The Biggest Mistake in any Pokémon Game

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If you are confused, here is an easy explanation. At the beginning of every turn, an accuracy seed is generated between 1 and 100. For example: Turn 1: 75 Turn 2: 91 Turn 3: 15 In order for a move to hit, the seed must be LOWER OR EQUAL to the accuracy of the move. Air Slash has an accuracy of 95 so, on Turn 1 it will hit since 75 is less than or equal to 95. However, a move like Sheer Cold will miss, since it's 30 accuracy is lower than 75. On turn 3, since 15 is lower than 30, Sheer Code will hit. The problem, is that these accuracy seeds are the same for every single battle, so you can easily manipulate the game and always pick a move that will hit. This is 99% an oversight error by Game Freak and will be fixed in a patch. Its a very easy problem to fix

To further elaborate with practical examples: In Minecraft, the Seed you use to generate the world can be reused to generate that random world every time. In Fire Emblem 3H (MUCH more similar to this Pokemon case), if one of your units doesn't get a crit on an enemy, you rewind time and try again for that crit, but you will never get it because of your Seed. In order to get the crit, you have to "advance" the game's state in the Seed by performing other actions, i.e. attacking or moving some other units, then trying again to see if you rolled the crit. Once a Seed is generated, it does not change for the duration of the match. However, the odds of events happening are still as they were (i.e. Sheer Cold still has a "30% chance" of hitting), it's just that if you know what Seed you're on, you can use specific moves to advance the seed to the 30% of the locations that give you Sheer Cold hitting. I'm not a professional programmer, this is just my understanding as it pertains to RPG mechanics.

The sad thing about this is that it's such an easy fix but no one has faith in gamefreak to fix their mistakes post release.

This is 100% a result of the rush to get the game out, like so many other problems in SV

Remember when people thought fissure no guard machamp would be a thing? It finally happened.

I've fought a few Japanese players using bright powder to abuse this to get the move used against them at a specific point in the battle to always miss, which means they can do some crazy setup stuff with no counterplay.

Normally a RNG would be seeded with the current clock time, in milliseconds or something on that order of precision. Because the clock time increases 1000 times a second, you're guaranteed to get unpredictable numbers from your generator. In this case, it's possible that the RNG is putting the same seed every time. My guess is that there's code that attempts to get the system clock time, but the code fails and returns 0 instead, as a fail state. The game doesn't check for a fail result and just uses the 0 as the seed. Since the seed is always the same, if you use a set of moves and then an OHKO move and the OHKO connects, you can guarantee that if you use those same moves in the same order, your OHKO will always hit. This principle is true for any moves with less than 100 accuracy.

For anyone wondering, computers cannot create random numbers because they rely on binary, and thus are discrete systems, they instead use fractal equations like the Mandelbrot set because it’s an equation in geometry that produces increasingly irrational numbers and diverges to chaos, it’s a pretty cool subject in number theory

There’s other bugs too. For example, indeede female can be caught knowing trick room from raids despite not being able to learn trick room naturally, which would be VERY broken on it

As a person working in game Development – this is an issue that can easily occur due to minor errors that are easily fixed, but is incredibly difficult to notice and spot during testing. I would assume that this will be patched as soon as possible. (At least that’s what I would do)

Sword/Shield had a glitch where Sucker Punch would fail under specific circumstances. If I remember it was fixed pretty quickly despite it being a really obscure glitch. When testing a game, randomness is usually turned off to make sure RNG isn’t influencing anything. This glitch was almost definitely an oversight, and one that isn’t hard to fix. Literally all they have to do is disable fixed seeds for battles.

When luck being a skill in these games is a considerable portion of strategy this error of luck actually being a constant is a really big issue

The bugs in this release are honestly unbelievable. The games absolutely needed a bigger team, or more time in development, or both. Game Freak needs to get their act together.

The fact that we can't tell whether or not GF will even patch this goes to show that they really say a lot. I dislike being negative against them but this is something that should be patch and it would be a no-brainer for most devs to do something instantly about an issue like this. Hope that they do something because laddering is so fun bro 😭

If they don't fix this, there is absolutely no excuse, it literally takes one line of code to initialise a random seed using the current time

I have a hunch this happened because at some point during development a developer was debugging something and needed a static seed and the code that made the seed static wasn't backed out before it went into production. This is probably an easy fix and I would expect it to be patched fairly quickly.

Fun fact, in the Game Boy adaption of the Pokemon Trading Card game the RNG seed for coin flips was locked in at the start of a battle. You could also quit and restart battles. If you restarted a battle and remembered the first few flips, you could purposefully only use cards like the PokeBall on guarenteed heads.

For anyone wanting a quick and dirty explanation of RNG seeding: RNG is, in most cases, a very long list of randomized values. Stupendously long. Whenever something "random" needs to happen, the generator just moves to the next number on the list, and the program does some math to then determine what should happen using that number. If there is no seed, the program will always start at the first value on the list, and then iterate from there, making things consistent. A "seed" is a number pulled from somewhere, usually something like the time at power on, or in the case of something online, when both players connect. The generator then uses the value at the seed's index to start iterating from, instead of starting at the first value in the line.

I am starting to fear that Wolfey's sponsorship deal with The Bagel Company International ended :(