Proposal Editing PP on Showdown

[z0mOG]

First of all, I don't know if this thread is better meant for policy review or the Pokemon Showdown forum, so if a mod needs to move this please do.

A month ago, I was playing for day 2 of a regional in a game 3. Landorus-I vs encore Whimsicott, and I find myself in a position where I have to protect my Landorus to survive the hit from the ally as I knock said ally out with my other slot. I then find myself in a Landorus vs Whimsicott 1v1. I get encored into protect, and thanks to a couple of double protects, I manage to run out of protect PP, ending my encore, and I knock out the Whimsicott when I was one moonblast away from a knockout. The only reason that was possible? I didn't bother to use 3 PP ups on my Landorus' protect before the tournament. I ran out of protect 4 turns early because of it. 2 PP ups and I lose the game 3 and my tournament run ended. Which also means... if this game was on Showdown, where all PP is maxed by default, my tournament run also ended here.

Obviously this was a 1 in 50,000 type of game. It makes me think though, that PP ups should be customizable on Showdown to match cart accuracy. Obviously the highest amount of PP on a move would be the default, but adding an option that looks like this really does no harm and only good to account for those 1 in 50,000 type games.

Here's what it could look like roughly:

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[a fairy]

Yeah. It's just a matter of making the code and UI work, it's been approved as a Suggestion before. https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/allow-moves-to-have-non-max-pp.3653621/

 

[DerpySuX]

Just adding that this is a fringe thing in bss but it has been done before. it would be nice to see this implemented to have strategies like this available for testing

 

[Fear]

This could also allow us to potentially implement clauses that nerf blatantly broken moves in old gens, which were later adressed by gamefreak in future generations. The one example I have in mind for GSC is Recover, that has 32 when PP maxed (20 Recovers with a no PP Up clause potentially could allow examining Ho-oH and Celebi in OU)

 

[Star]

we will not be doing that^

On a more serious note I won’t pretend to be an rby super-expert but it does kinda sound like this change would necessitate a suspect/ban on wrap/trapping moves since it takes away the only way (other than praying for a miss) to really play around them. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though, just is what it is and I do think this should be implemented.

 

[Teclis]

I don't know whether this is waiting for a PS Admin reply, but just in case:

First of all, I don't know if this thread is better meant for policy review or the Pokemon Showdown forum, so if a mod needs to move this please do.

Although Policy Review has offered it a better visibility by veteran players, everything related to Showdown's features should indeed be a suggestion in this forum: https://www.smogon.com/forums/forums/suggestions.517/ as it is up to our technical staff's approval...

Yeah. It's just a matter of making the code and UI work, it's been approved as a Suggestion before. https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/allow-moves-to-have-non-max-pp.3653621/

...and as a fairy pointed out the principle itself is fine. While from what I've understood it is not necessarily nightmarish to handle code wise, any change to the teambuilder UI (as proposed by z0mog above) is subject to extreme caution. chaos suggested yesterday that given the fairly niche usage it could start by having PP numbers being editable in the import (the same way you can, say, set a Pokémon to level 999 in Custom Battles for those of you who are familiar with it); food for thought for any developer who would want to work on this.

tldr: principle/policy wise ok, just needs someone who has some free time to dedicate to making it work code wise. this thread served as a nice bump to the topic, but I can't promise anything on any PS dev's behalf - they all are doing a lot of work already. in the future, please post in the og suggestion thread linked above.

 

[Hipmonlee]

Uhh.. my post got deleted, so I guess I was wrong about this having been an offical decision.

Anyway, there is absolutely no competitive advantage whatsoever to allowing fewer than max pp ups in RBY except to abuse wrap rollovers. So there is a trivial solution to this for RBY which is to just enforce max PP ups (which is the status quo).

For some reason? this is a controversial opinion? I guess???

[Edit] - And a note for whoever deleted my post, having gone back and found the discussion, it was clearly _not_ an informal discussion. It was an official discussion between council members on the ruling, which the majority of the council at the time agreed with. We just never made an announcement.

 

[Star]

It wasn't an official decision given it was discussed by 3 ppl on the council 2 years ago (2 of whom have since stepped down) and it was never brought up in public or with leadership.

Anyway, I'm not vetoing this or anything if it's what the (super)majority of RBY players actually want, but I personally think clausing PP ups wouldn't be the best solution. If/when this gets implemented and if people think Wrap/partial trapping is a problem I think there should be a public thread/survey/vote on how to tackle it. Personally, I think that while RBY does have some weird clauses due to all the bugs in the game, we shouldn't just default to adding more of them. In my opinion, this is a situation where we should just follow general policy and tackle what's actually (potentially) broken, which is partial trapping and not the PP Up item.

Also not directly relevant, but I must say I also find it kinda weird that the same ppl arguing for a sleep lose condition because it's "a trivial way to make the game more cart-accurate" also want to add a clause to enforce max PP Ups.

 

[Hipmonlee]

Nevertheless, there is a trivial solution that has no competitive downside that has already been agreed in principle by the rby council. I am happy for alternative solutions to be proposed, but, for the purpose of this thread ("should showdown implement PP editing?") the issue of wrap rollovers in rby should be a non-factor.

Also not directly relevant, but I must say I also find it kinda weird that the same ppl arguing for a sleep lose condition because it's "a trivial way to make the game more cart-accurate" also want to add a clause to enforce max PP Ups.

Taking this bait because IMO re-enforcing the philosophy of cart accuracy is always a good idea.

When I advocate for cart accuracy, I am simply advocating for a game that I have the option to play on a cartridge with a link cable. So a rule like "you must have max pp ups" is trivial to follow in a cartridge battle. A rule like "sleep moves will always fail when your opponent has another pokemon slept by a move you used" is not. And note that it doesnt have to be trivial, for instance the undo button is the classic example where recreating it on a cart requires having neutral adjudicators entering peoples moves. But, the upside is high and I could practically see myself playing on cart this way. As opposed to repeatedly recreating battles millions (billions? trillions?) of times until we get the exact rng we need so that sleep always fails when we need it to.

I also like the ruleset to be simple, this goal is sometimes in conflict with the first goal, such as in this case. Enforcing max pp ups is a somewhat complex rule. It is by no means the most complex rule that we have, even in just RBY. And the upside of it is that a whole class of moves don't end up with effectively infinite PP*. I think its a pretty good trade-off.

And furthermore, I like the game to be competitive. Which is also often in conflict with the above two rules. So for instance, I think that the ADV switching patch is a good ruling, despite being very complicated and impossible to recreate on cart. I am also comfortable with the counter patch and freeze clause, though I would also be perfectly happy if both were removed. I also would be totally happy with patching the hyperbeam freeze interaction, though I am also fine with it being used to force draws.

* (ok, for the pedants, it isnt quite that bad, but its still a turd of a scenario any way you split it)