An official Pokemon Scarlet & Violet tournament in Korea was cancelled due to the four participating players locking in teams that only knew Metronome. Read on to learn more.
Korean Pokemon Tournament Cancelled
Top 4 Players Invited For Worlds Disqualified
On June 3, 2023, Korean Video Game Championship (VGC) player Nash made a tweet. It contained a screenshot of an email by The Pokemon Company (TPC) in Korea which basically said that he, along with with his fellow players, were all disqualified from the four-player event due to:
- An act of causing harm to other participants or giving an offensive image
- Other actions that Nintendo CO., Ltd. and TPC (and its subsidiaries) deem inappropriate
TPC sent that email just a few days before a Pokemon Scarlet & Violet tournament where he, Blue (replaced with Betago), Sangyoon, and Mija were supposed to participate in. Consequently, the tournament, essentially a Nationals in terms of TPC International's standards, was also canceled because all four participants were disqualified. In addition, their invite for the Day 2 of the 2023 Pokemon World Championships was also revoked. This event caused a wave of outcries from VGC players and the Pokemon community as a whole.
How Did This Happen?
To adequately describe the events that led to this, the way Korea holds events to qualify players for the Pokemon World Championships (PWC) must first be explained.
Before COVID struck, Korea used to have three real-life events that led to the Finals, which gave players CP depending on their placements. This CP was then used to decide whether the player was eligible for an invite to the PWC. But when the pandemic struck, PWC was canceled and didn't come back until 2022, when it was held in ExCel London, England. During the lull in the competitive scene, TPC Korea only gave one online double-elimination tournament (Trainer's Cup) every year.
But during 2022, even with PWC being held again, real-life events in Korea never continued. Instead, they continued to hold the yearly Trainers Cup tournament without a word regarding PWC. And then, after the event, TPC Korea suddenly announced that the top 4 of the Trainers Cup were invited to PWC. This meant the players had no idea they were competing for slots to enter PWC until the event had already concluded.
A year later, TPC Korea maintained silence again until they announced their qualifiers in March. Note that the PWC is an annual event held every August, so the players only had barely six months to prepare. For comparison, Regional tournaments had been announced in the US, Canada, Europe, Latin America, and Oceana, the areas TPC International cover, since as early as September of 2022, giving them almost a year of preparation.
The Korean 2023 circuit followed a set of guidelines as written in Victory Road. To put it shortly, the top 50 Korean players from three different Global Challenges, also online events, will be invited to the Trainer's Cup. In total, 150 qualified. Then, during the Trainer's Cup, the 150 players competed for the 16 slots available to compete in PWC, with the top 4 players getting an invite for Day 2 of PWC and the rest for Day 1. The tournament involved having to play ten best-of-one matches in a row. The top 4 were also invited for a Trainer's Cup Finals, where they could win travel rewards, such as flights and accommodation.
Why Metronome?
The Korean format, particularly for 2023, to qualify for PWC has many issues. The first one is apparent upon first hearing the date TPC Korea made its announcement. Starting from March is too late to properly prepare, whereas TPC International had already set their events as early as September of last year.
Pokemon VGC 2016 World Champion Wolfe Glick uploaded a video detailing the issues the Korean players faced during their circuit, which included only having to play ten best-of-one games, the players not being allowed to stop playing once the queue started, the system allowing players to get matched against the same people multiple times, among others.
"There were only ten games (in Korea), in Japan there were ten to twenty games. In both cases, that's not a lot of games in best-of-one."
For comparison, in the territories handled by TPC International, players could join multiple Regional and International tournaments, which included a Swiss round and a single elimination play-off for the top cut. This means that VGC players can build up their Championship Points (CP) through several dozen games. They can also recover in case of a lousy tournament result by joining other regional or international events. But in Korea, aside from the Global Challenge rankings, their fate is essentially decided by just ten best-of-ones.
Even then, the matchmaking for the ten games was riddled with major issues. For one, once the player starts matchmaking, the players are not allowed to stop playing. None of the regular button inputs worked to get you out of the queue. So instead of a tournament, it became a marathon. There were also issues with games not being counted if a player got disconnected, either by accident or voluntarily. Since a minimum of ten games needed to be played, some players would find out at the end that they hadn't met their quota despite having played ten matches. For comparison, in online tournaments handled by TPC International, players were allowed to stop playing as long as they got back within a specific time limit, which allowed them to take small breaks in between, order food, talk to their community, etc.
While that seemed like a terrible event already, another issue only added to the players' pains: they could be matched with the same player they had already fought against. This was problematic for numerous reasons, but the most glaring and obvious one would be compatibility; players could be matched with another player whose team had an advantage against them multiple times. This reportedly happened often. Due to a combination of the tournament's small size and the system forcing every player to enter the match queue right after the game immediately, the two people who had just played a game together would join the queue at the same time and, due to a lack of other people in that queue, be matched again.
Due to the tournament's problems, TPC Korea decided to invalidate the result and revoke the top 16 players obtained for PWC before holding another tournament using the same format. Those players demanded some form of compensation for their decision, so TPC Korea responded by saying that they would be invited to next year's Trainer's Cup, basically allowing them to skip the prerequisite of completing the Global Challenge stage. However, they were outraged about it not just because being able to cut the Global Challenge requirement was not as difficult as top-cutting Trainer's Cup but also because it also meant that they would have the same horrible format the following year.
That was why Nash, Blue, Mija, and Sangyoon, the top four players of the tournament who were invited to the Trainer's Cup Finals to compete for travel awards, decided to protest. The reasons for their protest can be summarized with the following points:
- No IRL events
- Constant problems with the tour system
- Disregarding younger divisions
- Bad compensation for the problems their system caused.
Essentially, and most importantly, their protest was against TPC Korea's disrespect to their players.
Although Blue was suddenly disqualified by TPC Korea for unspecified reasons, the player who replaced him, Betago, agreed with the players and joined in. Their protest involved submitting teams filled with Pokemon who only knew Metronome to play in the Trainer's Cup Finals. Metronome is a move that executes an entirely random action available from an extensive list of all Pokemon moves, bar certain ones. This can be anything from powerful attacks like Earthquake, and important status moves like Will-O-Wisp, to useless ones like Splash.
This likely represents how their qualification process felt more like it was based on luck instead of the players' skills.
One day after submitting their teams to TPC Korea, they received an email declaring that TPC Korea had canceled the event and that they had been disqualified. They stated strange reasons, as the four players submitted legal teams that did not violate any rule set by the tournament. It's almost as if they were disqualified because they were protesting and not due to anything else.
How Did The Community React?
As expected, the entire VGC community, enthusiasts, and the players' audiences were outraged. Following NashVGC's posts on Twitter that detailed their experience, dozens of VGC players and Pokemon fans tweeted their reactions to show their support for the Korean players.
Some players also started to share their horrible experiences with TPC events in Asia, with tweets such as:
Even the legendary Pokemon VGC 2014 World Champion Sejun Park, who won the Master's Division tournament with his iconic Pachirisu, chimed in by saying:
One player even attended the Milwaukee Regional Championships with a whole Metronome team to stand in solidarity with the four Korean players. It's worth noting that TPC International allowed him to participate with this team.
As to whether or not this will change anything remains to be seen. In the best-case scenario, TPC Korea would make improvements to the system that's currently in place. However, there is also a chance that it could get worse. But TPC must tread carefully with a significant fraction of the Pokemon community becoming aware through the dozens of players and content creators bringing attention to this issue.
