Competitive Pokemon Disqualifications
Competitive Pokemon battling has been in video game news quite a bit lately for some disqualifications and I feel like the traditional Pokemon fan’s perspective has gone unrepresented thus far.
To sum up the situation, a recent championship disqualified several players right before the tournament began for using Pokemon generated artificially with a hacking utility. This process is not new, and apparently many or most competitors use the tool to generate ideal Pokemon for their party. And before you automatically write it off as cheating and bad, “While some use it for nefarious means, it’s largely used to save time” (Middler, 2023). The argument is that it makes more sense for a competitive Pokemon player to spend more time planning and practicing, rather than building and training their team manually.
Those opposed to the ban and in favor of allowing “generated” Pokemon suggest that it doesn’t make sense to require a competitor to build and train their entire team. Comparisons are made to other sports and competitions to illustrate the level of time involved. For chess players, “It would be like playing chess, but you had to take a ton of extra time to carve out the pieces themselves, in addition to experimenting with different strategies” (Diaz, 2023). Taking the eSports perspective, this is like “a hypothetical rule requiring competitive soccer players to bring their own hand-stitched balls to each game” (Jones, 2023).
In my opinion, and the opinion of many Pokemon fans that I have discussed this with, those are not applicable comparisons. I believe that the context of Pokemon necessitates that one look at the series as a whole, rather than just examine the competitive sector. If you ask anyone outside the competitive arena what Pokemon is about, they are likely to echo the motto “gotta catch ‘em all” or suggest something about training a team of creatures.
Catching and training is critical to the Pokemon experience. When I play a Pokemon game, I don’t want a perfect team of tool-generated Pokemon to be handed to me at the beginning so I can breeze through the entire game. I want to go on an adventure with my starter Pokemon, so we can catch and train together and overcome the obstacles of the game. The whole concept revolves around catching new Pokemon and training them to gain better skills and new moves.
After you complete the story portion of a Pokemon game, there is absolutely a “post-game” phase of more competitive strategery. And for those of us that really enjoy exploring different type and move combinations, that may be the most fun part of the entire game. It doesn’t make the rest of the game irrelevant, but I do spend more time in that context. But even with the bulk of the game finished, there is still a huge presence of catching, hatching, and training to really fine tune your party. You may spend a few hours getting an ideal Pokemon to slot it into your party and see how it works in practice. That’s just part of the game.
If you tell me that catching and training Pokemon is not a core part of the experience, you missed the whole point. A chess player would never be expected to craft their own pieces, and a soccer player would rightly scoff at the idea that they must stitch their own ball. Pokemon competitions, though? I can’t see why it’s so absurd to consider that a player must craft their own team through the traditional means.
Now, I do concede, it is substantially faster to generate an ideal Pokemon through a software utility. And if that is accepted as the norm for a tournament, I have no problem with it. The administration sets those rules, and it happens that they have opted to prevent hacked Pokemon from being used in the championship. The decision could have gone either way (as it seems to have in the past), but that does not invalidate the decision. If you don’t want to train your own team, don’t participate in the championship.
The compromise that I see most fitting is multiple tournaments, or multiple classes in the same tournament. If you want to use hacked Pokemon, you participate in the hacked tournament. If you are willing to train your own Pokemon, you can compete in a league that is exclusively for legitimately-obtained Pokemon. This allows both perspectives to participate with like-minded competitors.
My concern is that popular players may have fans that would do the leg-work of obtaining legitimate Pokemon for them, while lesser-known individuals would be tasked with the grind themselves. Jones goes on to say that “the amount of practice time lost to that rule would soon see those players outsource that work to someone else” (2023). These would still be legitimate Pokemon, but the popular player would then have substantially more time available to practice with a team and ensure that they have a better chance for success.
The problem is certainly a complex one. I can see the logic from both camps, I just personally side with those who suggest that catching and training is part of playing Pokemon. With such enormous stakes as a world championship, though, this isn’t something to just be brushed aside.
All that said, I will criticize the championship administration for only now cracking down on hacked Pokemon. If the intent was to reduce the presence of hacked Pokemon, that should have been publicized long before the beginning of the tournament, and some mechanism should have been provided to check competitors’ teams before they were disqualified. You can’t decide after multiple years of minimally enforcing a policy that you’re suddenly going to be much more strict with it. That isn’t fair to the participants or the integrity of the tournament.
At the end of the day, I enjoy playing Pokemon games and I find entertainment in watching the best of the best compete with top tier teams and skill. However, this mass of disqualifications has revealed quite a bit of negativity and I don’t think that helps anyone. If you want to attack the championship tournament or people that play the games legitimately, you can take that toxicity to some other intellectual property. People are entitled to enjoy the games in whatever way they see fit.
References
Diaz, A. (2023, November 14). Why it’s OK that so many top pokémon players “cheat.” Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/pokemon/23955708/pokemon-scarlet-violet-cheating-scandal-competitive-explained
Jones, A. (2023, October 31). Pokemon World Championships were rocked by a “perfect storm” of trading glitches and anti-cheat rules, all because of Pokemon Legends arceus. gamesradar. https://www.gamesradar.com/pokemon-world-championships-were-rocked-by-a-perfect-storm-of-trading-glitches-and-anti-cheat-rules-all-because-of-pokemon-legends-arceus/
Middler, J. (2023, August 15). Pokémon players disqualified from World Championships for using Hacked Pokémon. VGC. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/pokemon-players-disqualified-from-world-championships-for-using-hacked-pokemon/
Those opposed to the ban and in favor of allowing “generated” Pokemon suggest that it doesn’t make sense to require a competitor to build and train their entire team. Comparisons are made to other sports and competitions to illustrate the level of time involved. For chess players, “It would be like playing chess, but you had to take a ton of extra time to carve out the pieces themselves, in addition to experimenting with different strategies” (Diaz, 2023). Taking the eSports perspective, this is like “a hypothetical rule requiring competitive soccer players to bring their own hand-stitched balls to each game” (Jones, 2023).
In my opinion, and the opinion of many Pokemon fans that I have discussed this with, those are not applicable comparisons. I believe that the context of Pokemon necessitates that one look at the series as a whole, rather than just examine the competitive sector. If you ask anyone outside the competitive arena what Pokemon is about, they are likely to echo the motto “gotta catch ‘em all” or suggest something about training a team of creatures.
Catching and training is critical to the Pokemon experience. When I play a Pokemon game, I don’t want a perfect team of tool-generated Pokemon to be handed to me at the beginning so I can breeze through the entire game. I want to go on an adventure with my starter Pokemon, so we can catch and train together and overcome the obstacles of the game. The whole concept revolves around catching new Pokemon and training them to gain better skills and new moves.
After you complete the story portion of a Pokemon game, there is absolutely a “post-game” phase of more competitive strategery. And for those of us that really enjoy exploring different type and move combinations, that may be the most fun part of the entire game. It doesn’t make the rest of the game irrelevant, but I do spend more time in that context. But even with the bulk of the game finished, there is still a huge presence of catching, hatching, and training to really fine tune your party. You may spend a few hours getting an ideal Pokemon to slot it into your party and see how it works in practice. That’s just part of the game.
If you tell me that catching and training Pokemon is not a core part of the experience, you missed the whole point. A chess player would never be expected to craft their own pieces, and a soccer player would rightly scoff at the idea that they must stitch their own ball. Pokemon competitions, though? I can’t see why it’s so absurd to consider that a player must craft their own team through the traditional means.
Now, I do concede, it is substantially faster to generate an ideal Pokemon through a software utility. And if that is accepted as the norm for a tournament, I have no problem with it. The administration sets those rules, and it happens that they have opted to prevent hacked Pokemon from being used in the championship. The decision could have gone either way (as it seems to have in the past), but that does not invalidate the decision. If you don’t want to train your own team, don’t participate in the championship.
The compromise that I see most fitting is multiple tournaments, or multiple classes in the same tournament. If you want to use hacked Pokemon, you participate in the hacked tournament. If you are willing to train your own Pokemon, you can compete in a league that is exclusively for legitimately-obtained Pokemon. This allows both perspectives to participate with like-minded competitors.
My concern is that popular players may have fans that would do the leg-work of obtaining legitimate Pokemon for them, while lesser-known individuals would be tasked with the grind themselves. Jones goes on to say that “the amount of practice time lost to that rule would soon see those players outsource that work to someone else” (2023). These would still be legitimate Pokemon, but the popular player would then have substantially more time available to practice with a team and ensure that they have a better chance for success.
The problem is certainly a complex one. I can see the logic from both camps, I just personally side with those who suggest that catching and training is part of playing Pokemon. With such enormous stakes as a world championship, though, this isn’t something to just be brushed aside.
All that said, I will criticize the championship administration for only now cracking down on hacked Pokemon. If the intent was to reduce the presence of hacked Pokemon, that should have been publicized long before the beginning of the tournament, and some mechanism should have been provided to check competitors’ teams before they were disqualified. You can’t decide after multiple years of minimally enforcing a policy that you’re suddenly going to be much more strict with it. That isn’t fair to the participants or the integrity of the tournament.
At the end of the day, I enjoy playing Pokemon games and I find entertainment in watching the best of the best compete with top tier teams and skill. However, this mass of disqualifications has revealed quite a bit of negativity and I don’t think that helps anyone. If you want to attack the championship tournament or people that play the games legitimately, you can take that toxicity to some other intellectual property. People are entitled to enjoy the games in whatever way they see fit.
References
Diaz, A. (2023, November 14). Why it’s OK that so many top pokémon players “cheat.” Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/pokemon/23955708/pokemon-scarlet-violet-cheating-scandal-competitive-explained
Jones, A. (2023, October 31). Pokemon World Championships were rocked by a “perfect storm” of trading glitches and anti-cheat rules, all because of Pokemon Legends arceus. gamesradar. https://www.gamesradar.com/pokemon-world-championships-were-rocked-by-a-perfect-storm-of-trading-glitches-and-anti-cheat-rules-all-because-of-pokemon-legends-arceus/
Middler, J. (2023, August 15). Pokémon players disqualified from World Championships for using Hacked Pokémon. VGC. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/pokemon-players-disqualified-from-world-championships-for-using-hacked-pokemon/
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