The Transition to Pokemon Showdown

prem

failed abortion
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aeo also already knows about the ladder issue. and the sorting issue has been mentioned many many times.

something i want to bring up because this is kinda ridiculous to me..
GUYS THIS IS STILL A BETA PROGRAM. stop thinking that if it doesnt have something now its a downgrade from po because it will have everything you are mentioning unless its really stupid or unneeded. mention all fixes or complains to ps! here, and they will probably get met unless its unneeded.
 
I think this is a great idea. Pokemon Online mainly because it can't be supported bey IoS devices. I think PS is the best. Love how it works on my IPad. There is a few things that need to be worked on, it obvious. So there is no need to try and boycott, suicide bomb, and hate smogon. I 100% support the move.
 
I would just like to give a protip to anyone that really doesn't like Showdown's team builder. Make your team on PO, then simply export to text and import on Showdown. Of course there are new forms, abilities, and pokemon, but I trust that you can manually make a pokemon or two.
 
Woot! i highly agree with this move. I cannot stand pokemon online, the team builder might be better, but it seems like its extremely glitchy, might be because im on a mac but ive used it on windows to. For example, the cancel button is atrocious.
 
ShinySyduck, the problems are known and are being worked on as we speak.

No worries! We won't pull the plug on Smogon PO until PS is running quite a bit smoother.
 
The bolded lines are the main reason for the move to Pokemon Showdown! Apart from the numerous reasons already highlighted by Antar, these two are the very crux of the move to PS!
Lag and Spammers are still a very real issue on PS! I would say the lag on Showdown is worse than PO considering it stops all activities including team building. With everyone moving to PS! the spammers will follow. I would hope that the move will be delayed since as many of you said, PS! is in beta. With so many things to fix (ladder, lag, support for other gens, etc.) is it really the right time to make the move?

@Antar Its a bit rash to ask, but what would be a good estimate for PS! to be running smoother
 
Please, no one should forget that if project PS fails, then we just move back to PO. It's not the smogon admins or whatever opinion, it's ours. They just make the decisions after we make ours. If PS is to laggy and they don't fix it? We go back to PO! If they don't have all the tiers and battle types (double and triple)? We pack our bags and move back to PO! But remember, they are still on their beta so not everything is done yet. But if you trust smogon, then you'll give it a try at least. 3 people in my clan can now play pokemon online because they don't have to download anything. Why they can't in the first place? I...have no idea.

Although, PS does need A LOT of clean up, it will get done (I hope anyway). We're all missing a lot of things though. For example (I told someone on PO already but I don't think he'll pass the message), what about tournaments? We all want them back right? But how? Surprise me. But seriously, I'm not going to take sides on this thing. All I'm saying that if PS is good, we should TRY.
 
With so many things to fix (ladder, lag, support for other gens, etc.) is it really the right time to make the move?
Well, no. Which is why we continue to maintain Smogon PO. The move to make PS an "official" Smogon simulator is more of an acceptance of the reality that most of our users have already migrated to PS (and, by the way, it is highly unlikely that spammers will be able to cause quite the level of damage to PS as they did to PO--for starters, even if they do manage to "crash" a person's "client," users of PS are able to reconnect to a battle within 60 seconds of being DC'd).

@Antar Its a bit rash to ask, but what would be a good estimate for PS! to be running smoother
At the current rate of progress, I'd day between two weeks and a month. But don't hold me to that--the people to ask would be Zarel and bmelts, and the place to ask would be the Showdown forums.

@Chidori -- PO-style tourneys are on the devs' "to-do" list. And there literally is a "to-do" list that I add to as needed. I take the issues brought up in this thread EXTREMELY seriously.
 

Lemonade

WOOPAGGING
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Maybe I'm just delusional, but I feel like battles take a few minutes longer because of the animations. Seeing the attacks represented and all is great (and I don't mind it on the replayer), but the cool factor really wore off for me and I like quick moving battles. IMO the animations (of moves, not the Pokemon. I don't mind those) just waste time. But if I'm the only one who feels like this, I'll deal with it.
 
The "animations take time" thing is actually going to be a net positive for the VGC community. They'll actually be able to have their realistic battle timers.
 
I think this is a great simulator, blows PO out of the water.

Teambuilder took some getting used to, but once I got the hang of it, you can literally hit tab through almost the whole thing. It quite literally guides to to the next step.

I haven't experienced any lag during my usage, albeit limited.

My only question is if I clear my browser's cache (I'm on Chrome but you can apply it to all browsers) will it clear all my teams?

Other than that great sim, can't wait to see it up and running smoothly. I don't have any programming experience or anything but if you want a hand let me know, I'm pretty thorough when it comes to testing things and even just for teambuilding I've spent hours testing movesets on a single pokemon. I can test new metagames as well.
 

verbatim

[PLACEHOLDER]
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Your teams are stored in cookies, so various tools on various systems may or may not remove teams. For instance clearing the cookies on my computer doesn't touch my teams , while other people have had issues with the cookies that store their teams getting auto-deleted by their computer. If you aren't 100% sure as to wether or not your teams will survive various clearings I recommend importing them to text and emailing the teams to yourself/storing them in a .txt file.
 
Pretty excited about this switch, look forward to having a Smogon developed sim again. Keep up the good work.
 

Zarel

Not a Yuyuko fan
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Creator of PS
I just wanted to point out something:

As the creator of PS, I know that PS has flaws and bugs. All of the problems you've brought up in this thread are problems I plan to fix, some ASAP, some eventually. It's in beta, and in fact I recommended for Smogon to wait until much later (at least end-of-summer), and I have way more things I wanted to have finished before we moved over.

So as much as you guys don't want to deal with PS's bugs, I don't want you guys to, either. I'm not done yet and I don't really want this many people to be using my unfinished work.

But the move happened because PO's been having tons of problems with Smogon's servers, and I respect Antar's need to reduce the amount of time he spends fixing server problems caused by PO.

Also, one specific response:
As for your problem of not having high enough programming skills, why didn't you ask a user such as Zarel/aesoft or bmelts to help you, as this would have made your 'job' much easier.
In fact, once, I did help him through a Unicode issue in PO. But you can't seriously expect me to devote a significant amount of time to fixing problems in a rival sim.
 
I'm somewhat excited about this, especially because it will be supported on devices like the Ipad, but my computer is soooo slow, and I haven't been able to spend more than 10 seconds on PS without getting DC'ed or my computer frozen. Hopefully I will find some way around it, but I know the whole community doesn't revolve around 1 player. I haven't seen the teambuilder so I can't give any opinion there. I have one question, will we ever be going back to PO if this doesn't work, or is this a permanent change for worse or better? Should be interesting to see what happens in the next year, and i somewhat look forward to it.

EDIT: I was able to spend about 30 seconds on one try after posting this message! XD
 
To add to Zarel's post, I have said REPEATEDLY in this thread that we will continue to maintain a PO server until PS is out of development (or, at least, is in a more final state).

Smogon has not actually "moved to PS." Rather, PS has moved to Smogon, by which I mean, they're now using our hardware (more powerful, Zarel and co. don't have to pay for it), and we'll be using their usage stats for official tiering. This is primarily a reflection of the fact that much of the Smogon userbase has already abandoned PO for PS. Smogon PO usage has been on the decline for months, with last month hitting near-record lows.* This isn't (we believe) due to people leaving the forums or using other PO servers--it's because people have switched to PS.

All that we have done is recognize that fact and attempt to facilitate the merger of the two communities (which weren't that separate to begin with).

*The only month in recent memory that saw lower usage was March 2012, when I was hosting Smogon PO off my home computer, and it would disconnect people, hundreds at a time.
 

verbatim

[PLACEHOLDER]
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I'm somewhat excited about this, especially because it will be supported on devices like the Ipad, but my computer is soooo slow, and I haven't been able to spend more than 10 seconds on PS without getting DC'ed or my computer frozen. Hopefully I will find some way around it, but I know the whole community doesn't revolve around 1 player. I haven't seen the teambuilder so I can't give any opinion there. I have one question, will we ever be going back to PO if this doesn't work, or is this a permanent change for worse or better? Should be interesting to see what happens in the next year, and i somewhat look forward to it.

EDIT: I was able to spend about 30 seconds on one try after posting this message! XD
PS isn't going down. Unlike Smogon's PO server PS is maintained by the developers of said system; any kind of horrendous mistake or traumatic glitch can be addressed more accurately than one on Smogon's PO server.
 
I've honestly been playing Showdown more. It has more of an "interactive" feel as before the battle its more cinematic will all the Pokemon moving, all the moves you use are simulated well and its not stale like PO. I've enjoyed it a lot.
 

breh

強いだね
The "animations take time" thing is actually going to be a net positive for the VGC community. They'll actually be able to have their realistic battle timers.
I wouldn't call it a net positive. Most PS! animations are rather fast; if you've ever seen something like (for example) surf or muddy water used, you know that it takes a while (about 5 seconds) for it to finish. It doesn't help that there's also a certain amount of time spent each time a Pokemon dies, when you have to wait for the Pokemon to cry, fall through the floor, and text about it to pop up. Stat-upping moves can be quite long depending on the move (Quiver Dance, although it is not all that relevant to VGC, takes a while to play - it has to say that each of the three stats were raised one by one). Trick Room in PS! is just a little wobble; ingame it's a long animation where the Pokemon sets up, then there's "<Pokemon> twisted the dimensions!" text, and then it's finally done. Even worse is any single target move that causes status effects or stat drops; every time it does something, it zooms in on the pokemon, zooms out, damage is done, zooms in again, shows the effect, zooms out again, text.. you get the point.

Again, just like with PO, unless you specifically count the amount of time a move should take (along with its associated effects, which would, frankly, be maddening), you're not approximating VGC all too well.

Anyway, I do agree that PS! is nice; everybody has migrated there anyway. It's unfortunate that it doesn't support doubles and I do agree that it'd be nice to get rid of animations altogether (and perhaps have a single check for Pokemon gifs vs. static sprites to ease lag at least a bit).
 

jrrrrrrr

wubwubwub
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Everything breh said, plus the fact that PS! doesn't support doubles, so what's the point of catering to the VGC community that doesn't use simulators in the first place? Even skarmbliss, the dedicated vgc server on PO, never sees even 1/4 the traffic as our OU ladder. I like the animations but I agree with v0x that they grow old fast. It's the main reason why I don't play on carts anyways.
 
How is PS going to be an accurate indicator of usage as of now with the ladder meaning absolute shit (and accordingly, not a particularly accurate measure, with people being paired up against each other multiple times in a row [my record is 5] and other such deficiencies) and how will this affect usage statistics, primarily for the month of July?

If this has no influence on the statistics, then I apologize, but just wondering how the majority of the user base being on PS for June (and the deficiency of battles on PO, as seen by LC...100% 1200 stats anyone) and the PS ladder not being particularly...good will affect our statistics and our tiers in the near future.

I think that's a problem that needs to be addressed.
 

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