Pokémon (Not-So) Griefing Thread - Scarlet and Violet Released with 10 Million Copies in First 3 Days in Buggy States

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You know, for "the leading authority on Pokémon", Prof. Oak is actually kind of terrible at handling them:
I only bring it up because I love Ampharos' face:
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Just so happy to be here.
 
WelperHelper99 said:
My nephew is getting into Pokemon cards, gave him a deck recently; reminds me when I was his age lol. Pokemon cards have gotten powerful, everything in my old bucket of cards is basically useless, but that's power creep for you I guess.
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Nick Gars said:
I've been into the TCG on and off, and yeah, looking at old sets compared to new, the power creep is insane. I remember the old version of the OTCG having the "XY Evolutions" deck and wondering how the fuck, even during X/Y period, anyone was expected to pull a win with that deck. Older cards are like throwing a level 5 Starly at a level 100 Gigalith and expecting to win without extreme shenanigans. Hell, I remember when 120HP was considered a lot, now you're a scrub of your Pokemon doesn't have 300+ HP, have a busted deck control ability, and deal 200+ damage.
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To be fair XY - Evolutions set then that set was basically a Gen I wankfest with very few cards being viable (the only Pokémon I remember seeing any sort of competitive use were Dragonite-EX and, ironically enough, the Base Set Mewtwo “reprint”). That said you do have a point about the power creep, Creatures Inc. seems to be trying to dampen it a bit by making SV-era exs similar to RSE-era exs but there’s still the issue of attacks being doing 200+ damage and HP counts being around 300+ HP for certain Rule Box Pokémon.

But it is marginally better to get into the game in terms of cost and accessibility. You can easily build Lost Box, the current “top tier” competitive deck in the Standard format for less than 100 bucks and most decks are similar in terms of cost and it gets even cheaper when you factor in Pokémon’s official (but extremely buggy) online TCG app.
 
Archeops said:
To be fair XY - Evolutions set then that set was basically a Gen I wankfest with very few cards being viable (the only Pokémon I remember seeing any sort of competitive use were Dragonite-EX and, ironically enough, the Base Set Mewtwo “reprint”). That said you do have a point about the power creep, Creatures Inc. seems to be trying to dampen it a bit by making SV-era exs similar to RSE-era exs but there’s still the issue of attacks being doing 200+ damage and HP counts being around 300+ HP for certain Rule Box Pokémon.

But it is marginally better to get into the game in terms of cost and accessibility. You can easily build Lost Box, the current “top tier” competitive deck in the Standard format for less than 100 bucks and most decks are similar in terms of cost and it gets even cheaper when you factor in Pokémon’s official (but extremely buggy) online TCG app.
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Yeah the attack is nuts. I got my nephew this box set for 10 bucks, and it slaughters basically everything I had from 10 years ago
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My old Raquaza X could pull a 200 damage attack out, but it's cost was discarding all its energy. Now these new cards just spit that shit out like its nothing
 
I'm probably necroposting/breaking some kinda rule (by all means call me out if I am) , but a while back a guy called "FossilDiggerStudios" was on this thread, Yeah so fast forward a bit and I meet the guy, I had no clue about anything he did, we just had common interests, But I found his Steam/D.A/Tumblr accounts of anyone wants that, Now a days he's into pregnant cookie run characters.



 
I got curious as to when new DLC news might come out, so I went back to look at SwSh's marketing.

The first announcement of SwSh's DLC was on January 9th, 2020, with the first proper trailer coming two months later on March 20th(?). After that, there was only one more trailer sometime in May before IoA's release in mid-June. Crown Tundra followed a similar trajectory.

Seeing as Scarlet and Violet's marketing strategy has essentially boiled down to "exactly how Sword and Shield did it but we show almost nothing for half a year before dropping the game", I'm guessing it's going to just be a more spaced-out version of this. The DLC was announced on February 27th but we didn't get anything other than a few pieces of art until June 21st (when we got like 5 minutes of gameplay and no elaboration beyond version exclusives and a few names)… and the Teal Mask is releasing sometime in Fall. The timespan between information is much longer (2ish months between reveal and first trailer compared to 4 months) but the same amount of information is being shown (arguably even less than before, actually), so it doesn't seem totally implausible...

I'm expecting nothing until maybe late August or early September, and then a drop in probably late September or early October. If TPC wanted to be really cheeky and/or stupid, they could drop Teal Mask right before Halloween and release Indigo Disk sometime in January. I don't think that'll happen, especially considering the ever-important holiday window, but considering how the release dates are still super fucking vague nearly 5 months after the DLC's initial announcement and the obvious troubles Gamefreak are having with development I can believe that there might be a delay that necessitates it/the release dates still haven't been decided and they're just going to end up shitting the DLC out when it's "ready" (technically playable).

All this is to say: haha what the fuck is happening over at their HQ. How badly are they panicking/not caring. How is it that we're 4 months maximum from the first release and there still isn't a date yet. What even.
 
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Anonitolia said:
All this is to say: haha what the fuck is happening over at their HQ. How badly are they panicking/not caring. How is it that we're 4 months maximum from the first release and there still isn't a date yet. What even.
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Personal Opinion - the games launch was so fucked that The Big N looked at GameFreak and asked "the fuck is this shit". Yeah, it sold like hotcakes - it's fucking Pokémon, so no shit - but compared to other Big Name First Party Nintendo IP's, the games were an embarrassment on launch.

I have this mental image of Nintendo telling them to fix their shit before they put out any form of DLC, but because GameFreak has been coasting on name recognition since Gen 4/5 and have no real experienced talent on hand for what Scarlet and Violet are, they break at least 3 things for everything they "fix", so Nintendo is moving up to reminding them that Kneecaps are a Privilege.

My weird Mental Image aside - GameFreak makes a lot more sense if you think of them as Japanese Bethesda, just without modders to unfuck their shit.
 
Leaf Wage Slave Jr said:
I have this mental image of Nintendo telling them to fix their shit before they put out any form of DLC, but because GameFreak has been coasting on name recognition since Gen 4/5 and have no real experienced talent on hand for what Scarlet and Violet are, they break at least 3 things for everything they "fix", so Nintendo is moving up to reminding them that Kneecaps are a Privilege.
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I already rated you optimistic, but I'm going to reiterate because you really are being incredibly optimistic. Nintendo isn't going to do shit- if they didn't step in when Sword and Shield caused a massive uproar that we're still hearing about today (dexit posters still exist in every major community i've visited, they're just a little less rampant now) and also launched totally barebones with extremely subpar everything, they're not going to step in when Scarlet and Violet do the same thing but with more glitches and even more stripped-out shit. Especially considering that the games haven't sold this well since the originals on Gameboy, discounting the Expansion Pass' extra profits.

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TPCi and Gamefreak are the main people in charge of the brand and what it does, even if Nintendo is a big player, so they probably get the final say. And it's very very obvious to anyone who's been following the franchise since the start of its decline that they are the ones pushing for this constant schedule of "1 generation every 3 years with DLC/a third version/a remake" since gen 4's unforeseen delay, not Nintendo (especially considering things like BW2 still being on DSi in 2012 or the Pokémon company's retarded refusal to put a mainline game on a home console until the Switch- which they also thought would fail miserably).

They're the type to find something that works well in one context and stick to it until the day they fucking die, regardless of if it stops working nearly as well or starts actively hurting them (as if their game design, marketing strategies, and everything they do didn't scream that loud and clear already), so changing the course of this series will probably require either a hostile takeover or an outright purchase at worst.

…I really hope that what you proposed actually happens though. It's been a decade. I'm so tired. I just want to see my favorite franchise making quality products again instead of actively spitting on the idea of adequacy and excellence.
 
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Anonitolia said:
…I really hope that what you proposed actually happens though. It's been a decade. I'm so tired. I just want to see my favorite franchise making quality products again instead of actively spitting on the idea of adequacy and excellence.
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Trust me, I know I'm being incredibly optimistic, and I'm in the same boat where the soft spot I have for Pokémon makes me want SO much better for this series than what GameFreak and TPCi are shitting out. I'm hoping against hope that Nintendo is starting to get sick of their shit, considering the states other Big Name Nintendo releases come out in compared to this dumpster fire of a Gen's launch. It wouldn't be that much of a first for them - see Hyrule Warriors, where they watched those devs like a damn hawk and were probably ready to crucify them if they fucked up a LoZ game. GameFreak's now botched 2 major releases in a row insofar as quality.

I just want these games to not suck. That or Coliseum and XD remakes/remasters, but I feel that second one is asking for too much...
 
Leaf Wage Slave Jr said:
see Hyrule Warriors, where they watched those devs like a damn hawk and were probably ready to crucify them if they fucked up a LoZ game.
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That's Zelda, though, one of Miyamoto's golden boys and a 100% Nintendo IP. They wouldn't have to do any wrangling with third-parties or agreement with any other companies to get that series in tip-top shape. I don't think it's too fair a comparison when compared to Pokémon being wrapped up in (at minimum) 3 other companies outside of Nintendo.

I would argue that GF's botched more than 2 major releases in a row quite readily, too, but I'm also a curmudgeon with standards higher than the moon who's been extremely sour on the series since USUM so I won't lol

That aside...

Leaf Wage Slave Jr said:
I just want these games to not suck.
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Yeah.
I feel you man.
This shit sucks hard and I want it to stop. You probably want it to stop. The only people who don't want it to stop are the same people deepthroating corporate cock while making Bugsy trans, and even they are sort of turning around on things due to SV.

The worst part is frankly the fact that it hasn't stopped for so long- that the brand is permanently damaged now. I don't think there'll be any way to recover in terms of image, even if the series course-corrects immediately, until the next decade at least.

Two straight generations of obviously-rushed creature designs, power creep in the TCG (which, to be fair, began much earlier; I'm just mentioning it because it's gotten much much worse as of late),
the plethora of abandoned gimmicks that bloat the series alongside convoluted evolution methods and distribution techniques that make certain Pokémon unable to evolve outside of spin-offs (almost every PLA mon, Meltan, Gimmighoul) or very specific contexts within the games they were introduced in (Feebas post-Sinnoh, every location-based evolution, Runerigus, arguably Gimmighoul, Kubfu),
nearly 5 straight years of controversy, obvious paywalling of previously-free features (GTS, (most of the) National Dex, Apricorns in SwSh, walking Pokémon, game-exclusive Pokémon (Arceus, Mew in BDSP, Shaymin, Darkrai in PLA, Meltan, Roaming Gimmighoul), accessory-exclusive Pokémon (just Mew at the moment, in LGPE), online features in general, etc etc...),
subpar product quality since XY somewhat caused by everything aforementioned,
death of spin-offs outside of extremely scummy mobile games + association with Tencent via those mobile games,
almost everything that has ever come out of Masuda's mouth post-BW and Ohmori's post-XY (alongside whatever Tzunekaza is smoking)...

I don't think the series is going to be able to return to how good it used to be, is what I'm saying. Maybe to the fans it might get there (not the long-time ones, likely), but not anybody else. Even normies kind of think Pokémon is shit at this point- or at least shitty enough to facilitate the viral spread of SV memes and take asides to agree with their sentiment. They buy the games anyways, which is a big reason why the games are in this state in the first place, but I haven't seen as much positivity towards them as I used to.
 
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Anonitolia said:
I don't think the series is going to be able to return to how good it used to be, is what I'm saying. Maybe to the fans it might get there (not the long-time ones, likely), but not anybody else. Even normies kind of think Pokémon is shit at this point- or at least shitty enough to facilitate the viral spread of SV memes and take asides to agree with their sentiment. They buy the games anyways, which is a big reason why the games are in this state in the first place, but I haven't seen as much positivity towards them as I used to.
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Nail on the head there. As much of a soft spot as I have for Pokémon, Scarlet and Violet burnt through a LOT of that good will with the state they released in. Unfortunately, Pokémon's key audience is Children, and Autists - both of which will take basically anything, so we're fucked for the forseeable future.

At this point all I want from this series is remasters of the Gamecube titles, before my Gamecube finally gives up the ghost - no one builds shit like they used to, I could probably bludgeon someone to death with that thing and it'd probably work better for it. Unfortunately, I accept that that's probably a pipe dream, but let me hope.
 
Leaf Wage Slave Jr said:
Nail on the head there. As much of a soft spot as I have for Pokémon, Scarlet and Violet burnt through a LOT of that good will with the state they released in. Unfortunately, Pokémon's key audience is Children, and Autists - both of which will take basically anything, so we're fucked for the forseeable future.

At this point all I want from this series is remasters of the Gamecube titles, before my Gamecube finally gives up the ghost - no one builds shit like they used to, I could probably bludgeon someone to death with that thing and it'd probably work better for it. Unfortunately, I accept that that's probably a pipe dream, but let me hope.
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yeah, it sucks. The most we can do at this point is pray that some of the new designs are good while we watch the rest of the series crash and burn but never disintegrate due to everyone insisting that it's fine.

On a (slightly) less depressing note, I finished Infinite Fusions last night.
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I was going to do a regular Modern Mode playthrough, but I got about 3 gyms in before breaking down and becoming completely obsessed with min-maxing to a point where I couldn't enjoy the game anymore. I restarted the game on a randomizer (to make things more challenging) and forced myself to only use one fusion per route (that I'd get by catching the first two Pokémon I hadn't already caught on each route and fusing them together; I wasn't allowed to catch wild fusions) and it went much more smoothly.

I honestly can't say the game is good, though. It has almost nothing going for it outside of the mostly-great spritework on the custom fusions.

A lot of the map design has gotten worse (long stretches of encounter grass that can only be dodged through repel spam, every Strength puzzle was made much longer but no less complicated so it just becomes tedious, multiple quests that encourage the use of speed-up because they involve mashing A upwards of 10 times in a row),
the story tries to be more serious but still relates to Team fucking Rocket so it gets mildly urgent at best,
most of the game has been made more linear but it still has plenty of difficulty spikes (Koga, Zaptrescuno (which is also the dumbest bullshit I've seen in a fangame in a WHILE), Giovanni's gym battle, Pokémon Mansion for some reason) so there's little benefit to having done that,
and Modern Mode puts Azurill on the second fucking route which makes the game absolutely piss easy (even despite the aforementioned difficulty spikes) unless you actively opt not to use it.

That's not even bringing up the subpar spriting outside of the custom fusions. The female player character is a travesty- she runs like a partial paraplegic and doesn't have proper fishing sprites (the game switches between not showing the rod and using her normal in-game surfing sprite to using the FRLG fishing sprite and not changing the player character model to stylistically fit it), many new tiles don't fit the region's theming or just look bad (special shout-out to the generic beach right next to the spooky bog)...

The game is, also, still broken. Just because it's playable now doesn't mean it's not. I'd argue it's even more broken than SV, by a mile- abilities have failed to work multiple times,
several items either lag the game or cause errors when used (healing my mon with a Banana brought up an error log and forced the opponent to skip a turn),
even more items just don't work outright (Gender Stones have no effect on Fusions even if the fusions have gender, most of the new Pokeballs don't show up next to a Pokémon's name after being caught and some of them don't activate their additional effects randomly (Virus Ball, Candy Ball) , Secret Potions cannot be used and do not activate when given despite being in the medicine pocket and having medical effects),
screen transitions regularly fail to activate,
there are invisible walls everywhere and I can walk through walls that I shouldn't be able to,
and my game crashed 5 separate times throughout my playthrough with seemingly no prompting either in battle or when entering a location.
It's worth noting that plenty of these errors also occurred on Modern Mode, so I don't think it's a Randomizer thing.
Loading times were also abysmal on my fresh PC and using the version of the game where it only downloads the sprites it needs, frequently taking up to a minute to load the title screen and sometimes taking as long as 5.

The soundtrack is bad enough that I turned it off after my first playthrough. For reference, I never do this. Unfortunately, almost every single area in this game has shitty GlitchXCity-tier remixes of otherwise-simple tunes, and they all sound overly loud and bloated. Some of the tracks are ripped straight from HGSS- those tend to be the better ones- but many of them are normal-sounding songs that don't use the same soundfont so they clash and sound terrible to the ear when put in the same game as the obviously DS-oriented HGSS tracks.

The script is also bad, but I've already mentioned that. Characters are frequently missing punctuation/have too much punctuation (or they're just speaking Discord. I've seen ,,, more times than I'd like to admit, so it's possible), spelling errors abound (abandonned is a very frequent example), and it seems like nobody proofread anything before putting it into the game.

I will say, however, that I was impressed by the amount of content in the game. Aside from the fusions and the plethora of new pokeballs, they really crammed a lot in here. Voltorb Flip, 50 or so side quests (several of which included unique mini-games), rematches for almost every single trainer in the region, HM replacements, unique sprites for almost everyone in the gen 5 style, Johto and the Sevii islands alongside a new city and multiple new areas in Kanto... it's definitely admirable, and I found myself very busy with the game. The improvements made to Voltorb Flip specifically also taught me that I don't dislike that game, I just dislike how it was implemented in HGSS. Lol.

The custom fusion sprites are also really really fucking good. That goes without saying, but seriously- some of these mon have the prettiest galleries i've seen in ages. Any Porygon fusion (from any member of the line), any Smeargle fusion... Jirachi, Golurk, Clefable, Reuniclus, Aegislash, Starmie, Torterra, Cofagrigus, Chandelure, Genesect, Rapidash, Ditto, Magnezone, fucking Klinklang- these are mon with extremely strong themes and extremely unique concepts that integrate brilliantly into new Pokemon, and I swear some of these things were made to be fused. Almost every single fusion with these guys in them is incredibly creative and INCREDIBLY well done. I had to force myself not to make entire teams out of their fusions Some of this spritework could be official, it's insane how high-quality it is. I sort of wish it stayed more consistent on that front, but even the worst sprites still look really really good imo.
(I would also mention Miltank in that lineup, but almost all of its sprites are very obviously lactation fetish shit. Just avoid that thing if you want to have something that looks decent.)

Here's a sampling of some of my favorites from when I was trying to make a team in the Modern Mode playthrough. I purposely excluded Legendaries because I thought they were all postgame (they aren't) and tried to stick to stuff that didn't overlap in type... but most of what I ended up liking was Steel-type anyways so that attempt kind of failed lol.
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You can also view all of them here if you want to. They're so fucking good. I'd recommend you waste an afternoon or two just browsing through them if you're bored.

Overall, the game only exists to let you gawk at some really good spritework. You can get that exact same experience by browsing the sprite repository (which I will link again just to make sure that everyone goes and looks through it) with a lot less annoyance, and I'd recommend avoiding the game unless you thought SV was acceptable. It really sucks that those games were so bad that they're arguably on-par with a fan attempt at redoing KANTOOO in terms of how well-optimized they are.
 
New short released to promote the world championships. Looks neat.
Has a slight case of ADHD since it’s only a minute long, but I like how it looks and the fact that they tailored (most) of what showed up to actual competitive builds (instead of solely focusing on shillmon).
 
Anonitolia said:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-3p5O0GaJZINew short released to promote the world championships. Looks neat.
Has a slight case of ADHD since it’s only a minute long, but I like how it looks and the fact that they tailored (most) of what showed up to actual competitive builds (instead of solely focusing on shillmon).
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You know, I think they would have been better served with floating shiny text on a black background in between shots instead of using this shitty VA. Her voice hurt my ears.
 
No builds right now: I am busy with ArtFight.

However, I still managed to shorten the Fog Up animation (though I may need to do something abou that background) and fixed a bug where a description that overflows the box boundaries ends up leaving artefacts on the box.
However, there are a couple of bugs. Not only does having Kurt make a ball cause a fade to black that does not disappear until you leave his house, but attempting to give a Pokémon an item freezes the game upon the fade to white.
Another problem is my attempting to give Pokéballs their own palettes, but pokegold may be using a different algorithm from pokecrystal, since the catching animatio now glitches the bottom of the Pokéball.
 
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