Korean Nationals finalists disqualified after protest

[Zowayix]

This happened 2 days ago but felt like it was worth making a post about. (I'd post in the VGC forum but there's been literally 1 post there in the last 3 weeks and this deserves more visibility.)

Sequence of events:

• May 14: Korean Nationals qualifier. Glitches in the game cause loops of rematches and other faulty behavior.
• May 17: Players who won are told that their results are now void, and that the qualifiers will be rerun on May 28.
• May 28: Korean Nationals qualifier rerun. (Players who got 5th-16th place go to Worlds Day 1 and players who got 1st-4th place go to the Korean Nationals Finals and Worlds Day 2.)
• Korean Nationals Finals are on June 3; players are told that the team lock deadline is June 1 9am.
• May 30 6pm (KST): Pokemon Home releases. This has an abrupt competitive change because Plates and some Egg Moves are now suddenly legal for the finals.
• May 30 11:10pm: Players are abruptly emailed that the team lock deadline is wrong and was supposed to be 24 hours earlier instead (May 31 9am), which is literally zero business hours notice. (Source) This forces players to rush to lock in their teams on time. It also says that Plates and the new Egg Moves are banned, so anyone who already locked in their team with those is screwed.
• May 31: The team lock deadline change is rescinded and extended.
• June 2: In protest at the above screwups, the four finalists lock in Metronome teams for the finals.
• June 3: The finalists are all disqualified, from not just Nationals but also Worlds. (Source)

Note that Korea is the only region to have been hit by all of the above screwups at once. Japan got hit by the rematch loop bug as well, but their Nationals aren't until June 10 so there was no abrupt team lock deadline on top of Home release legality confusion. Four other regions (Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines) also had Nationals on June 3-4 and were also hit by the team lock deadline switcheroo and Home release legality confusion, but they weren't also hit by the rematch loop bug.

Misinformation:

• There are some people claiming that the finalists were disqualified because their teams were hacked, or even that they locked in Pokemon who can't legally learn Metronome. This is false; all of the Metronome Pokemon were legal. However, the Metronome Pokemon were genned (all of them have identical height/weight/scale values).
• The disqualification message said nothing about hacked/genned Pokemon and instead referred to the Metronome movesets specifically. (There's a rule about match fixing, which has a specific clause including the deciding of a match by random means.)

Edit:
Apparently the screwups went a lot deeper than I thought. Here are several more things that went wrong:

• Qualifiers being abruptly changed to best-of-1 single elimination with three days notice, causing a ton of uncompetitive lucksacking (not to mention potential travel expenses risk)
• Rules being changed so that all disconnects force a rematch, with judges refusing to budge, even when it is very obvious that a losing player disconnected on purpose and even when so many people do it in a row that the tournament ends up lasting for 10 hours
• Players being abruptly told with no notice (or having to hear from previous players rather than officials) that they're not allowed to look at their opponent's team sheet during a game, when the tournament format is literally supposed to allow this (which suddenly turns the game into "memorize your opponent's team sheet really fast before the start of the game")
• In at least the Singapore and Philippines Nationals, the head official completely mixed up the concepts of "open team sheets" and "team preview", which abruptly changed the tournament format to closed team sheets 15 minutes before the first round
• Google Forms in emails that were set to private, causing everyone to get a "you don't have permission to view" message until 24 hours before the form closed
• Broken links in emails
• Some players not being told whether they qualified or not until 36 hours before Nationals, which is impossible if you need to book a flight or have other travel expenses
• A mandatory private Discord server that not everyone was sent invites to, causing people to have to scramble for invites from other players on their own, with numerous people not getting in until after 11pm the night before the tournament
• When players tried to bring up some of these issues with representatives, one representative left immediately in the middle of the first sentence, a second one said that changing the best-of-1 single elimination format was "impossible", and another one confirmed that 2024 Nationals qualifiers would also be best-of-1 single elimination.

Edit #2: Added several more to the above list.

Edit #3: In slightly different news, Chien Tsai (one of the Taiwan Nationals players) protested by nicknaming four of his Pokemon "Daddy TPCI", "Email sent 3 days before", "Bring back Swiss rounds", and "Reject single elimination". The nicknames were shown on stream for one game, after which a judge ordered him to turn on the "Hide Nicknames" option in the in-game settings. After he advanced to Day 2, during streamed player interviews he held up a protest sign saying "We hope that many players from Asia will take an active role in the scene" (a quote from a TPC official from 2022 used satirically, which players are picking up as a slogan). No other penalties were given.

 

[R_N]

Just an absolute clownshoes set of events the past couple weeks in this game huh

 

[Worldie]

I am find somewhat ironic that asian regions of all things are the ones being cursed by this situation.

We're here memeing TPCI for their oversea issues with advertising and the games, and the "insanely long deadtimes" during VGC streams (hey at least we have both official and partnered streams now), but the Korean and Japanese sections are really their own thing. In negative.

 

[R_N]

I am find somewhat ironic that asian regions of all things are the ones being cursed by this situation.

We're here memeing TPCI for their oversea issues with advertising and the games, and the "insanely long deadtimes" during VGC streams (hey at least we have both official and partnered streams now), but the Korean and Japanese sections are really their own thing. In negative.

Well per the rest of this information, the Japanese had the same bug but didn't have the full shitshow on display in Korea. So that's actually still TPCI, technically.

 

[Worldie]

Well per the rest of this information, the Japanese had the same bug but didn't have the full shitshow on display in Korea. So that's actually still TPCI, technically.

Is it, when I heard about this situation, I was under the impression that Korea has its own separated branch, and TPCI mainly deals with the western audience.

 

[bdt2002]

I haven’t been following this development too much, but in a weird, almost selfish way… I hope stuff like this continues to happen. I hope TPCi keeps burning themselves to the ground like this. Unfortunate as it may seem, change only happens within a greater population following times of hardship. I’ll spare you guys the economic politics, but TPCi’s (and to a lesser extent Game Freak’s) incompetence reminds me a lot of gaming market analysis from the early ‘80s, where for a while over-saturation of game development bundled with inflation and toxic company practices famously ended up killing the international home console market all the way until 1985.

What I’m starting to hope comes from this isn’t a change in product quality, because at the end of the day, I’d still say games like Scarlet & Violet are better than a lot of games on the market right now, as well as a step in the right direction over Sword & Shield. Situations like these feel more like an issue with management and who’s actually calling the shots with Pokémon’s development as an I.P..

 

[Worldie]

I’d still say games like Scarlet & Violet are better than a lot of games on the market right now

What really annoys me is the fact you're right.

These have been some pretty rough last 6 months for "AAA market"....

 

[bdt2002]

What really annoys me is the fact you're right.

These have been some pretty rough last 6 months for "AAA market"....

What makes this even funnier to watch unfold is that these companies always use the same crappy excuses for their actions. Blaming the pandemic for what happened to multi-million dollar corporations can only get you so far as a producer, especially when smaller game developers suffered a lot more from the pandemic because they had less to lose. Major AAA companies don’t seem to understand the fact that producers are consumers too, and that the economy will be at its strongest when product quality ensures consumers are paying for products they deserve instead of what we’re being given.

After the stunt that Tears of the Kingdom pulled (although to be fair, that game looks like the second coming of Christ compared to the sh** Pokémon’s been putting out on the Switch), I wouldn’t be too surprised to see the core series games raise to $70 USD on the Switch’s successor console whenever that releases. That begs the question: if current-generation products don’t feel like they’re worth $60 USD now, how good would a modern Pokémon game have to be to feel like a $70 price tag is justified? As far as I’m concerned, that game would have to be historically excellent.

(Christian jokes aside, the fact that ToTK and SV were games made for the same console is freaking hilarious.)

 

[Irpachuza]

More news on this matter...

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1667115097406451712

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1667115099184852992

And the cherry on top:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1667115101013544961

 

[Worldie]

Tbh, I don't think the disqualification per se is wrong.
Regardless of the reasoning, they did break competitive integrity by basically deciding to coinflip matches, on events that often have paying viewers / sponsors that paid money to watch actual content.

That said, the situation that led to the protest is still inexcusable and TPCKorea is doing their best to divert the attention.
It's not us providing a bad environment, it's the players that are toxic :)

 

[Irpachuza]

Tbh, I don't think the disqualification per se is wrong.
Regardless of the reasoning, they did break competitive integrity by basically deciding to coinflip matches, on events that often have paying viewers / sponsors that paid money to watch actual content.

I'd kinda agree with this logic if the ban didn't have a basically unprecedented indefinite term. As you mention, they already make a huge and demotivating stance regarding what they'll not allow as protests, but taking such a measure of this length to basically competitive staples of their country is not only a very dangerous precedent but a shot in both feet. Also frankly, this is the opposite of diverting attention, Korea literally will not have representatives going directly into Day 2.

 

[Makima]

Edit #3: In slightly different news, Chien Tsai (one of the Taiwan Nationals players) protested by nicknaming four of his Pokemon "Daddy TPCI", "Email sent 3 days before", "Bring back Swiss rounds", and "Reject single elimination". The nicknames were shown on stream for one game, after which a judge ordered him to turn on the "Hide Nicknames" option in the in-game settings. After he advanced to Day 2, during streamed player interviews he held up a protest sign saying "We hope that many players from Asia will take an active role in the scene" (a quote from a TPC official from 2022 used satirically, which players are picking up as a slogan). No other penalties were given.

On edit #3, it’s worth noting that the people who run Pokemon’s streams always ask the players on stream to turn off nicknames. If you’ve watched consistently this season, you would have noticed some matches with nicknames G1, but not in the game(s) after that. Although the player’s nicknames can be deemed controversial, this is standard practice and he would have been asked to turn off nicknames regardless of what they were.

Here is a recent example of this:
Hartford Top 4 - Sohaib Mufti vs. Ryan Haig
VOD - https://www.youtube.com/live/7pmXe0_Pdfk
Skip to 4:58:00 for match in question (couldn’t get timecode b/c mobile.

Game 1 the nicknames are on, and despite being inoffensive they are off game 2. This is likely to aid in casual/newer players’ (and viewers) understanding of the game b/c they are not as familiar with it as say this website’s community.

 

[trace]

personally the way TPC Asia has been treating the asian circuits have been nothing short of garbage for how inept they have been. too many problems happened with terrible response by the staffs team during the nats. i don't really want to talk too much about the drama but when you have drama about shit like intentionally disconnecting in a terrible position = rematch, shit isn't right because TPC Asia rulings in that position is to rematch, and how the national staffs somehow fucks up timezones with the japan timezone so round deadline is longer than it should be (2 hours instead of 1 hour)

also i think this screenshot by a PH Nats staff says enough about how much does TPC asia cares about the VGC scene at all

how hard is it to let a filipino speaker to help staff the nationals instead of outsourcing it to someone else?

 

[bdt2002]

I made something for this; personally I think this sounds like a really good deal

 

[doipy hooves]

Tbh, I don't think the disqualification per se is wrong.
Regardless of the reasoning, they did break competitive integrity by basically deciding to coinflip matches, on events that often have paying viewers / sponsors that paid money to watch actual content.

That said, the situation that led to the protest is still inexcusable and TPCKorea is doing their best to divert the attention.
It's not us providing a bad environment, it's the players that are toxic :)

I'd kinda agree with this logic if the ban didn't have a basically unprecedented indefinite term. As you mention, they already make a huge and demotivating stance regarding what they'll not allow as protests, but taking such a measure of this length to basically competitive staples of their country is not only a very dangerous precedent but a shot in both feet. Also frankly, this is the opposite of diverting attention, Korea literally will not have representatives going directly into Day 2.

For me, I thought the initial protest was warranted and the Metronome game would have been interesting to watch (maybe if they snuck it in with other moves rather than just Metronome it could have gotten past the match fixing rule), but the usage of 6IV hacked/genned mons was unnecessary for the purpose of only running Metronome and ended up just causing more problems than the time it saved. Making Metronome TMs isn't even that bad in SV since they're cheap LP-wise and Chansey/Igglybuff material is abundant. The "How we got disqualified for playing Metronome" tweet doesn't mention them so it didn't seem like the intended focus of the protest and should have had no impact on how the games or the protest would play out, but the whole genning thing became such a big talking point that overshadowed the real problem and caused telephone games to blur all the messages going around. I was reading through Kaphotics's thread and it seems like genning is taken so much for granted these days that the typical response was that "the teams were genned but everyone gens and the DQs were only said to be because of Metronome", which is actually what I think led to Pokemon Korea realizing that they genned in the first place.

If this was the real cause for our disqualifications, they could've stated it earlier. In earlier notice, they stated that all pokemons having one certain move(Metronome) was the main reason. Changing and adding reasons just now seems intentional.

I think this tweet has the right idea about what Pokemon Korea was going through to make this decision and I agree with the theory that Pokemon Korea probably had no idea any of the mons were genned and was not a reason for the initial DQs. However, when everyone's making a big deal about how they genned but that wasn't why they got punished, and Pokemon Korea is already pissed off and lashing out at competitors, then I could definitely imagine them seeing all of that and taking it as a free excuse to punish them even further. Overall to me it's kind of disappointing that the real problems the protest is happening for will be overshadowed by unnecessary genning that didn't even matter in the end.

As an aside I wasn't really a fan of the Metronome teams themselves, especially knowing that they were genned and could have been fully customized. Nash's team had no Ghost tera and missed the opportunity to have Grass tera Flower Veil Florges along with Arboliva. Bingha's Choice Band Symbiosis Florges with Booster Energy Iron Hands was the most inspired choice I noticed, but that team didn't even have any Ghost tera either, as well as running a random Wish Glaceon which could have at least run Copycat for the spirit of repeating the random moves that get called. The team I liked best was MiJa's who didn't have a full preview but it had Ghost Tera Iron Hands as well as Annihilape and Dragonite as solid picks, but it also had Palafin, so that's another team that just has 5 Metronome mons.

 

[Karxrida]

After the stunt that Tears of the Kingdom pulled (although to be fair, that game looks like the second coming of Christ compared to the sh** Pokémon’s been putting out on the Switch), I wouldn’t be too surprised to see the core series games raise to $70 USD on the Switch’s successor console whenever that releases. That begs the question: if current-generation products don’t feel like they’re worth $60 USD now, how good would a modern Pokémon game have to be to feel like a $70 price tag is justified? As far as I’m concerned, that game would have to be historically excellent.

I feel like it's important to note that Tears of the Kingdom is the first(?) Switch game to use a 32gb cartridge. And cartridge manufacturing prices are tied to their memory capacity. Better excuse than the rest of the industry's "because we can" price hike, which last I checked has actually had a negative impact on overall sales figures.