What We Learned: 2013 World Championships Edition

During every Pokemon event, we learn a little bit about the game of Pokémon and the community that surrounds it that is worth reflecting on. This Masters-centric column will appear following major events and highlight important trends and moments during the previous(ish) weekend’s events.

Another fantastic World Championships is in the books! In fact, Worlds was so fantastic this year that we all had to take a week off to recover from its greatness, but I’m back to give a look back at the final event of the 2013 VGC Season. This year gave us three new champions, a weekend of excitement, and a video of a baby kangaroo punching a Conkeldurr.

And the Winner is….

The biggest story of the weekend was certainly Arash Ommati (Mean) winning it all and becoming the World Champion. I think we have a tendency to exaggerate the greater meaning of individuals winning Pokemon events, but it was really cool that we got our first Italian World Champion and by extension, the first winner from the European region. I’m not sure if Arash’s win will change anything for the greater community or not — I don’t think anyone ever contested, for instance, that Europe (and Italy in particular) has some great players or that Arash himself was very good. What I do hope, though, is that maybe Arash’s win will make a World Championship seem more attainable to players all over the world after three years of Ray Rizzo (Ray) dominating the field. Players having the dream to win it at all and believing they can achieve it is what makes the circuit exciting. Hopefully someone like Arash winning, who wasn’t riding the hype train coming in, helps remind everyone that it’s how you play the game that counts, not how other people expect you to do.

With that said, if Arash himself winning was super surprising to anyone, they probably weren’t paying attention. Obviously, he wasn’t among the big favorites coming in, even if you only look at Europe — that would have been Ben Kyriakou (Kyriakou), Abel Sanz (Flash), and Matteo Gini (Matty). I think other than maybe Daniel Nolan (Zog), who was another player getting the respect predictions for having cut Worlds before, Arash really should have been the next player on most people’s minds who didn’t already have the big Worlds finish under his belt. In my own predictions, he would have been the next European player I had mentioned if I had kept going (and he was slightly higher than that on Scott’s Amazing Pokemon Worlds Fantasy Draft Rankings(tm), which I unfortunately never got to use). I think he flew a little under all of our radars because he’s not a player that self-promotes much, to the point I actually completely forgot he was going to Italian Nationals when I wrote the preview for it this year, but I think everyone who’s played him this season knew he was a good player coming in. I was more surprised that he ended up finishing so low on CP, which was more because he didn’t play the whole circuit than because of his performance, than that he won Worlds.

Especially now that I write so much promotional stuff on Nugget Bridge, I worry a bit about who the champion is going to wind up being when we get close to Worlds, because for better or worse, being the world champion means more than just having won a Pokemon tournament to the community. I’m really happy that the winner this year was Arash. He’s a strong player, and more importantly he’s always struck me as a good guy. He’ll be a good champion for our game as we head into a new generation, and I hope he takes the chance to be around in the community a little more this year. People will like him.

And a Top Cut For Germany

Germany might seem like an odd story to draw out for this. Korea had the 6-0 in swiss, Italy had two players in top cut, Japan made it back to the finals… and it was a good year for all of those countries, but I don’t want what the German players were able to accomplish to get overlooked. Prior to this year, no German player had ever had a winning record in Worlds before. Three different players managed to break that curse this year in Masters, with Matthias Hellmoldt finishing a bizarre 4-1-1 and Christoph Kugeler (drug duck) and Baris Akcos (Billa) both finishing 4-2. Matthias also became the first German Master to make top cut, and was only about an hour away from being the first German player ever to do so… an honor reserved for Baris’ sister Melisa Akcos in the Junior division.

Variety is the Spice of Whatever

One of the cherished aspects of the way Worlds qualification works right now is that it allows for players from many different countries to compete. We were all excited that the variety in VGC was greater than it has ever been before this year, with 47 total players competing in Masters this year from 11 different countries, an increase from 33 players from 9 countries last year. The new additions this year came from Singapore, who had a player qualify through LCQ, and Australia, who had its own VGC National tournament for the first time this year. Outside of Masters, the Senior division also had a player from Austria, bringing the total of participating countries to 12. Sadly, a Swedish player in Seniors and an Irish player in Juniors were also invited but were unable to attend, which caused us to fall short of a potential 14 countries involved with VGC Worlds.

It’s a Shame So Few Pokemon Are Viable

It is perhaps the most common complain in every ruleset of Pokemon that has ever been and ever will be that the most powerful Pokemon are too good and that serious players can only use a small variety of Pokemon because of them. If you haven’t already seen the list of teams from 2013 VGC Masters Worlds, you should definitely check it out, because I think that myth should absolutely be dispelled by what the game’s best players selected if it wasn’t already. While there’s a few things I would certainly have changed in this year’s ruleset if I could have… mostly related to Prankster… Pokemon variety was definitely not an issue this season. Between the 47 players in Masters VGC Worlds, 54 different Pokemon were used at least once. There were no teams of off-the-wall nonviable Pokemon inflating the statistics this year, and there were still a handful of reasonably strong Pokemon like Raikou, Machamp, Rhyperior, and Ninetales that weren’t selected in the Masters division this year in spite of the great variety present.

I’ll leave you with a few Pokemon that were selected by teams in the top cut that might surprise people expecting to see only teams similar to Ray’s 2012 team on top:

Ryosuke vs Aaron

While I usually try not to comment too much on specific games in these columns, especially games that aren’t the finals, I think the top 4 match between Ryosuke Kosuge and Aaron Zheng (Cybertron) has been controversial enough that it’d be helpful for me to touch on it.

I want to get my bias out of the way up front: I try and stay as neutral as I can, but since Aaron is kind of the communal little brother for the admins I was definitely rooting for him to begin with. Ryosuke is someone I expected and wanted to see in the top cut, but the familiarity isn’t there with him. I wanted Aaron to win even more after I saw how Ryosuke chose to play game 2 and 3 of their series, since I had given up my spot in Worlds to work on the stream because of how important I thought it was for the stream to give a good impression of VGC to the viewers… something I suspected the frequent use of Swagger and Thunder Wave was going to work against. To say I was frustrated when Ryosuke won playing the way he did would have been an understatement.

But you know what? Ryosuke played that series exactly the way he should have. Let’s take a moment to look at both players’ teams:

Ryosuke:

Aaron:

It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out the way these teams stack up. Ryosuke was using his Nationals team again, completely verbatim. Aaron’s team was based on Ryosuke’s Nationals team, but had some changes that made it a little more comfortable against the metagame in North America and Europe. Most notably, Aaron was using a more standard Chople Berry/Protect Tyranitar instead of Ryosuke’s Iron Ball/Fling, as well as using ChestoRest Cresselia to free up the Sitrus Berry Aaron instead used on his Light Screen/Will-o-Wisp defensive Rotom-W, which he chose to use over Ryosuke’s infamous Thundurus-I. As we saw during Game 1 of their series, these changes gave Aaron an extremely large advantage playing a conventional game of Pokemon between the similar teams, and he won pretty easily.

If you’re Ryosuke there, you have to look at your options and figure out where you might be able to draw an advantage. He had several Pokemon, like his Landorus-T, Heatran, and Conkeldurr, which were either identical to Aaron’s or were functionally identical against him, and even trying to use them better than Aaron wasn’t likely to work because of Rotom-W, so the odds of winning through those three were bleak. Worse yet, Ryosuke had a small disadvantage between the Cresselias and Tyranitars because of Aaron’s changes. The only piece Ryosuke had that was appreciably different from Aaron’s in a positive way was Thundurus-I, who also had the advantage of being at its best against support Pokemon that don’t do a lot of damage on their own… which was exactly what was beating him before in Cresselia and Rotom-W.

We all know how it goes from there, and it isn’t pretty, but Ryosuke is in the semifinals of Worlds. He has to do whatever he can do to win, and I think he picked the highest percentage route to try to do that. Ryosuke’s odds were actually very good the way the match played out because Aaron rarely switched out of confusion, and even when Rotom-W and Cresselia were able to attack, they weren’t going to put out much offensive pressure on their own, so Ryosuke was able to put himself in relatively safe situations to do slow damage. Rotom-W also put the odds further in Ryosuke’s favor because Hydro Pump and Will-o-Wisp are both inaccurate moves to begin with, which further increased the odds of Aaron not being able to attack, though obviously Will-o-Wisp was much less accurate than what would be expected in that series.

I think not getting the best of luck understandably caused Aaron to tilt a little bit, especially after game 2, and he started making sub-optimal decisions in situations he might normally have played better. He chose to switch only rarely, and by failing to at least create pressure with a sweeper occasionally to threaten Ryosuke with meaningful return damage if Swagger didn’t work, he lost control of the games. Aaron also chose to allow Thundurus-I to stay alive for quite a long time, healing with its buffet of Leftovers. Opting not to use Tyranitar  in game 3 after getting run over by Thundurus-I in game 2 was also a strange decision, but I think it’s easy to understand why Aaron was a little shaken after game 2. However, these decisions were as big of contributors for why Aaron lost that series as the RNG was.

It’s unfortunate Aaron lost the way he did, since he didn’t really get out-Pokemoned, and while I’m a little flustered the top 4 match we showed the viewers was what it was, Ryosuke absolutely adjusted the way he should have to what happened in game 1 and played the series extremely intelligently. People shouldn’t be faulting Ryosuke for winning.

Stats Part I: Average Record of Countries

I think the international rivalry aspect of Worlds tends to get overblown in what is both fundamentally an individual event and an event that is more about having fun with other people who love Pokemon from all over the world rather than actually competing in a tournament. However, since the trash talk gives us something to do the other eleven months and three weeks of the year, I compiled some data about the tournament. First up is the average record of each country in the tournament:

Notes: Byes are excluded from the wins column. The tie between Matthias Hellmoldt and Ben Rothman(Nightblade7000) is completely ignored.

Obviously, everyone isn’t playing on even ground here. Especially in Europe, sending a bunch of players to Worlds is a sign that a country has depth. With this type of analysis it makes countries like Great Britain, who sent a bunch of players, look weaker compared to countries like Italy, who had only their best players competing. Still, I think this is an interesting stat to look at and I think at least it does a good job of showing how strong Italy and Japan were this year.

Stats Part II: Record Between Regions By Round

While this is another stat that has some limitations because all games have equal weight regardless of the record of the players playing in them, the head-to-head record between regions is another stat I figured would be interesting to people. It should be noted that I used qualifying region instead of country this time. I think qualifying region is much more relevant than country given that most of the European Worlds players played in more than one National and the Canadians played with the Americans, with the added bonus that using regions instead makes this table a more reasonable size and less redundant with the last one. I didn’t do all of the match ups in reverse to save space, but I hope everyone can still find the data they are interested in easily enough.

Perhaps the most interesting information to draw from this table is actually how frequently same-region match-ups occur, with 37 total (a little over six per round) between European players and 18 total (exactly three per round on average) between American players. Round 6 featured the second highest total of these matches for a single round, which included six of the eight games in the top eight tables and contributed to round 6 having the fewest games between North America and Europe of any round.

Decreasing Age of the Field

While Worlds wasn’t quite the same party for the younger guys that the National tournaments were, with graduated Seniors taking both spots in the US National finals and the runner-up positions at both the Italian and German National tournaments, it seems like the average age of the players in the top cut at Worlds gets a little younger every year. While I unfortunately don’t have exact enough data to get some more sick tables going here, almost everyone in the top cut was 20 or younger this year, and we saw three of the biggest threats from the first Senior World Championship in Enosh Shachar (Human), Aaron Zheng, and Sejun Park making it to the top cut and managing to become the favorites once again in the Masters division. Both of the 2012 Senior finalists finished at 4-2 as well, with the reign of the youngsters getting slowed down a little by former champion Toler Webb having to face off with Aaron Zheng in their 4-1 game to decide which of the two would move on to the top cut.

While the representatives from the European countries and Japan are staying a little older than the players from the United States and Korea, there is a distinct change in how young some of the top players are at the end of generation 5 compared to the end of generation 4. For a long time in VGC, the top spots in the uncapped age division have been dominated mostly by the players who have been playing Pokemon since they were kids and are much older now, but the times are changing. The younger guys are just going to keep getting better, and 2014 will be another season where some more strong Senior players graduate into Masters… it makes an old guy like me wonder how long my buddies are gonna be able to hang on!

LCQ Records

One of the more interesting storylines from 2012 Worlds was the improved performance of the players who made it to Worlds through the LCQ. Partially because of the addition of the best-of-three format to the LCQ portion of the event, the matches seemed to send the right player forward more often than usual. I think it was reasonable to expect a bit of a drop-off in the LCQ performers this year because the addition of Championship Points led to Europe and North America qualifying most of their best players before the grinder this year.

As a result, the LCQ thinned out a little, unlike past years where sometimes the LCQ would have a dozen players that seemed like they should have been in Worlds to begin with. 2013′s LCQ wound up having one of the more surprising results we’ve seen, with the Worlds field gaining two Japanese players, a Singaporean player, and American Alan Schambers(Metabou), who also qualified in 2010 and 2011. While the average finish of the players from the LCQ was understandably a little lower than it was last year because the actual Worlds field was a lot deeper, the LCQ players at least managed to keep their heads above water again this year. Here’s some bonus data:

Masters LCQ finishes in 2011(best-of-one LCQ, no CP, 34 total players): 9th, 10th, 12th, 14th, 19th, 20th, 24th, 34th
Masters LCQ finishes in 2012(best-of-three LCQ, no CP, 33 total players): 6th, 9th, 10th, 17th
Masters LCQ finishes in 2013(best-of-three LCQ, CP, 47 total players): 23rd, 28th, 38th, 41st

I think what we should draw from this data is that the change in LCQ performance over time is evidence the Championship Point and LCQ systems are working pretty well. While we did have a world champion coming out of the LCQ in Seniors, at least in Masters it seems the qualification system worked pretty well and the strongest trainers of the season were already in the field. Additionally, the LCQ adding the best-of-three format for the last two years is still helping deserving players get through. Even though 2011 was still using the unreliable system of only sending the top players at each National forward to Worlds and more extremely skilled players were in the LCQ as a result, the win percentage of LCQ players in 2011 was still pretty similar to the win percentage of LCQ players in 2013 in spite of the tougher field, because 2011 also sent a few players who weren’t as strong as some of the others.

Any Given Saturday

The most surprising story this year is definitely how much some of the favorites struggled during swiss. It’s easy to forget that the top players are human just like the rest of us and bad things can happen to them too, but even considering their humanity there seemed to be an avalanche of misfortune for some of the top players this year. Seven players in the Masters swiss field had top cut Worlds before, but outside of Sejun Park no one else was even within a win of repeating that feat this year. Matteo Gini, Wolfe Glick (Wolfey), Ray Rizzo, and Daniel Nolan all finished 3-3 with low enough resistances that even with an extra win they wouldn’t have cut. Abel Sanz and LCQer Alan Schambers ended up finishing 2-4, both having even rougher tournaments. I know some of them had some weird things happen to them like getting paired with a bunch of people they had practiced for Worlds with, or having some crazy strings of bad luck, or inexplicably spending all their teambuilding time working only on Torkoal, but it’s still amazing that all of them had an off-day at once. I feel like with most of these guys, if we were to play the tournament again in two weeks they’d finish with better records, but I think the way the Worlds that counts played out is indicative of how much better the players in the field have gotten.

While making it to Worlds is prestigious in itself, in past years there were always a good chunk of players who weren’t quite ready to compete with the best in the world who qualified to compete anyway. We all knew this was going to be a tougher year because of the Championship Point system sending more consistent and deserving players to Worlds this year, but I don’t think we had all quite grasped exactly how much tougher it was actually going to be, and I think the tournament experience some of these guys had is as strong of a statement about the increased challenge as we’re ever going to get. Maybe some of them deserved to do a little bit better and maybe some of the people above them overachieved a little, but the bottom line is that just being an elite player isn’t good enough anymore because the field is full of elite players. I’d expect most of the guys who had a rough go of Worlds this year to bounce back hard next year because they are all extremely good players, but this should be an eye-opener for everyone who wants to do well at Worlds. It’s never been as challenging as it is right now, and everyone who wants to do well is going to have to work hard to be ready next season.

Streamin’

I was pretty critical of the Worlds stream in 2012. While I think we were all excited that Pokemon had finally decided to try the streaming thing, something most of us who are fans of other games had expected Pokemon to do for years, the product was disappointing. Since the commentators weren’t players from the community, the commentary was essentially a comedy of errors. I feel a little bad for the commentators in retrospect because they did the best they could with the situation they were given, but they messed up attack names, Pokemon names, told the audience Metagross was a Garchomp counter, that Skill Swap had ended when Trick Room ended, were completely baffled by a game ending through the timer, and even failed to understand some basic mechanics like Sandstorm. I didn’t pull any punches criticizing their performance in last year’s version of this column, which I’ll admit I half-regret because it was fairly obvious from some of the things the commentators said that they had read our site prior to Worlds.  Like seemingly every time I run my mouth about something related to Pokemon, I quickly found myself having to put my money where my mouth is this year.

While there’s certainly plenty of things those of us who got to commentate this year need work on ourselves (perhaps someday I’ll figure out where the camera is and actually look at it), I think this year was a huge step for Pokemon. Pokemon is not a game that wants to try to be, say, what League of Legends is, but it’s still really valuable for Pokemon to bring the competitive game to as many fans of the brand and of gaming as possible, so that hopefully next year more people attend events than this year and so people keep purchasing the game in the future. I think what we did this year was a big step toward helping make that happen and getting people back in touch with Pokemon, whereas last year the Gamespot stream probably turned as many current fans of the game off with their sloppiness as they may have regained old ones by bringing the product to them to begin with.

While unlike the Gamespot guys last year, commentating this sort of a stream was something none of this year’s commentators had much(any?) experience with, I think at very least the content of what we were saying helped the product, because everyone speaking was someone who is very dedicated to Pokemon and who knows their stuff. During the cast of the VGC finals, we ended up hitting around 30,000 simultaneous viewers, which is pretty crazy when you consider for comparison that the record for a Nugget Bridge cast is something like 150 viewers. There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done to improve on what we did this year and expand the experience for viewers, but there’s sure been a lot less criticism of the stream this year than last year, and I think a lot of people came away from the stream with a positive view of the event and the game this year.

Growing the game is something I think is really important and is a big part of why we made Nugget Bridge to begin with, so it was really exciting to get to contribute to that some this year. I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of this game and this community, so having the opportunity to help build up the game a bit was exciting. It’s something I’d love to do again, but for whatever segment of the VGC community this platform lets me speak for, for this year I just want to comment that I’m thankful TPCI reached out to the community to let us do it rather than shaming the game with Gamespot again. I think the people who weren’t able to make it this year at least got a coherent picture of what was going on at Worlds from the stream, and maybe some of the casual fans understand the game a little better and will hopefully check out what the competitive game is like when Pokemon X & Y come out in a couple months. I think that’s as much as we could have hoped for this year. Just have to keep building!

Spotlight At Just the Right Time

While I was checking last year’s article to read myself ripping into Gamespot, one thing I noticed was that I complained about the finals being simultaneous last year. The stream kind of forced that to change this year, but I think the denizens of Nugget Bridge at the very least are really thankful it did.

I had a lot of really awesome moments at Worlds and with Pokemon in general this year, but I think the moment I’ll remember most from the 2013 season was watching Brendan Zheng (Babbytron) finally get his Worlds win. He’s been so close twice, and with as hard as he tends to take his losses, it’s been really tough to watch him the past few years. We all knew he was good enough to take that championship home and it just never seemed to work out for him, and the defeats were pretty devastating. It was his last chance as a Junior this year, and seeing him take the crown was really cathartic. It had the added bonus of leading into what was by far the best interview of 2013 Worlds, but it’s weird to think that if this had happened last year, most of us wouldn’t even have been able to see him win. It was an experience I think a lot of us really valued having, and I’m sure he was glad to have his audience — which I think was the loudest of all of the finals at Worlds this year — so I appreciate the format change letting us have that moment.

The Seniors finals was one I had less personal attachment to, but as I write whenever this comes up, making it to the finals of an event like this is a huge deal that very few players ever manage to accomplish. Players who do accomplish the feat of making it to a Worlds final deserve their moment in front of everyone, and I’m really glad they got this year… especially because Machamp dominating a final was another great show the crowd enjoyed.

The CoroCoro Cup

While Pokemon has few enough events that we have a tendency to overanalyze all of them to death here at Nugget Bridge (as seen for Worlds in the article What We Learned: 2013 World Championships Edition), the one thing I feel like the community overlooked a little this year was one of Japan’s qualifiers, the CoroCoro Cup. If you aren’t familiar with it, the CoroCoro Cup was an event for elementary school students where three players teamed up to form a team and battled other teams, with the team that won two of the three matches advancing. Species clause applied to the whole team, so they could only use one Cresselia between the three of them, for instance. The top team at each of two tournaments received invitations and trips to Worlds. While it was something I think most of us outside of Japan originally only had two reactions to — that at least one division of Japanese players was going to get an acceptable amount of representatives and that we were fiercely jealous of the awesome format — I think there’s a lot more to read into it than what we saw at a glance.

To get to the point of why I’m mentioning it in a Worlds article: like all of the Japanese representatives, the CoroCoro players did extremely well. Junior runner-up Fuko Nakamichi qualified through CoroCoro, and her teammates Ryusei Yasue (3rd) and Izumi Motoe (8th) both top cut as well. The other team of CoroCoro qualifiers included Haruka Narita (4th), Kippei Takaki (25th Seniors), and Ryuma Sugie (10th). While it sure seems like the Japanese players were just that much better than everyone who wasn’t Brendan Zheng this year in the Junior division, I think this tournament is an incredibly brilliant way to help these kids become excellent players and also make them more likely to stick with the game. Honest players know that no one becomes an elite player on their own in this game, you get good by practicing against other people and working together to build teams and share ideas. By forcing the kids to work together to qualify for Worlds, they learn these important skills and I think they’ll all continue to be stronger players as they grow up because of it. I have to imagine they’ll keep playing longer for similar reasons, too — they’ve now made these friends and teammates they won with and traveled across the world with, who wouldn’t want to keep playing the game with them? I think this is probably the single most brilliant Pokemon tournament I’ve ever seen and would love to see it emulated elsewhere in the world. Even ignoring the benefits to the players, it sounds like a lot of fun!

This isn’t really analytical in any way, but I have to add one thing: how awesome of a feeling must it be for those kids to make it to Worlds working together with their friends and then to all do so well at Worlds like that, for Fuko’s team especially? I think working hard with your friends and having success together is what makes this game fun to play competitively, it’s cool that they’re getting that experience so early.

Now on the TVs: Matches People Want to Watch

Perhaps the most frequent spectator complaint in the past has been the choice of games for the audience during swiss. While Worlds is the only event left on the circuit where swiss rounds are played on television for spectators, until this year both of the TVs were placed at the weaker end of the field, including the very last table, leading to some frustrating matches for spectators who often feel like they’re stronger players than the people they’re watching. Gone are the days of Air Cutter Tornadus and Minimize Drifblim, however, as one of the TVs this year was placed all the way up at the third table, giving viewers a much better experience this year.

The audience ended up getting treated to some fantastic shows even before the top cut as a result of the change, including a couple great games from Japanese Nationals runner-up Yuki Matsumoto against United States National runner-up Enosh Shachar and Italian National champion Matteo Gini. Perhaps the highlight match for the audience during swiss was Aaron Zheng vs Jordi Picazo, with the crowd coming alive to cheer for Aaron’s close escape from Jordi’s perish trap.

Don’t Dream It’s Over

I think the last night of Worlds is always a great indication of why these events are so great. Everyone is tired, we have a new champion, and as a result the other players’ dreams are dead until the next year. So do the players get depressed and think about their losses? No, they enjoy the game and the event and spend the night multibattling with players from all over the world! Pokemon has become what it is because of the community it has created, and every year at Worlds we’re reminded of that. I know everyone who went had a great time this year, and hopefully I’ll see all of you in Washington DC next year. The dream isn’t over for long, with Regionals presumably in a couple months, so I hope everyone is excited to get at it again… next year, it could be you finishing the year as champion!

Expect Worlds team reports to start being published starting tomorrow, with a bonus What We Learned next week to take a look back at the whole season, which will hopefully double as a feedback thread.

The post What We Learned: 2013 World Championships Edition appeared first on Nugget Bridge.