Pokémon GO speedruns
3 years ago
North Holland, Netherlands

I'm a dedicated Pokémon GO player and would like to see some different things from the game where we can speedrun on as a thing on this website. There is a lot in the game that can't be speedrunned normally because it's RNG based. But there are already a lot of people that are speedrunning raid battles. In a raid battle, you battle with a group of trainers (max 20 people) a Pokémon that is a kind of boss battle. There is a timer that's counting down how many seconds you have left to defeat the boss. So the trick is to complete the battle as fast as possible by choosing the right pokemon that are super effective against this particular one and giving them the right moveset, maxing them etc. I think it would be best to make categories for the number of players you try to complete the raid boss and make for each different boss a separate section. because if you are fighting with multiple people and someone else is alone you will be faster. There are different levels of raid bosses (1 to 5) that have more HP the higher you come in level.

Also cool for speedrunning would be Team GO rocket Grunts, Leaders, and the Boss Giovanni. The grunts have different typing and you need to have the right pokemon and movesets on your pokemon to beat them. The higher level you are the harder they are so this would require a lot more categories to be fair but I think it would be cool

I am very happy if raids get added, and if Team GO rocket gets added it would be cool too but mainly raids. I love to hear back about this and a whole new community of players will be exposed to your website if this gets added.

Thanks for reading ~CasGroenigen

Antarctica

Are you asking for people to do these “runs” with you or are you asking for them to be added onto the site?

If it’s the latter, then in order to get a game on the site you need to formally request it via the Request Form found at https://www.speedrun.com/requestgame

That being said, I don’t see this game getting added to the site because what you’ve described aren’t really categories, they’re more like just things to do in a broader, open game. There are several aspects of Pokemon Go that fall under the umbrella of games the site won’t accept per that rules page I linked. I don’t think you would be able to set up Raid Battles as a category because of how different they are. Unless my knowledge of the game is lacking (it probably is) what Pokemon spawn in a raid battle is random, right? How do you build a category around a randomly spawning pokemon? Some might have significantly higher stats than others, so even with proper typing they’ll take longer to defeat. How would you categorize that for a fair and even LB?

It’s stuff like that that makes this game not really “speedrunnable” I’m terms of what this site will track. Games need to have some kind of consistency to them to be tracked effectively and for the categories to be setup evenly. Granted, maybe the game has changed a lot since I last paid attention to it years ago, but since it’s always expanding and changing and trying to create a new experience for its players, it probably lacks the needs consistency for a proper LB here.

All of this is of course my opinion and I could be talking out my ass or site staff could say that everything I just said is wrong.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
CyanWes, YUMmy_Bacon5 and 2 others like this
North Holland, Netherlands

Thanks for your reply Tim. ok so I'm going to explain this with an example. if I see a Darkrai in a raid, it has a specific amount of combat power and HP. and I see another one, it has the same values, so that's consistent... but the moveset the Darkrai has could be different but there are only a few movesets he can have so that could be different sections or something like that. so it is consistent. I think it could be done. I'll submit it!

CyanWes and YUMmy_Bacon5 like this
Canada

[quote=CasGroenigen]if I see a Darkrai in a raid[/quote]

Kinda glossing over the massive if there, aren't you? Sure maybe all Darkrai all have the same stats or whatever, IF you're lucky enough to have a Darkrai raid happen near you, at a time of day where you can actually play the game. That is a pretty major issue if you're hoping to have any serious and fair competition around something like this.

[quote=CasGroenigen]there are only a few movesets he can have so that could be different sections or something like that[/quote]

...exactly how many categories are you planning to have? It sounds like you're basically thinking of having every possible raid Pokemon, with every possible moveset, as separate categories... yeah, no, that is not going to work at all.

In my eyes, the biggest issues with tracking this on speedrun.com are:

  1. Games like this tend to change very dramatically over short periods of time, so keeping leaderboards fair and up-to-date without having to nuke/hide existing runs every 6 months is nearly impossible, especially in a mostly server-based game like this that you probably can't downpatch.

  2. Paying real money for in-game currency will give you a major advantage. Banning that is pretty standard so competition doesn't become pay-to-win, but I don't think you could enforce that in this game since AFAIK there's no way to tell if the currency was obtained "legitimately" or not.

  3. As mentioned before, players have virtually no control over what raids/events/whatever happen when, or where. Categories that depend on you hitting the RNG jackpot by getting the right raid Pokemon in the right place at the right time to even attempt them, is just ridiculous.

CyanWes, YUMmy_Bacon5 and 6 others like this
Wisconsin, USA

Not to mention that almost all of the suggestions for categories require more than one person to complete, which falls under PvP, which isn't allowed as per the Game Request rules.

CyanWes, YUMmy_Bacon5, and Brakshow like this
Canada

I think most of that stuff is more co-op than PvP, but on that note, if you can't control who you're playing with (which at least for raids, realistically you can't) then that's yet another major issue for fair competition.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
CyanWes, Brakshow and 2 others like this
Kent, England

I personally would love to see Pokemon GO get submitted as an avid player, but realistically there is nothing in the game that could count as a speedrun, apart from possibly one to battle each Team Leader once in a practice battle. Even with that though, there's not much that can be utilised.

CyanWes and YUMmy_Bacon5 like this
Arizona, USA

As far as the issue for categories goes, at the current moment it may be unfeasible (due to the pandemic), but I think a lot of people are underestimating the active playerbase of this game that would be able to fill out the leaderboards. There definitely are enough competitive ~lvl40 players who might be interested in doing raids enough to fill out leaderboards for a TON of different categories, and this is coming from someone who lives in a medium sized American city of ~half a million people.

I think if you could come up with a robust enough ruleset then it would be fine.

Also there already are co-op games on the leaderboard, part of the problem here is that if you were running something co-operatively you would want all players to be registered on the site, decreasing your ability to run with randos.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
CyanWes likes this
Antarctica

I don't think anyone is doubting the player base (I don't see a single person that mentioned that at all actually, aside from relying on finding the same people every time to raid with), but rather we're questioning the feasibility of setting up an LB around a game where all of the proposed categories (ie Raids) are completely random every single time.

Regardless of the player base, you'd need incredible RNG to match the time another group got on a Raid because of different players playing together, different Pokemon, different stats, etc. There's zero consistency with the game, and you can't create categories around a game like that.

CyanWes, Brakshow, and Pear like this
Canada

[quote=watchmesuffer]I think a lot of people are underestimating the active playerbase of this game[/quote]

I think you're massively overestimating the number of Pokemon GO players that care about speedrunning at all and would be willing and able to put up with whatever crazy rules you would have to put in place to be able to do this, but yeah that's really not even the problem here.

[quote=watchmesuffer]I think if you could come up with a robust enough ruleset then it would be fine.[/quote]

Well yeah if you can magically solve all the problems then you've magically solved all the problems. Good luck with that.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
CyanWes, YUMmy_Bacon5 and 2 others like this
Arizona, USA

All I was saying is that the city I live in has Facebook groups and discord servers thousands strong just for coordinating raids which are active every day. On top of that there are hundreds of level 40 players who still play daily despite having hit the progression wall and now are raiding competitively versus members of their own team to see who can catch more/better pokemon. You don't have to care about speedrunning to become interested in it if it provides you with another form of progression or goal that the game lacks.

Also most of the top players and dataminers know enough about the game to create a consistent ruleset.

Ultimately if the SRC mods don't want leaderboards of PokeGO then at the end of the day I'm sure no one is really going to care since the game is already really rewarding to play for its own sake. But, it would be completely denying reality to pretend it couldn't be done.

CyanWes likes this
Canada

[quote=watchmesuffer]most of the top players and dataminers know enough about the game to create a consistent ruleset... it would be completely denying reality to pretend it couldn't be done[/quote]

I'm not convinced. It's real easy to say that it can be done, but I'm not seeing anyone present any solutions. If/when anybody actually figures this out then maybe there can be a real discussion, but until then our stance is unchanged, and there's not much more to be said about this.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
CyanWes, YUMmy_Bacon5 and 3 others like this
Arizona, USA

Hey, that's totally fair. I play PokeGO fairly casually. If by the time I hit level 40 (currently level 35, so still a LONG ways away) people haven't looked into this more I'll personally work on a comprehensive set of rules either for the site or for my own discord group.

Quick question since we're discussing it: What is the moderation's stance on AR games in general? The confusion being that they are a mix of video game (what this site is all about) and "non videogame activity" which is clearly disallowed in the submission rules.

CyanWes and YUMmy_Bacon5 like this
Canada

AR games are a bit of a gray area, they have to be considered on a case-by-case basis. Some like Pokemon GO and other similar games definitely qualify as video games, but other AR "games" are essentially just a digital front for a real-world puzzle or something like that, and don't have any "gameplay" in the traditional sense.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
CyanWes, YUMmy_Bacon5 and 2 others like this
French Southern Territories

Don't respond to old threads unnecessarily.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
CyanWes, Quivico and 6 others like this
Israel

@snowhippo27 Also, you certainly can't compare between RNG in a single-player game and RNG in a multi-player PVP/MMO game. Those are completely different dimensions. Please read and contemplate the given arguments next time.

CyanWes, Gaming_64 and 7 others like this
United States

So we have 1-20 people, probably a few hundred Pokémon that can be found in raids, and at least a couple possible move sets for each one. That’s already over 1000 categories.

No.

CyanWes, YUMmy_Bacon5 and 8 others like this
Queensland, Australia

get a pokemon%