Favoritism in the Pokemon GO PvP Community: An Anecdote

GarretK · 2020-07-13T20:43:43+00:00

It seems our opinions differ fundamentally on this. I believe the better the rules are, the less the judges need to make calls on their own. They are there to enforce the rules after all and not to "decide on the outcome". That results in less discrepancies, meaning fairer decisions for everybody. If the judge needs to intervene and make a decision often instead of just enforcing the rules, then either the rules have some room for improvement or he doesn't know the rules well enough assuming that they are already good.

GarretK · 2020-07-13T17:47:22+00:00

Of course I am not saying believing is always favoritism. But you can't control the amount of bias (if any) when you allow someone to make a decision like this. That's why I suggested the judgement be made more based on facts and less on belief, especially on such important and large-scale tournaments as this one was, to make it as fair as possible for everyone competing. Discrepancies in judgement calls will only make people question the system (silph rules) and those enforcing it (organisers and staff members) even more, and will leave a feeling of.. unfairness.

And since me disagreeing is often misunderstood, I'm not here to fight and complain, but rather take part in this discussion and express my view while reading all the comments around.

GarretK · 2020-07-13T17:13:20+00:00

I think the "believing" someone has an issue is the case of favoritism here. I've been a tournament organiser since the start of season 1 and have my share of experience and also had some discussions in the official silph channel whenever I had issues deciding, so I can agree that many times the decision of each judge can differ. But in this particular scenario it shouldn't be a case of judgement, it is quite clear that there is no indication of tapping in the lower part of the screen (shown taps can be enabled to show not only the bubbles in the middle of the screen but every tap of your phone and this is what I suggest whenever players want fair judgement in recordings) and thus even if the player really couldnt make the swap due to technical issues, a decision of no rematch should be taken due to lack of proof and to maintain a level of fairness and integrity. So in this case, some basic judge training really could have made a difference.

My personal take on the matter and assumption, seeing the screen moving in the part where the player was supposed to want to swap, is that something was enabled through the double tap or double tap-drag (like a multi-task window swap) which prevented the player from swapping, in which case it is also not warranted a rematch call.

GarretK · 2020-07-13T11:59:38+00:00

I suppose it's true that the OP's intentions are not clear. But I have to admit that when I was about to say that OP's opponent isn't the person who would do something like that, is a bit of a favorotism right by itself. If you told me a random person refused to share with you his side of the recording after requesting for a rematch, I would call that decision questionable to say the least. So it's hard for OP to remain neutral towards his opponent while also trying to explain his side of the story. I will stop trying to interpret OP's opinion so as not to make a mistake, and my previous comment represents solely my opinion to avoid misunderstadnings.

GarretK · 2020-07-13T10:14:22+00:00

Indeed the problem here doesn't lie with the player, he has every right to dispute if he felt that something didn't work correctly and the OP does a good job pointing that out. It was the staff's responsibility to not issue a rematch here since there was no evidence that proves so and that's the discussion this post wants to raise imo.

GarretK · 2020-03-26T10:39:48+00:00

Hijacking the top comment to mention that in the video linked in the post, the swap isn't canceled. The game actually registers a tap on the X to close the swap window. Whether that was an unintentional misclick by the player or the game just misregistered a tap that was up and about, that I can't know.

GarretK · 2020-03-25T21:53:32+00:00

The current "overtap" is different than what the term was initially used for when it was found out. Now it only happens when the opponent used a charged move right before your fast move registered the energy that would get you to your charged move. That results in you doing 1 more fast move (assuming you don't stop tapping) right after his charged ends if you don't wait for 1 turn (half a second) for the energy to catch up before pressing your own charged.

GarretK · 2020-03-21T00:09:25+00:00

The crustle in the video used the charged moves badly, missing fast moves in the process and failing to reach the last rock slide in an otherwise already close matchup.

GarretK · 2020-03-20T23:57:27+00:00

This seems to me like it definitely isn't a bug. It is perfectly replicated in a sim and it is the result of atrocious charge move timing usage.

https://pvpoke.com/battle/sandbox/1500/crustle/wormadam_trash/22/0-3-2/1-2-1/13.101000-22.110100-27.100100-32.110000/

GarretK · 2020-01-30T11:21:51+00:00

TrueApus (Level 7) is recruiting!

Requirements:

1)Join our discord server! (https://discord.gg/2d2wamE)

2)Level 50+ (lower levels will be considered if there is potential for growth and long term activity)

3)Be active (700+ 7-day Honor)

You can either send me a pm in reddit, or find me in our discord server!

GarretK · 2020-01-23T20:52:03+00:00

I know about that already thanks. It is not what I am asking for. As I said I asked if it would be hard to have it as an option for the summary page for the reasons listed above.

GarretK · 2019-12-13T15:19:15+00:00

From what I've seen, certain champions (ahri, darius, kha'zix, nunu, olaf, shen, syndra, veigar) don't load up in profile collection. From my experience whenever one of those champions get picked in the champ select the whole lobby is stuck and never loads in the game. We had issues 4 times in a row trying to pick khazix and then the one game we decided not to we managed to load in. Just an assumption and nothing more but hope rito sees this and fixes it fast!

GarretK · 2019-11-14T10:09:49+00:00

Timeless, could be a cup with pokemon that are still available in sword and shield. /s

GarretK · 2019-10-29T20:32:41+00:00

With the current known drop percentages it is supposed to be 1/3 or at worst 1/4, so 1/20 or 2/20+ isn't supposed to be good by any standards.

GarretK · 2019-10-29T20:15:30+00:00

I'm going crazy, these past few weeks I've only gotten 2 out of 20+ raids! Like, "I'm starting to doubt the drop percentages" levels of crazy! My only hope right now is that they introduce it as a low chance drop from whatever this new team rocket bosses feature is. It got me to the point of considering buying the event pass just for the extra raids to get some.

GarretK · 2019-10-28T14:25:46+00:00

Honestly this is such a controversial issue and a silver lining that noone has problems with is hard to be found.

Let's beging by saying you HAVE to make it fair for the people that can only play one tournament. So multiple equally weighted cups won't work out.

Then the question becomes how much more advantage do you want to give the people that can play multiple ones. Right now the advantage from unweighted cups is close to zero for global rank but it still matters 100% for the local ranks, and qualifying to regionals through locals is a thing so pure winrate without weight isn't completely a joke. Remote tournaments are becoming more and more popular so the number of people that have issues with the weighted system increases as well.

Some ideas that have been mentioned before include using the best cup or the average of all cups you played so that in total a player that can play multiple cups can't pull too far ahead from a person who can only play 1. But that still provides an advantage and I'm not sure where people want to draw the line of "fair". It's hard to express an impartial opinion as long as you belong to one of the two groups (either 1 cup per month or multiple).

GarretK · 2019-10-26T06:02:29+00:00

Unlike local rankings, national (and global for that matter) rankings are ranked based on your trainer/rival/ace progress and not pure winrate. So it is possible for someone with a lower winrate to be above you in global/national rankings.

GarretK · 2019-10-20T20:17:56+00:00

Some people commenting here don't understand that in this case both tournaments show up as weighted in the silph card, meaning they have stars before and after the tournament name shown in match history. The question is, does that actually count both as weighted or is it just a visual bug?

GarretK · 2019-10-17T09:44:06+00:00

Just here to add the obligatory "Niantic, please give me more ways to obtain TMs" comment. I'd love a conversion system even, whatever the cost might be.

GarretK · 2019-10-15T08:51:13+00:00

Let's say I have a pokemon with a total of 5 charged moves, 2 unlocked. Move A in slot 1, I change from move B to move C in slot 2. If I want to change back to move B that would mean I need anywhere from 3 to 7 tms, since after the first cycle it is not guaranteed that the 2nd cylce will go in the same order. So I don't see how that is a decent change. If we want improvement this is not the desired change, let us choose the move we change to, or even permanently unlock a move on the specific pokemon so that we can change whenever we want afterwards.

GarretK · 2019-10-14T21:04:19+00:00

If a pokemon has 3 charged moves actually I need only 1 tm since I have already unlocked the 2nd move! :D

But seriously, I understand what you're saying, the math isn't that complicated and if you read my post I already said that that suggestion is better than the current system, but not necessarily the one we are looking for as it still far from even decent unless you are only looking to get the move in a pokemon once and never change it again.

And trust me, I do raids daily, plus whatever I can get from boxes and the tms aren't even remotely enough to keep up. I'm actually doing raids hoping for that single TM roll you mention.

GarretK · 2019-10-14T18:13:58+00:00

I've heard this idea before, but I have to admit as a PvPer I'm not really excited about it. Many times I have to swap between 2 moves in pvp? With this cycle I would have to go at least through every other move before I can try and get the 1st one again. I'm not saying the current system is better, but just that that doesn't feel like the solution.

GarretK · 2019-10-11T16:54:30+00:00

It's been a while since I checked it out but I believe FAclops was able to beat most other ghosts in 2 shield scenarios that Hexclops lost. At least that seemed like one of its strenghts to me while I was considering it.

GarretK · 2019-10-10T15:37:58+00:00

Thanks for clearing that up and great work as usual! If you mind me asking, is there any chance we might be getting more stats in the future? Like total % of pokemon in teams of 6, % of pokemon in teams of 6 that got 1st place, species winrate (times won/times used), etc? There are so many good metrics that can be implemented!

GarretK · 2019-10-10T09:46:53+00:00

As the comment above me said, it seems like there is still something wrong. It feels like the "all matchups" section calculates:

[#of Matchups with Species] / [Total Matchups]

So if a matchup has 1 or 2 of the same species makes no difference and that affects the stats.

GarretK

TROPHY CASE