How can 63 players and the Supetmon users make the most of Pokemon Showdown?
| In this article, we will talk about |
I. What is Pokemon Showdown?
Pokemon Showdown, often abbreviated as PS, is currently the largest third-party Pokemon battling platform with the highest number of users. It allows for quick team building and PvP battles on web pages for both PC and mobile devices.
Website: https://play.pokemonshowdown.com/
II. What Benefits Can PS Provide for Us?
Since PS primarily focuses on 6v6 battles, and with the eighth and ninth generations of official games reducing the number of legal moves and systems, PS's National Dex mode has become the most popular. Additionally, to balance the strength of Pokemon in 6v6 rules, PS has created a series of tiers that have increasingly diverged from the official game's battling environment, leading many to jokingly refer to it as "village rules."However, this article will not delve into such debates. In fact, PS offers a multitude of tiers, including the single battles that follow game updates, double battles, and the VGC tier that provides visible battling. Even though the 66 mode is relatively niche, we can still use PS to improve our real-life battling skills.
In simple terms, PS can provide the following benefits for a 63 player:
1. Rapid team construction and memorization:
A qualified team often requires multiple battles and continuous fine-tuning. However, changing Pokemon configurations on a real device is costly, and there is a lack of tools to record details such as efforts and individual values. PS's team editor allows us to input all important information such as Pokemon type, personality, ability, Terastall type, individual values, efforts, moves, and held items in a very short time. This not only facilitates intuitive thinking about team composition but also makes it convenient for future configuration changes on real devices (especially fine-tuning efforts).
Additionally, PS's Pokemon configuration export format can be directly used for magic. If you need a friend to quickly get a certain Pokemon, PS is very convenient.
2. Move and Pokemon filtering.
Depending on the chosen tier when creating a team, the available moves for Pokemon will also change based on whether they can be legally learned in the actual game. One convenient aspect of PS is that it can easily determine whether a certain move is legal. For example, if I want to use a Gengar and want to use Sludge Wave as a poison move, but in PS with the 63 rules selected, I find that Sludge Wave is marked as illegal in the move pool, it means that in the current generation games, Gengar cannot legally learn Sludge Wave. However, in the National Dex mode, Gengar can use Sludge Wave because there were legal methods to obtain a Gengar with Sludge Wave in previous generations.
3. Preliminary mechanism testing.
Every player will encounter some questions in battles that are not easy to determine and not so easy to find answers to, such as "Can Pain Split damage be blocked by Shed Skin?", "Is a Water-type Terastall considered a normal type after being soaked?", "Does Light Screen block Psychic?" and so on. Many questions can be answered in the Pokemon encyclopedia entries or by asking high-ranking players in groups, but some tricky questions may require actual testing to get answers.
However, not everyone has two devices, and it's usually a hassle to arrange real-life testing with others. At this time, PS can act as a simulation laboratory. You just need to open two accounts to easily test a certain mechanism. Of course, it's not that the results from PS tests will definitely be the same as in real life, but the programmers of PS are quite diligent. The issues that would normally be encountered in battles are generally followed up and synchronized with the real-life logic in PS. So after the environment has settled for a while, it can basically be considered that the results tested on PS are consistent with the actual effects in real life.
4. Optimizing abilities.
PS's effort value interface is very well done. Dragging the ability bar increases the effort value by one point at a time. At level 50, it is even more intuitive because at this level, the first four efforts provide one point of ability, and then every eight efforts provide one point of ability (without personality correction), which will not lead to a waste of efforts.
Because the abilities, efforts, and personalities are summarized in the same interface, it is easy to know how many efforts are needed to reach the required ability value. For example, to trigger the Odd Keystone with a Bellossom, the HP needs to be even. For a Mimikyu to minimize the damage ratio after breaking the disguise and have an odd HP, the personality-corrected ability value should be a multiple of 11 to avoid wasting ability, to exceed a certain speed line, etc.
5. Team testing.
Although the 63 tier on PS is relatively small, it can still quickly match opponents. It is much faster to pull a team on PS than to make one on a real device, and the battle skill animations on PS are very fast. A 20-turn match takes less than 3 minutes, and a large number of matches can be played in a short period of time to test and evaluate your team (some players even only take three Pokemon to match to test the main axis strength), and it can quickly increase the proficiency of the copied team. However, it should be noted that due to the limitations of the platform mode, PS cannot reproduce the real-life TOD rules, which will cause teams that rely on TOD for victory to perform poorly on PS. Objectively, it also leads to some differences between the 63 environment on PS and real life, and the win rate on PS cannot be used as the basis for the team's strength. In the end, it is necessary to return to real-life battles.
III. How to quickly get started with PS?
Supetmon have both made entry-level tutorials, and I will only briefly introduce the interface and basic usage of PS in this column.1. Home page interface:
- Battle tier selection: Decides what battle tier to match in.
- Team selection: Decides what team to participate in the match.
- Your ID: If not logged in, it will display "choose name" and you need to enter your ID. After successful login, you can click on the ID to enter the personal interface to view the records of each tier, as well as the chat rooms you have joined and the battles you are currently in.
- Settings interface: You can set avatars, passwords, battle backgrounds, etc. Note that when you log in with a brand new username, you need to "register" and create a password in the settings interface, otherwise, the records will not be saved. (It will give you a Pikachu GIF and ask what it is, and of course, the answer is pikachu)
2. Team editor interface:
This interface is very intuitive, with the filter bar on the left to filter out different tiers of teams, and the right side is the recorded teams. The button to create a new team is very conspicuous (PS team records are saved in the browser's cookies, no need to save manually).
3. Team building interface:
4. Battle interface:
The operation is also very intuitive.
Hovering the mouse over a Pokemon will show the current status of the Pokemon (similar to pressing the Y button in the game).
IV. Other PS-related tools
1. PS version calculator: [https://calc.pokemonshowdown.com/]
2. PS platform usage statistics: [https://www.smogon.com/stats/]
3. Smogon forums: [https://www.smogon.com/forums/]
