SPOILERS! Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl Data Dumps

The Smogon Discord is looking at the Battle Tower set list, and man this is gonna be rough:

-47 Bright Power users.
-32 Focus Band users.
-21 Lax Incense users.
-30 Quick Claw users.
-47 Double Team users.
-6 Minimize users.
-13 Sheer Cold users.
-11 Fissure users.
-74 Focus Sash users.
-49 Flash users.
-19 Sand Attack users.

This Tower is overflowing with bullshit.
Jeez, as if past Battle Facilities weren't bad enough with this shit. This is why I was never too broken up about the Battle Frontier not being in this game, to be frank.
 
Stadium 2 Koga and Karen were enough RNG for a lifetime, hard pass.

What bothers me the most about Frontier/Tower are all these unevolved high-level mons. Bunch of turn wasters.
 
Jeez, as if past Battle Facilities weren't bad enough with this shit. This is why I was never too broken up about the Battle Frontier not being in this game, to be frank.
Still better than the old/current Gen 4 BT. Uber misery, the endless waves of hacked Wonder Guard Spiritombs I had to fight to get my World Ability Ribbons.

Still, I feel you. My interest in BT/BF starts and ends with which ribbons I can get on my mons. I understand why people want a challenge, but I usually wish they were far easier - at least for my needs.
 
Still better than the old/current Gen 4 BT. Uber misery, the endless waves of hacked Wonder Guard Spiritombs I had to fight to get my World Ability Ribbons.

Still, I feel you. My interest in BT/BF starts and ends with which ribbons I can get on my mons. I understand why people want a challenge, but I usually wish they were far easier - at least for my needs.
My issue isn't even that it's difficult, I take issue with the inordinate amount of RNG hax present in almost every Battle Facility. My experience slogging up to a 50-streak in the Battle Tree in Moon pretty much turned me off from Battle Facilities for life. (I played around with the Tower in Shield some, but only because there were no streaks there.) Even with a team of comp-ready pseudo-legends (and a Tapu for good measure), it still took me a solid month of grinding attempts before I beat Red in Super Singles just due to how often plain rotten luck would end a run. Not nice :psygrump:
 
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The Smogon Discord is looking at the Battle Tower set list, and man this is gonna be rough:

-47 Bright Power users.
-32 Focus Band users.
-21 Lax Incense users.
-30 Quick Claw users.
-47 Double Team users.
-6 Minimize users.
-13 Sheer Cold users.
-11 Fissure users.
-74 Focus Sash users.
-49 Flash users.
-19 Sand Attack users.

This Tower is overflowing with bullshit.
This is an incredibly misleading post. For one, it includes all the NFE Pokemon and other various dross you'll fight before the first Palmer fight, so the numbers are somewhat inflated (e.g. Bellossom 2 has Bright Powder, but you'll basically never face it after Palmer 1). This is important because Focus Band, for example, is very skewed towards the early sets; there are only 17 Pokemon in later sets that have it, out of the 32 quoted.

More importantly, though, it doesn't provide any context as to how this compares to other facilities; for example, the Gen IV Tower has 40 BrightPowders and 35 Lax Incenses, a greater total than the BDSP Tower. This Tower has been dealt with rather successfully, as you can see by its records thread, and I personally expect the BDSP Tower to not cause too much additional aggravation on the luck front.

Here's a full comparison with the Gen IV Tower, since I imagine that will be a reasonable point of comparison, using all the Pokemon. The list is formatted as (new amount) vs (old amount):
  • Bright Powder: 47 vs 40
  • Focus Band: 32 vs 30
  • Lax Incense: 21 vs 35
  • Quick Claw: 30 vs 36
  • Double Team: 47 vs 39
  • Minimize: 6 vs 3
  • Sheer Cold: 13 vs 6
  • Fissure: 11 vs 10
  • Focus Sash is not a bullshit item?
  • Flash: 5 vs 3 (you were counting Flash Fire and Flash Cannon as well lol)
  • Sand Attack: 19 vs 8
Here it is again, without the Pokemon before Venusaur-1:
  • Bright Powder: 39 vs 32
  • Focus Band: 17 vs 13
  • Lax Incense: 4 vs 25
  • Quick Claw: 25 vs 28
  • Double Team: 37 vs 31
  • Minimize: 2 vs 1
  • Sheer Cold: 13 vs 6
  • Fissure: 10 vs 10
  • Flash: 2 vs 1
  • Sand Attack: 4 vs 1
Essentially, the point I'm trying to make is that the new Tower is not significantly more liable to spawn bad luck than the Tower it's based on, and the facilities community is also constantly refining strategies to fight against these factors. The actual factors that we're looking at that seem to make this harder than the previous Tower are generally more competitive sets which demand appropriate counterplay, potentially improved AI, and the weakening of common strategies due to the Pokedex cut (e.g. Trick Room loses many setters, including Eviolite Dusclops + Porygon2).

Apologies if this post seems like I'm tryharding, I just don't enjoy one of my favorite activities within the game being constantly demonized. If you're interested in learning more about the Tower and/or getting your ribbons more easily, the Battle Tower Discord is full of experienced veterans, mostly much nicer than I am, who would be happy to teach willing learners the ropes.

Some other thoughts, based on replies to this post:
My issue isn't even that it's difficult, I take issue with the inordinate amount of RNG hax present in almost every Battle Facility. My experience slogging up to a 50-streak in the Battle Tree in Moon pretty much turned me off from Battle Facilities for life. (I played around with the Tower in Shield some, but only because there were no streaks there.) Even with a team of comp-viable pseudo-legends (and a Tapu for good measure), it still took me a solid month of grinding attempts before I beat Red in Super Singles just due to how often plain rotten luck would end a run. Not nice :psygrump:
The actual reason the Battle Tower appears to be so "hax"-inducing is because you have to win 49 battles in a row to complete it. Even if you give yourself a generous 99% chance of beating any battle you encounter, that's only a 61.1% chance to get through the whole thing, barely better than landing a blind hypnosis. It's a lot worse if you keep streaking further. The pseudo-legends and Tapu team sounds great on paper, but I imagine there were definitely significant threats in the Tree it failed to account for. It's similar to how you can't expect to bring a singles OU team into DOU and win matches: battle facilities are also a different kind of format that must be built specifically for. One interesting example is how Salamence on modern high-level Tree teams is almost always mono-attacking with Return, whereas it might run EQ in general competitive formats.
 
The actual reason the Battle Tower appears to be so "hax"-inducing is because you have to win 49 battles in a row to complete it. Even if you give yourself a generous 99% chance of beating any battle you encounter, that's only a 61.1% chance to get through the whole thing, barely better than landing a blind hypnosis. It's a lot worse if you keep streaking further. The pseudo-legends and Tapu team sounds great on paper, but I imagine there were definitely significant threats in the Tree it failed to account for. It's similar to how you can't expect to bring a singles OU team into DOU and win matches: battle facilities are also a different kind of format that must be built specifically for. One interesting example is how Salamence on modern high-level Tree teams is almost always mono-attacking with Return, whereas it might run EQ in general competitive formats.
I suppose there's some truth to that. Still, it cheeses me off just a bit how many sets in the Battle Tower and other facilities do shit like put a Scarf on an Aerodactyl that only knows Rock Slide, or slap Bright Powder on random things for no reason. No matter how you slice it, there are sets in every Battle Facility that exist just to be annoying, and when you're trying for those streaks, those are the ones that kill the whole experience, I find.
 
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Jesus, Weavile just getting the absolute shaft. It's already basically unviable in-game on account of not having a strong, physical Ice STAB...and now competitively it's severely nerfed from losing its primary Dark STAB. I mean, damn.

Sneasel learns Icicle Crash as an egg move. Knock Off isn't available. Maybe I read it wrong though.

So is it confirmed if Arceus is in the game day one? Or if it will be at all? And likewise for Darkrai and Shaymin's items. Seems like all other mythical and legendary are, if I am not mistaken.
 
Arceus' event seems to be dummied out for the time being, unless something changes with the launch patch. Shaymin and Darkrai's events are in, minus the distribution of their item which will presumably be at a later date.
They actually removed more of the event in the 1.1 patch I believe
 
Then why bother wasting very limited time and resources for it?

It's probably coming with Legends/Home Support. Believe it!
It was barely implemented at all in 1.0, and now they've made it even less implemented. That does not sound like "yeah it's coming no doubt " to me!!

I think what will happen is: they purely want Legends Arceus to have Arceus. From the implication left by the "you brought an original DP pokemon forward" in-progress diploma we can presume that Home will allow transfers of the 493, so you can get Arceus in this game by transferring Arceus from Legends Arceus.
 
It was barely implemented at all in 1.0, and now they've made it even less implemented. That does not sound like "yeah it's coming no doubt " to me!!

I think what will happen is: they purely want Legends Arceus to have Arceus. From the implication left by the "you brought an original DP pokemon forward" in-progress diploma we can presume that Home will allow transfers of the 493, so you can get Arceus in this game by transferring Arceus from Legends Arceus.
I'mma stick to my guns and believe the Azure Flute will drop as a save game bonus with Legends.

But it really is too early to say, it could go either way.

Now that they went out of their way to scrub out the event data, we can't even try and find scripts for it.

Come to think of it... How are people even getting the event scripts? Are only Kaph and the like managing to get them or can anyone with the game try and find them? I know people already modded out Darkrai's item and Nat. Dex checks to see if the whole thing works. (It does.)
 
There's often a bunch of stuff left over in games because they may have planned to use it at some point, but abandoned plans later. The original Azure Flute/Hall of Origin event in DPPt is in fact an example of this
Heck, if they got a lot of the code from the originals then that is probably where it came from for this. Why it would still be in there at this point is that it would definitely be a low priority to be removed since you would need an item you can't normally get to trigger it.
 
Off the top of my head, that sounded similar to the first bit of Arceus's cry, though I also feel it seems similar to a lower pitched and drawn out version of Cresselia's. Definitely sounds 'cosmic,' and is only slighlty off from having the particular sound that shows up in a lot of UB cries.
 
It's just part of the Dialga cutscene
@~ 0:41

There is a lot to process in that clip.
  1. (1:01) Red Chain clipping through Dialga's dorsal fan. The chain also seems to be a 2D object that disappears when viewed from the side.
  2. (3:06) He angy.
  3. (3:51) This is one of the most confusing skybox choices I have ever seen. I thought we were done rewriting the galaxy on a whim.
There's some likable stuff in there: the ambience pointed out, the Eye-of-Sauron teleport effect, and the way they integrated the weird RGB sky from the now-classic versions. Also, Forehead of Time does not look nearly as bad as this post in the news thread made it out to be, which noticeably cuts off before the actual firing of the attack. On that note, hey-hey, Roar of Time is a roar again and not a diamond-studded laser beam!
 
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