This happened 2 days ago but felt like it was worth making a post about. (I'd post in the VGC forum but there's been literally 1 post there in the last 3 weeks and this deserves more visibility.)
Sequence of events:
Misinformation:
Apparently the screwups went a lot deeper than I thought. Here are several more things that went wrong:
Edit #3: In slightly different news, Chien Tsai (one of the Taiwan Nationals players) protested by nicknaming four of his Pokemon "Daddy TPCI", "Email sent 3 days before", "Bring back Swiss rounds", and "Reject single elimination". The nicknames were shown on stream for one game, after which a judge ordered him to turn on the "Hide Nicknames" option in the in-game settings. After he advanced to Day 2, during streamed player interviews he held up a protest sign saying "We hope that many players from Asia will take an active role in the scene" (a quote from a TPC official from 2022 used satirically, which players are picking up as a slogan). No other penalties were given.
Sequence of events:
- May 14: Korean Nationals qualifier. Glitches in the game cause loops of rematches and other faulty behavior.
- May 17: Players who won are told that their results are now void, and that the qualifiers will be rerun on May 28.
- May 28: Korean Nationals qualifier rerun. (Players who got 5th-16th place go to Worlds Day 1 and players who got 1st-4th place go to the Korean Nationals Finals and Worlds Day 2.)
- Korean Nationals Finals are on June 3; players are told that the team lock deadline is June 1 9am.
- May 30 6pm (KST): Pokemon Home releases. This has an abrupt competitive change because Plates and some Egg Moves are now suddenly legal for the finals.
- May 30 11:10pm: Players are abruptly emailed that the team lock deadline is wrong and was supposed to be 24 hours earlier instead (May 31 9am), which is literally zero business hours notice. (Source) This forces players to rush to lock in their teams on time. It also says that Plates and the new Egg Moves are banned, so anyone who already locked in their team with those is screwed.
- May 31: The team lock deadline change is rescinded and extended.
- June 2: In protest at the above screwups, the four finalists lock in Metronome teams for the finals.
- June 3: The finalists are all disqualified, from not just Nationals but also Worlds. (Source)
Misinformation:
- There are some people claiming that the finalists were disqualified because their teams were hacked, or even that they locked in Pokemon who can't legally learn Metronome. This is false; all of the Metronome Pokemon were legal. However, the Metronome Pokemon were genned (all of them have identical height/weight/scale values).
- The disqualification message said nothing about hacked/genned Pokemon and instead referred to the Metronome movesets specifically. (There's a rule about match fixing, which has a specific clause including the deciding of a match by random means.)
Apparently the screwups went a lot deeper than I thought. Here are several more things that went wrong:
- Qualifiers being abruptly changed to best-of-1 single elimination with three days notice, causing a ton of uncompetitive lucksacking (not to mention potential travel expenses risk)
- Rules being changed so that all disconnects force a rematch, with judges refusing to budge, even when it is very obvious that a losing player disconnected on purpose and even when so many people do it in a row that the tournament ends up lasting for 10 hours
- Players being abruptly told with no notice (or having to hear from previous players rather than officials) that they're not allowed to look at their opponent's team sheet during a game, when the tournament format is literally supposed to allow this (which suddenly turns the game into "memorize your opponent's team sheet really fast before the start of the game")
- In at least the Singapore and Philippines Nationals, the head official completely mixed up the concepts of "open team sheets" and "team preview", which abruptly changed the tournament format to closed team sheets 15 minutes before the first round
- Google Forms in emails that were set to private, causing everyone to get a "you don't have permission to view" message until 24 hours before the form closed
- Broken links in emails
- Some players not being told whether they qualified or not until 36 hours before Nationals, which is impossible if you need to book a flight or have other travel expenses
- A mandatory private Discord server that not everyone was sent invites to, causing people to have to scramble for invites from other players on their own, with numerous people not getting in until after 11pm the night before the tournament
- When players tried to bring up some of these issues with representatives, one representative left immediately in the middle of the first sentence, a second one said that changing the best-of-1 single elimination format was "impossible", and another one confirmed that 2024 Nationals qualifiers would also be best-of-1 single elimination.
Edit #3: In slightly different news, Chien Tsai (one of the Taiwan Nationals players) protested by nicknaming four of his Pokemon "Daddy TPCI", "Email sent 3 days before", "Bring back Swiss rounds", and "Reject single elimination". The nicknames were shown on stream for one game, after which a judge ordered him to turn on the "Hide Nicknames" option in the in-game settings. After he advanced to Day 2, during streamed player interviews he held up a protest sign saying "We hope that many players from Asia will take an active role in the scene" (a quote from a TPC official from 2022 used satirically, which players are picking up as a slogan). No other penalties were given.
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