Wifi: Why We Do What We Do

By Rosie_The_Venusaur. Art by unfixable.

Introduction

Wi-Fi is one of the biggest rooms on PS, with over 400+ users at peak times. Being a staff member of Wi-Fi is not just modding and banning, but also doing things like cloners tests, updating cloners lists, giveaways, scam reports, trying to return scammed Pokémon, EV trainers tests, breeders list maintenance, answering questions, ban appeals, mass GTS giveaways, running monthly tournaments, hack detection, answering questions about room rules, teaching people how to build a trade list, checking every trade list that is posted in the chat, staff interviews, dictating policy, determining policy, and likely 200 other things that I can't think of off the top of my head. All in all, it's pretty stressful. I'm not complaining, though. In fact, I love what I do, and so do the rest of the staff.

The Bad

Sure, there are aspects of being Wi-Fi staff I don't love. I could do without being harassed in PMs and other chatrooms by permabanned scammers and PM spammers, being scammed myself, complicated scam reports where two people are accusing each other of scamming, generally rude and argumentative people in the chat that drive me up the wall, being hated by the majority of our userbase because of our rules, inter-staff communication issues, and even issues amongst the staff. And it doesn't make it any better that this is mixed in with three giveaway requests a minute, two scam reports every five minutes, and ten people asking questions about this, that, or the other. All of this is going on while we try to do our own stuff too, like cloning, breeding, and trading, so it can get pretty chaotic.

But as I'm writing this, I'm sitting here smiling because I know that there's a reason why I, and the rest of the staff, put up with all of that.

First, let me explain why Wi-Fi often gets some pretty terrible users. We have rules that are there for a reason. People disagree with these rules whether it be hacking, abusing formatting or anything else. This is all normal. However things get dicey because, unlike most other chatrooms, we're dealing with something that happens outside of Showdown, that being the exchange of Pokémon. People get very defensive when it comes to their capsule monsters, and it often shows in their aggressive attitudes. Beyond the normal "Why did you mute me for spamming the word 'AIDES' 53 times?" we get a lot of users who believe that they are entitled to special treatment due to their prowess at trading and whatnot. But enough complaints, let's get on to the meat and bones of this article.

The Good

Let me tell you a story. A few months ago, Wi-Fi decided to do its first mass giveaway for one of the first legitimate Diancie available to the public. We had gotten our hands on and cloned the hell out of a Diancie from Diancie and the Cocoon of Destruction, which was obtained on the first day that Diancie was legally tradeable: it was the first Diancie that was tradeable over Wi-Fi. So naturally, we decided to share the love (and also distribute that diamond so that people weren't doing insane trades for it; 10:1 trades are 75% of the time scams) and distribute it out. We gave out over 1000 of them. Obviously, there were complainers: "It isn't 6IV" or "It's Adamant". However, they were eclipsed by the overwhelming gratitude that we received from traders across the world, who were now able to collect and use a rare Pokémon. A normal Saturday morning had turned completely chaotic by everyone and their shiny Greninja waiting to get their hands on a Diancie.

Giveaways

Leading up tothe ORAS release, the Wi-Fi room had a brief series of GTS mass giveaways. Basically, 800-1200 shiny self-bred RSE and ORAS Megas were traded over the GTS, every Sunday afternoon over a series of weeks. It was a lot of fun doing these special GTS giveaways for the Wi-Fi room, and we even got a feature in the Pokémon Showdown! news. However, for some time zones it was hard to participate in these giveaways because they would usually take place durring the afternoon in America, which made it hard for users from other countries to get them.

The Wi-Fi room chose an RSE Pokémon theme in order to get everyone hyped for Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. The most popular Pokémon that was given away would have to be a shiny perfect Hidden Power Rock Treecko nicknamed "Geico". There was also a shiny Hidden Power Ground Swablu nicknamed "Skypiea" and a shiny Dream Ball Cacnea nicknamed "Cactusl00ver" to name a few. 800 to 1200 of each Pokémon were given out over a series of weekends.

Giveaways are an integral part of the Wi-Fi room. The cloners of the Wi-Fi room are compelled each month in order to do a monthly giveaway to stay on the cloners list. We have three main types of giveaways: questions, lottos, and GTS giveaways. We used to do these giveaways with the /wall command, but it was long and tedious, and sometimes we'd have to wait for unresponsive people. Questions were by far the easiest to do before the giveaway script was implemented. A staff member would introduce a giveaway, ask the question, and then announce the winner. Lottos took more time to do, as a staff member would have to introduce it, get the users to PM the person doing the giveaway their Friend Codes, get the person doing the giveaway to block PMs in 2-3 minutes, and then randomly select and announce the winner. In contrast, GTS giveaways are pretty easy to do, so it's a popular giveaway option if the person doing the giveaway wants to give away a lot of Pokémon at a time.

We also have a new giveaway script that was recently implemented in the Wi-Fi room. The person doing the giveaway still has to PM a Driver or above in order to start the giveaway, but it's taken a great deal of stress off of the person doing the giveaway (no more Friend Code PMs or answers to questions!) and it's taken stress off the Wi-Fi staff because they only have to input commands now.

Conclusion

There isn't really enough time to talk about everything that the Wi-Fi staff deal with on a day-to-day basis, this is just a small glimpse; but ever since that Diancie giveaway, I've become more and more aware of how, for me, Wi-Fi is a place where we can help foster these experiences and make them realities. Yes, I still help people evolve their Haunter into Gengar while being screamed at by a scammer, because I know that the joy brought to people is so much greater than the comparatively minuscule amount of stress we auth have to put up with. What auth in Wi-Fi, and indeed auth in Showdown as a whole, have created is a space where users can come and create memories, pass time, chat, make up strange and unheard of movesets for Pokémon, crack bad jokes or puns, vent, or simply swap Pokémon. No auth is auth for the sake of power: if that was their sole motivation, then they would have quit long ago, because the job isn't worth it just for power. Whether it's a love of policy, meeting new people from around the world, hanging out with friends, being remembered, or simply the game, we do what we do because, frankly, we love it.

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