Misleading trapping-moves tag split

[Mokujin]

Hi.


I'm writing here to suggest what in my point of view could be a major improvement in the clearness of some battling mechanics.

Tags are showdown's great features which (at least many of them) are not displayed in the official games and help people better understanding what's going on on the battle field. Hence tags are designed to help players clarifying some battling mechanics.

Here i will show that this isn't always the actual outcome.

In particular, as you can grasp from the header, i'm referring to those tags which are normally displayed below your pokemon's hp bar when it is hit by a trapping-dot move (infestation, fire-spin, whirlpool and so on).

Take a look at the replay below:

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7ou-998389948

This replay shows all the 3 possible frameworks and their outcomes.

Case 1) (turns 1-2) - Ghost pokemon: a ghost pokemon cannot be trapped. In this first scenario the infestation tag is displayed. The attacked pokemon keeps getting damaged by the dot but is free to switch out.

Case 2) (turns 3-4) - Magic guard pokemon: a pokemon with magic guard cannot take damage over time. Also in this second scenario the same infestation tag is displayed. This time, the attacked pokemon does not get damaged by the dot, but it is now trapped and cannot switch.

Case 3) (turs 5-7) - Regular pokemon: a regular pokemon can either be damaged over time and trapped. Also in this last scenario the very same infestation tag is displayed. Not many people know that the only way to set a regular pokemon free from traps/dots is by using substitute. In particular, using substitute the pokemon is either freed from the dot and the trap. It is now free to escape. If you paid attention, btw, even after the substitution, the infestation tag is still there (this is one of the reasons why many people do not know about this feature!

Summing up, we have the very same tag which describes 4 different situation (only trap, only dot, both trap and dot, no trap and no dot after sub).
This confuses many players that don't even realise that in some situation they can actually save their mons (especially in a perish-trap framework).


Proposal: Tag split

In order to solve this problem i propose to split the above mentioned tag in two: instead of showing a single tag with the name of the move, it would be much clearer to show two different tags, one (e.g. "trap") to indicate the pokemon is actually unable to switch out; another one (e.g. "dot") to indicate the pokemon is suffering a damage over time. Of course those new tags would disappear when the effect ceases to exist / would not appear if the effect does not exist: i.e. in case 1 only "dot" tag is displayed; in case 2 only "trap" is displayed; in case 3 both tags are displayed before the substitution and both disappear thereafter.

If this is not possible, at least a minor change could simply be removing the trapping-dot move tag when the pokemon, using substitute, is fully freed from the effects of the move (while both ghosts and magic guard mons are still partially affected and so the tag remains unless they use substitute).

Note: of course, i selected trapping-dot moves because they are the general framework, but this applies (and an eventual change should in my opinion be applied) also to trapping-only moves, with currently do not display any tag at all. This should not instead be applied to shadow tag, magnet pull, arena trap, because it could reveal your set.



Cya.

 

[Tapo Collino]

I don't think those tags are there to help clarify mechanics. Toxic tag doesn't tell you the damage increases over time, Focus Energy tag doesnt tell you your crit rate has increased, etc. They are there to make it easier to keep track of what is happening on the battlefield.

Having a trapped tag that does not appear for ghosts types could also be problematic if Illusion is involved. I feel that these sort of things (including Magic Guard) should be common knowledge, and does not need to be specially laid out for beginners, kinda like how Prankster fails against Dark types. It is the kind of stuff you learn as from experience. The way it is currently handled is fine imo as people can just google the move or /dt it to figure out what is going on.

Though, if stuff like Mean Look don't have a tag, that would probably be useful.

 

[Mokujin]

Thank you for your answer, i'd really like to create a discussion around this topic.

Let me now answer you:

Toxic tag doesn't tell you the damage increases over time, Focus Energy tag doesnt tell you your crit rate has increased, etc. They are there to make it easier to keep track of what is happening on the battlefield.

Regarding toxic, it is true that the tag only shows the presence of the status, but you can easily assess the progressive damage increase from the information window which appears if you set the pointer on your pokemon (also the opponents can see it).
Regarding focus energy, instead, it does not tell you anything about your crit rate increase, but its meaning is univocal.
Trapping-dot moves tags are instead ambiguous: the same tag could describe 4 different situations, as proved above.

Having a trapped tag that does not appear for ghosts types could also be problematic if Illusion is involved.

Regarding illusion, this is not actually a problem.
In fact, illusion works so that it disappears as soon as the pokemon gets hit by a damaging move, and the secondary effects are applied only after. Even in the current framework, then, hitting transformed zoroark with whirlpool will firstly break illusion, and the "whirpool" tag will appear only after.
Hence, simply substituting "whirpool" with "trap" + "dot" would not be an issue in that sense.

Though, if stuff like Mean Look don't have a tag, that would probably be useful.

Thank you for this point.
I am actually realising that this could be a problem if mixed with illusion.
In particular, moves that only trap the opponent do not deal any direct damage to the opponent.
Hence, if illusion is active mean look does not break it. So, if zoroark has turned into a ghost mon, the "trap" tag would potentially reveal that the ghost is not a ghost.
Being an exception, by the way, this could be treated as an exception: for instance they could add something like a rule so that "if a non-damaging trapping move hits a transformed zoroark, the tag will take into account the transformed mon and not zoroark" so that if you use block on a zoroark turned into a gengar the "trap" tag won't appear.


The point which i give more importance to and want to stress more (it is the actual reason that prompted me to open this thread), by the way, is the fact that when a pokemon substitutes, completely freeing itself from both dot and trap, the presence of that tag still makes it look like it's trapped.

I'm a perish/trap azumarill enthusiast, and i use it in many of my teams, so i'm going to say this against me, but you have no idea of how many players i keep finding, even on really high ladder, which literally sacrifice their sub serperior because of that tag which makes them think their mon is still trapped.

This issue is not matter of ignorance/experience: showdown aims to perfectly replicate all in-game mechanics, but official pokemon games have no tags for this kind of statuses. Having a tag which remains even when the status is gone is paradoxically more confusing than not having tags at all!

 

[SadisticMystic]

If you use Mean Look or Block against a Gengar, it says "It doesn't affect Gengar" and no tag appears in the first place. If the move does work and the tag does appear, that's sufficient for an astute player to notice that it must be an illusion.

 

[Mokujin]

If you use Mean Look or Block against a Gengar, it says "It doesn't affect Gengar" and no tag appears in the first place. If the move does work and the tag does appear, that's sufficient for an astute player to notice that it must be an illusion.

This is because they are normal attacks, which do not have effect on ghosts.
There is also spider web, which even being bug does not work against ghosts (it simply 100% fails).
But unfortunately there exist also another move (even if pretty unused) called fairy lock which locks both you and your opponent and is fairy type.
In this last case it would represent a problem because the tag "trap" would appear on zoroark transformed in gengar but not on gengar.
This is why i was talking about the "exception".

 

[SadisticMystic]

The fact that Mean Look and Block are normal-type is irrelevant for these purposes. They are status moves, and status moves do not care about type-chart immunities with the sole exception of Thunder Wave. Again, with ghosts having a global immunity to trapping effects, any move for which that effect is the sole effect will give a "doesn't affect" message regardless of that move's type, so if you see one of those moves work on something that appears to be a ghost (either in-game with the "Can't Escape" status on the summary screen, or on the sim with the "Mean Look" volatiles and such), then you can conclude that the culprit is they're not actually a ghost, jumping to the other possibility: Illusion.

 

[HoeenHero]

This issue is not matter of ignorance/experience: showdown aims to perfectly replicate all in-game mechanics, but official pokemon games have no tags for this kind of statuses.

They actually do! As per DaWoblefet's research he kindly did for me on request:

Mean Look, etc. display as "Can't Escape" on the bottom screen and are visible from both sides (trapping abilities do not display this). Whirlpool, etc. display as "Bound" on the bottom screen and are visible from both sides. It does not display the number of turns the target is bound for.

Mean look fails on ghost types

Mean look succeeds on a pokemon illusioned as Zoroark, which hints its not really a Ghost type.

This isn't what your suggesting currently and I see the difference, but I just wanted to point this out for now.

 

[DaWoblefet]

^Clarifying on the above that what SadisticMystic said about trapping moves is still correct; it says it "doesn't affect" the Ghost-type Pokemon (not as if he needs corroboration but still good to mention).

 

[Mokujin]

Hi guys,

I'm here again to provide you with further elements to add to the previous discussion.
In particular, here the focus is on substitute, which actually frees the user from traps without clearly stating it.

In the following replay i am showing the difference between rapid spin and substitute.

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7ou-1006125292

As you can see, both Rapid Spin and Substitute free the pokemon from both the trap-status and the damage over time.

In the first case, by the way, an alert message is displayed ("[pokemon] was freed from whirlpool") and, most importantly, the whirlpool tag disappears.
In the last one, instead, as largely proved above, nothing happens and the tag is still there.

 

[Mathy]

The above issue has been fixed, the label now silently goes away when Substitute is used.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9anythinggoes-1769988018

As for the original post, that's rejected to best match the in-game status display.