it addresses a game-breaking mechanic, was an exception made in deviating from cartridge mechanics for metagame preservation and competitive reasons, which the community voted on. I think in cases like beat up, especially with good justification which has been provided at this point, we should be more open to a convenient and clean solution that falls in line with other "exceptions" made, like the 18 character nicknames.

The community strongly supports a convenient fix to this situation that doesn't have subtle drawbacks. The rest of this thread should focus on some sort of compromise/finding justification to fix this as cleanly as possible. People who do not play ADV/are not involved with it should not be chiming in to be dismissive and say "leave it as is".
 

Irpachuza

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Another example I'd like to bring up is the RBY Counter patch, which while different because it addresses a game-breaking mechanic, was an exception made in deviating from cartridge mechanics for metagame preservation and competitive reasons, which the community voted on.
It wasn't patched for the same competitive reasons as the ones asking for Beat Up to be modded. It was patched as part of the Desync Clause, which takes on account certain RBY glitches that cause a desync, making the battle technically unplayable. If any mechanic that can be seen subjectively bad from a competitive standpoint would need to get modded, stuff like this thread asking to mod uncomfortable mechanics would appear every day for RBY (and for other gens! We can't use BW Sleep competitively? Let's mod it to not reset the sleep timer on switch! and so on). Regarding Gen 2-4 Beat Up I still think this is mostly a commodity mod rather than a competitive one, but ADV is not my area, so just posting to suggest to not use the Counter patch as an example of "metagame preservation and competitive reasons" because it actually just falls on plausability-of-playing-land and shouldn't be used to support modding unoptimised competitive stuff.
 
It wasn't patched for the same competitive reasons as the ones asking for Beat Up to be modded. It was patched as part of the Desync Clause, which takes on account certain RBY glitches that cause a desync, making the battle technically unplayable. If any mechanic that can be seen subjectively bad from a competitive standpoint would need to get modded, stuff like this thread asking to mod uncomfortable mechanics would appear every day for RBY (and for other gens! We can't use BW Sleep competitively? Let's mod it to not reset the sleep timer on switch! and so on). Regarding Gen 2-4 Beat Up I still think this is mostly a commodity mod rather than a competitive one, but ADV is not my area, so just posting to suggest to not use the Counter patch as an example of "metagame preservation and competitive reasons" because it actually just falls on plausability-of-playing-land and shouldn't be used to support modding unoptimised competitive stuff.
I said "while different because it addresses a game-breaking mechanic", so I know what desync clause is and why counter was patched. It can be used as an example for metagame preservation and competitive reasons because it would have been much more sound and cartridge-friendly to just ban counter in the first place. Don't wanna dive into an rby counter rabbithole in the beat up thread though
 

peng

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PS already has a nickname mod and has since day 1

I can rock up to DPP with a shiny Raikou called Ben and that should tell my opponents that I do not have Aura Sphere, which is event exclusive and therefore the only possible nick is RAIKOU. We don't implement this for an obvious reason - it would be 100% optimal to just call every shiny Raikou "RAIKOU" so as not to reveal information, so we might as well just assume that people are doing that and let them set a nickname for aesthetic purposes.

I don't want to kick off a completely separate debate here but the argument that "we shouldn't implement convenient aesthetic changes to ADV beat-up" is already in direct contradiction with how nicknames are implemented on PS, which are strictly aesthetic and do not follow cart (event nicks, 18 character nicks, region-locked names).

tl;dr in almost every gen it is optimal not to nickname Pokemon, we let people do it (even where technically impossible) for aesthetics
we are proposing that in ADV, it is the opposite due to beat up mechanics and we should similarly assume all pokemon are nicknamed and modify beat up appropriately
 
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Eo Ut Mortus

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I might be putting words in people's mouths, but DaWoblefet's proposal means that absolutely nothing has to change about the way text is displayed on PS outside of Beat Up. When he says allow duplicate nicknames, he means the cartridge ones, which will no longer be set or displayed on PS except when Beat Up is used, because there is no reason for anyone to set them differently. The "nicknames" that will be shown are the "labels" given to the judge in DaWob's example or the ones that are being communicated over voice in Bughouse's example, which can be restricted or unrestricted as anyone likes. To give a more explicit example:

What McMeghan set in the PS teambuilder:
Skarmory's nickname: Airmure
Snorlax's nickname: Ronflex
Dugtrio's nickname: ???

What PS will show:
Go! Airmure! (Skarmory)
Airmure used Spikes!
(this is what it currently shows)

Go! ??? (Dugtrio)
??? used Beat Up!
Duplicate nickname's attack!
Duplicate nickname's attack!
Duplicate nickname's attack!
(DaWoblefet said in his previous post that this text would probably be changed to <generic Pokemon>)

What this would look like in a cartridge scenario (this is just here to prove that it can be replicated on catridge):
Skarmory, Snorlax, Dugtrio are all in-game nicknamed "Duplicate nickname"
McMeghan submits Airmure, Ronflex, etc. to a third party judge, who announces each of these names whenever they do something
Whenever Dugtrio uses Beat Up, you once again see "Duplicate nickname" pop up

My assumptions are the following:
1. You are still prohibited from assigning duplicate PS nicknames (aka "labels" aka the things that show up when you send in a Pokemon).
2. You cannot set "cartridge nicknames" (the things that show up only during Beat Up) anywhere on PS at all; they are assumed to be set to the same value because it's always optimal to do so.
3. No text outside of Beat Up is changed.

If all of this is correct, then the Beat Up text and behavior can be modified without applying any other changes.

re: Stats tool. Assuming all this is correct, it's not relevant here as I said in my original post, because no text is being changed. But yeah, the glitch has been around forever and has messed with RBY usage stats since there is no nickname clause there.
 
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Marty

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Sorry for the wait, I asked Zarel to check this thread since I'm sure he has an opinion but that was weeks ago. This isn't that big of a deal so we'll just move forward with it.

The reason I wanted to remove Nickname Clause is because it's a VGC rule that only started appearing in official documentation during Gen 5. Games released after that don't even enforce it, so no Smogon Singles format would ever need to use it.

I also wanted to keep the Beat Up message somewhere so I don't have to hear bug reports about some suddenly missing game text. My idea which I posted here earlier was to have the message only in battles with Nickname Clause on, since the info is only valuable if the Beat Up names aren't all the same.

Obviously the Ctrl+F and usage stats counting issues would pop up with a lack of Nickname Clause, so I also planned to do what ABR suggested later and have NICKNAME (SPECIES NAME) appear all over the battle log. After an hour of looking around and testing how this could be done, I realize it's an unreasonable amount of effort involving server and client changes, and sim protocol changes which I definitely would need Zarel to approve.
So I'm just going with what Eo clearly explained above and commenting out the Beat Up message. Nobody report this as a bug! :blobwizard:
 

Zarel

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I don't remember being asked about this, but I'm fine with hiding nicknames from Beat Up. Nicknames on PS aren't intended to exactly simulate in-game nicknames, anyway: they don't have the in-game length limits or character-set limits.
 
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