Why Is Pokémon Go's PVP so Obfuscated? | Design Club

Good time zone, internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club, the only game design show on the internet that has tech problems the moment we're supposed to be going live. I am your humble host, Will, joined as always by my pal Jeff. Say hi to the people, Jeff.
Hi to the people, Jeff. Hi everybody, I am Jeffrey Zachin the studio director of Extra Credits and more importantly for this longtime video game designer and even more importantly longtime player of Pokemon Go for which for obscure reasons will actually make a difference today.
I I don't know I don't know that that's obscure but like it is definitely a fascinating example of the of the topic that we want to talk about. So
let's
Well, joined by
Oh, hi. I'm Will. I'm here too.
There we go. That's That's my intro. That's my intro now. Hi, I'm Will. I'm here, too. Um,
okay.

Will, I missed an opportunity.
Yes.
I I don't have purple I don't have my purple wig on in Team Rocket jacket today.
That's true. We could We could have done a Jesse and James intro. That would have been great, but we didn't think about it until just now, so no good.
That wig's like right there. No.
But no. No. Okay. So, today we're going to be talking about obfuscation. So, let's let's just start real Oh, one thing one thing I wanted to mention up front and I checked my notes and I'm glad I did.
A reminder, if you enjoy this show and watching me and Jeff do stuff, the day is changing in June.
The
and we are almost in June. We are almost
for those watching live, it is the month of May and is the 28th day.
Correct. So the fourth will be the last design club on a Thursday and the next design club will be the 16th on a

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We're moving Thursday to Tuesday. Actually, I guess since I mirrored Tuesday, Thursday to Tuesday,
correct? Yeah. Uh, and that's for a whole bunch of reasons, but that will affect when this goes live over on YouTube and when we do it over on Twitch. So, please look forward that.
And for those watching breakfast, the reason we're moving is because we are moving breakfast from Monday to Friday. So that instead of the news of last week, it is now the news of this week.
That's correct.
And we didn't want to do our shows back toback.
Yeah. Doing doing two shows in two days is not great for a whole bunch of reasons. Okay. So, today we're talking about obuscation. That's a $ five dollar word to talk about hidden information or Yeah. Right. Just like like that that Jeff is now obuscated. Right. So, um, we're going to be talking about it in in the context of Pokémon Go is a pretty good example, but please keep in mind that the while we're talking about it in the context of

Pokémon Go, it is applicable to a great many games and to a great many choices that developers and designers make when they're choosing what information to expose to uh players in their in their game. Um, and so we're going to talk we're going to set this up a little bit. We'll talk about um what games do it and then uh we'll we'll we'll dive we we might dive pretty deep onto the Pokémon Go thing as like an example of just how deep this rabbit hole goes and why it's so very obuscated. So Jeff, could you please explain to me what's up with Pokemon Go? Muted. Let me That was because Matt and Cat have as always found a discussion that has started immediately on my Discord right after we went live.
Yeah.
But luckily I'm on air and not talking about that. Okay. So, I started playing Pokemon Go

10 years almost 10 years ago now. They're coming up to their 10th anniversary back when the game was a brand new thing. And I played for a while and actually I played with my wife. I played with co-workers and eventually like most people ended up stopping because it's fun and it's a good exercise game and for a while everybody was playing it.
Yeah.
But it has continued to be the number one AR game for mobile. Full stop.
Yeah.
As far as I understand it from the stats, there is nobody else even close
correct
to that. Um, there have been others that have tried and others that have done well, but Pokémon Go 10 years in is still the magic combination of IP and fantasy. And one of the big things that it has that almost no other game does is a it has a huge brand that's been going for 30 plus years now.
30.
And so people know it. And what you do if you were a Pokemon trainer, Will, you

would wander out into the wild with your Pokeballs, look around and try and catch small P animal, excuse me, try and catch Pokemon as you wandered around the world,
right?
In Pokemon Go, you take your phone and you wander around the world. You bump into Pokeballs. You throw Pokeballs at them and capture them. You're kind of mimicking what we've seen people do in the manga, in the TV shows, in the games,
right?
And it because of that exact match and the beloved IP, I think it works better than almost any other AR game that they've tried since,
right? And and social, boy, there are other AR games. Yeah, Pikmin has one, Pikmin Bloom. There have been attempts with various other licensed IPs. Harry Potter. Actually, there have been a freaking ton of ones that when Pokemon Go did well.
A lot of others got green lit.
Almost none of them did well.
Like Harry Potter is a beloved IP for a lot of people. But you don't wander

around the world as a wizard randomly blasting people with your wand. Kind of the whole point of Harry Potter for most of it is the wizards keep hidden from the muggles.
Yeah. Right. So like Yeah. It's
there isn't that matchup that you get,
right? It's it's a ludo ludo narrative dissonance as opposed to a ludo narrative harmony which you get with Pokemon and almost nothing else. Monster Hunter could have been it, but I feel like the problem is that that's too close to Pokemon Go
in a lot of ways in that it's monsters except it's not cute and there's more battling involved. It's less like
uh look at my giant collection of Pokemon. Mhm. Yes, they did even make an NBA. Like there have been a lot of tries in making these games. But anyway, so a certain number of years ago, five, six, seven, somewhere in that range, my wife and I had a kid. And about a year ago, we accidentally showed child Pokemon Go.

It was kind of accidentally like we'd he'd he'd heard about it at school. Pokemon. We started when he was interested, we started watching Pokemon anime. Like we went back to Indigo. I showed him the very first Pokemon and we've been like working our way forward through that.
He now has a bed full of Pokemon plushies. He had a birthday party somewhat recently that was Pokemon themed.
Like he has Poke on the Brain.
Sure. And Pokemon Go is understandable by someone of that age for its basic concept of wander around, see a Pokemon, throw a Pokeball at it, catch it. And I've actually been training his analytical skills will because Pokemon and Pokémon Go have IVs, which we'll talk about. And I've taught him how to look at a Pokemon he finds. And this is, you know, I'm just going to use 5-year-old as a standin for rounding.
Yeah.
This is something that I've taught a 5-year-old to look at. look at IVs, rate them, and start rating which ones are

worth keeping and which ones are not because you can't store an infinite amount of Pokemon,
right?
And so his analytical skills are getting developed by looking at Pokemon and having to start making choices
about them.
Well, and
um anyway, so that that's preamble to what we're about to get to, but go ahead. Sorry.
No, I mean games are a fascinating way to teach children core competencies, right? Like I learned to read by playing Magic the Gathering because do you know how much of a disadvantage it is if you have to ask the person you're playing against what your card does?
I was furious at that as a four-year-old so I learned to read all the cards so I could play Magic the Gathering without needing to read, you know, anything, right? And like reading uh hand eye coordination for catching stuff, analytics, right? It's good stuff. Um it's it it's obviously not a complete educational replacement or anything, but it is Yeah. It has supplements that are good to teach kids. Yeah.

And so at a certain point, um in addition to doing all of these things and liking to catch the biggest Pokemon he can because all young children like large things. Yeah.
Um be it magic, the gathering poke, etc. He dis I I don't know if I dis showed him or if he accidentally discovered through clicking through interfaces that you could battle against other people.
Yeah.
And so Oh, go ahead.
I was going to say um I I can loosely explain the PVP if you would. Uh Matt is requesting that you check an an important priority message.
Oh,
okay.
Uh so you can not only use your Pokemon in raids, right? You use them to battle in gyms uh or in raids to catch like legendary Pokemon. But there is also a whole system where you can battle against other people. And most of what we're going to be talking about today is most relevant in that battling other people phase. It has some implications

for um like the ultimate top end maximization of raids and uh gym battles, but that's not really the at stake here. Um, this is mostly talking about specifically the PVP.
Okay. Fixed. Sorry. Small small studio emergency.
Yeah. Right. Okay.
I have weighed in on that. Um, and we'll dive a little deeper into all of these, but one of the interesting things that got me to where I am on this. Um, is child has been doing PvP battles and for the again proxy age 5-year-old, he is surprisingly good at them. Like he's starting to memorize his types, but he is still picking hokey that look big, fun, and stompy. like um given the choice between a big fun and stompy legendary and a solid workhorse say Raichu, right? Or something else, right?

He's going to go with the big stompy thing,
right?
Um
and of course the irony is, and I'm I'm jumping the shark ever so slightly, most of the legendaries are either ineligible for the leagues that most people play or they suck. They're not good. Yeah,
he has enough to like try them out and if it's like this one's good, it's daddy, I'm using this one.
Yeah.
So, he's been playing a lot and um Pokemon Go uses a season system which is I think three months long. Yep.
And you battle up and you rise in rank and so it matches you loosely against other players of similar skill.
Right. He is reaching the point where the Pokemon he picks because they're kind of fun are not necessarily the ones that are going to win against other people who have these really nicely constructed teams. So I was like, "Hey, I'll just go make an a couple of teams for him." You can like save out little team loadouts for different leagues of um and they do the

leagues by how many points a Pokemon is worth, right? And this is mostly determined off their level and their IVs. So there's a 1500 point league, the great league, 2500 ultra, and then there's the unlimited league above that. And occasionally they'll throw in weird groupings like great league but only this region or
things like that.
I I've seen like at one point there was like a babies only league, which we're not going to think too hard about that. They've done like leagues with specific
collections of Pokemon like this is Halloween Pokemon only. Ghost types. Only ghost types. Figure it out.
So anyway, so I'm like, "Oh, I'll go make a couple of teams."
And so I started trying to look for what's meta and what plays well.
Uhhuh.
And this led me to a rabbit hole,
right?
Because let's talk about Pokémon Go for a moment. Actually, will
Yeah.
Can we um
Yeah.
Let's go look at uh I took some videos. Let's go look at video number one while

we're talking.
Okie dokie. This is some Pokémon Go footage.
There you go. So, there's my character. Um, interestingly for Pokemon, you can show these fine because that doesn't actually show your trainer name,
right?
That just shows and you can see here like, hey, here's how far I've walked this week. Because Pokémon Go is, as I'll remind everybody, a game designed to get you out and walking around. Yeah,
I've played a while, so I have tons of badges, but I've got a buddy there that I'm walking. We can talk about buddies at some point. You can see I'm leveling up. You can see distance.
So, it's designed to be mass market and very consumer friendly. You know, it's designed for anybody to be able to pick up and just start playing.
Yes.
So, it's designed to be simple. Um, like that's one of the things that they just straight up were like, "Hey, this should be a game that anybody can pick up and play." And I absolutely absolutely

believe that they would never have had the level of success they had,
right?
If they hadn't been able to pick up and play.
I agree.
And so, cool. I've been walking a lot. Let's switch over to video two for a second. And as you walk, um, you collect Pokemon and you can store Pokemon in your Pokedex. So, this is just a quick look down, but hey, Will.
Mhm.
Can you read up top? How many Pokemon do I have in my Pokedex?
Uh, you currently are holding 1,416 Pokemon with a capacity of,450,
right? I have paid in-game coins to expand my Pokedex greatly. Um, that is one of the things you can earn in-game coins by doing certain things uh for free. You can also pay real money for them,
but I have spent a large amount expanding my bag and the number of items I can hold.
Yep.
But yes, I currently have 1,416

and this is curated. Like I go through and I dump I'll call them bad pokey for the moment. um they get transferred to the professor and you kind of do things with them. Um but or he does things with them. I don't know what he's done with the tens of thousands of Poke that I have sent him.
Pay no attention to the blender behind the scenes. Anyway,
I know. Well, he gives you candy for every poke you give him, so it probably is a blender.
Probably a blender anyway. Um anyway that
right.
Yeah. Oh here we were all thinking it.
Yeah it was a big poker in the sky.
Correct.
Um so
and I I just also want to comment that there's a fair amount of other information on this page that is
uh
oh yeah
like expressed to someone who knows what

is going on, right? but is not overwhelming for someone who doesn't. So, for instance, we have a generically strong Pokemon. There's a Hepowon up there in the second row that has 2,924 uh TP.
Above it, we have an Arcanine that has a different UI element above it, right? That has a different UI element that conveys something specific. But if you don't know what that is, it's still a cool Arcanine. It just has a thing and it doesn't it's not obfuscating the fact that it's still an arcanine, right? And that uh D uh Dmanitan has an icon behind it. And then down here we've got a Charizard with two icons. There's like a pink like almost butterfly icon and a and a snowflake icon or like a series of shinies, right? And so like
actually let it roll again. Go back up to the top a second and you'll notice um they're about to see it. There's a little special badge next to the Garchomp on the top.

Mhm.
That also means something or the slacking there has a little icon or the Gyarados for four down left.
All of those little icons have very specific meanings in this game. And as a quick note, there is no info box that tells you what they all mean. I was getting
you kind of figure it out as you go. Like Garchomp's badge means that he's a fourstar friend or buddy. We can talk about buddies later that I've done a ton of work. The little icon next to slacking means he's currently hanging out in a gym defending it and I can't actually pull him up and use him in a battle or a raid in anything else cuz he's currently off defending another location.
Of course, slacking is bad everywhere except defending a gym. So, it's fine,
which is why he's in a gym,
right? Like the little symbol next to Gyarados means I believe he was he's both a um fourstar buddy friend, but he was also caught as a shadow Pokemon variant and then purified.
Correct. And the other Gyarados is a

lucky Gyarados that is also a four-star friend.
Yes, I I've had a lot of Gyarados friends. The Metagross above him with the butterfly means it's a Dynamax variant of a Metagross, which you can't turn one Dynamax. You have to catch a Dynamax by doing a Dynamax battle where their Mega Evolves. If you get enough mega particles, you can turn any Pokemon into a mega evolve. Like I've just listed a whole bunch of information,
right?
That is not listed anywhere in the game.
Yes.
And has to be discovered. It is all obfiscated
this
nonsense. So, so, so this is kind of the the fascinating point is that there is two things are true simultaneously and it's one of the reasons why Pokémon Go is such a great example for this
one. There is way too there is a absolute ton of information that genuinely does matter, but none of that information matters to a huge section of

the player base and none of it matters enough to that section of the player base that it's slowing them down.
Yeah.
Right. Like you could still play the game not knowing any of the things that Jeff just said except maybe how to defend a gym and still enjoy Pokemon Go as an excuse to get out, walk around your town, explore new places, hang out with your friends, whatever, right?
And it's interesting to me that like looking at this page, this page still looks very simple. Like you could miss all of the extra information on this as a new player. And for also like you can't rearrange this grid will it is always three wide like you can't go small to see a whole bunch of things. You can filter it to be in different orders. Like this is by CP. I could do it by Pokemon number by most recently caught. There's a couple of things the search actually has a tremendous amount of filters. So I could be like
dark Pokemon that can Dynamax. Like I

could multi-string this. So there's there are things I could be doing to search here, but they very purposefully are trying to keep this large. By the way, my again, I'm using proxy age. My 5-year-old understands all of these icons at this point through trial and error and other things. Like you pick it up as you go, but there is a I'd almost forgotten how much information is just right here and obiscated. I also think that like it is helpful here that the IP is strong enough that people want to stick around, right? Like if it wasn't an IP, if these were all
Yeah.
blocks, different different colored stick people, right? And the IP wasn't as attractive. I don't think they could get away with this. I also don't think they'd get away with this in a new game, right? Onboarding new players to this is difficult. onboarding existing players one mechanic at a time because remember when Pokemon Go launched I cast bones to dust a decade more than

a decade ago.
Yeah,
right. And we had that one week that was the closest we'll ever know to peace in our time,
right? You remember that week, right, where everyone was playing Pokémon Go, right? Okay, great. um it was the one it was the original like 150 and you couldn't do a lot of the things you can do now and they've been slowly add it right
I'll get to that in a moment when we look at a different one um I'm just kind of throwing some up yeah like the barrier to re-entry is actually pretty low um because you literally do just you could just this posted again yeah
pick up your phone and start walking
Yep
like this only really matters to
some people and they They've added more and more search functionality over time. Like that part has gotten good.
Um, actually, we'll see a thing. Will go to the next one for a moment for me.
Um, and I'll talk about something more

later, but for a thing they added that's amazing. See those little tags on top will that say like buddy top shelf buddy fourstar.
Those are custommade tags I made. They put a system in where you can tag Pokemon and when you're looking at the search, you can just look at those. So, for example, I can look at anybody I've tagged as buddy if I want to
on that. This is getting into some of the stuff I'm going to talk about later. So, we
So, we'll just we'll leave it right here.
We can just pause it there. One of the others,
but um
yeah, there's a staggering amount of information here. Mhm.
So, as I was getting into that PvP research, like for me, up until I started PvP, I knew for example, high CP is good. I knew actually, let it scroll down a tiny bit. I want to see IVs. Um,
does it do it on this one?
It should go. Yeah. Uh,

oh no, I never found what. Um, I forgot. There's an overlay screen for IVs.
Correct. It's uh yeah, if you go if you go here and click appraise,
you get you get the
I forgot about that. Okay, so actually go back then. So that main screen, a player can see the CP.
This is by how the game launched. All of the IVs were hidden. IVs for anybody who don't know for Pokemon are their three main stats, which is their attack, their defense, and their hit points. Um, something I found out recently, like nine plus years into it, is that there are 15 levels of HIV, or excuse me, 16. A score can go from zero to 15 for each of those, the attack, the defense, and the hit points. And I hadn't actually realized that that was true in Pokémon Go. I thought they just have like little bar. They don't have a number next to it. It's just a pure line graph, sideways line graph going up.
Yep. There's one three segments.
Yeah. in one, two, and three segments. I

hadn't actually realized that those were specifically like the third notch or is 15, the second notch is 10, and you could then learn how far up 11, 12, 13, and 14 are once you realize there's only four increments up there. Like once I knew that, my brain clicked to that. Before I just thought it was a pure slider.
That's how far they offiscate this. They don't actually tell you that number. So, uh,
so I played, yeah, I played closer to launch and I was struggling with this at launch. So, way back when, people figured out with math um, how to to determine what the IVs, what IVs were possible to yield a particular CP value for each Pokemon. And you see how there's a bar that like there's there's like I remember that now. Yeah.
Yeah. The curve bar around, right? That's its level.
They never tell you its number,
correct? But that is its level. So,

someone wrote an overlay that takes a screenshot of a Pokemon, figures out where the dot is for what level it is, and then does the math on what the CP is at. So, what possible IV values you can have for that yield that level and CP combination. And then you can narrow it down by leveling it up incrementally. So like if it's level
I remember that one cuz it it asks you to take a screenshot like level it up one time.
Yeah.
Do it again because it can also look at see uh where it says power up the button there.
Mhm.
Every level that you do the power up costs more.
Yep.
So they could look at the increment on that to help fine-tune the exact level it was at.
Correct.
And use that to backwards engineer.
Right. So, all of this is to say, by the way,
yeah,
that everything we're talking about right now has been in the game since the very beginning

and was completely
showing a little bit more of it now.
Yeah, there's there's slightly more of it now, but like the concept of IVs was in from the very beginning and was completely hidden from the player unless you used a third party app that took screenshots and did a bunch of math to figure it out. Like, it just wasn't exposed to the player at all. And so yeah, for the first months the stuff you caught, you were just like, "Oh, cool. It has a high CP."
Yeah.
And that's was a majority of the players. And later they exposed the IVs so you could look. But I met my niece has been playing for probably five or six years and had never known what an IV was ever. She was just collecting the Pokemon she thought were cool that were high CP.
Yep. And I explained it to her and it's a really disappointing day the day you learn about that because you look at your collection and you realize that like twothirds of the Pokemon you were collecting will never top out at the highest thing if that matters to you.
Yep.
And for some people it does and for some people it completely doesn't. And again,

one of the reasons Niantic was able to make this mass market is they hid all of this so that if you just want to go collect Pokemon and show your cool Pokemon that you're walking around with, it's good. You can play that way. This only really matters for like bragging status and if you're doing big raids and big PvP, the big raids, because when you go fight a raid, because this is a raiding game at the high end to get the really good legendary Pokemon and other stuff, you have to join in with other people, you need to bring really, really tough Pokemon.
Yeah.
Otherwise, you get flattened real quick.
And um tough Pokemon good. So anyway, as I was researching the PvP for this, I'm like, "Okay, I know CP, I know IVs, I've got some high IV Pokemon, you know, let me go check what's meta." And the more I dug into this, Will, what I realized was that the PV the battle

system that they use in most of the console games is in Pokemon Go.
Yep. Like different attacks have different specialty or have different moves. All of the resistance types are there. They have different energy costs. They have different attack speed. All of this is in there and none of it is shown in the app. Well, excuse me. Some of it and I want to show you in a moment.
Yeah.
And so what I ended up doing actually will let's run through this video again from the beginning. I want to point out a couple things to show why I got to this.
Yep. Okay, so let's pause here a second. Um, cool. We can see it's CP. This is 3,413. The shiny stuff behind it means it's lucky, which means my stardust cost to power it up is lower. That doesn't really matter for the moment.
Yeah, you have a shiny lucky, by the way, which is
I have a shiny lucky. That my tag of top

shelf means it has a very high IV grouping.
Um, you can see my tags. I should be powering this up one up and I've turned it into a four-star buddy by walking with it for hundreds of kilometers and doing other things. And actually, if you fourstar buddy, which takes forever, they actually add a tiny bit to your m CP above the maximum. So, just to make it worse, Will, if you have Pokemon you really, really want to battle, you also need to go walk and do other things to add that little bit of extra CP on top of what their IVs and level give you.
Yeah.
Okay, let's let it run for a little bit. So, what what you would know, this is just showing difference between like a lucky and a non-lucky.
Yep.
Stop it here a second.
Okay.
Right there. I know that my um Solomons has two attacks here, Dragon Tail and Fly. Um Dragon Tail, if I'm in a PvP

battle or actually any battle, you have two button. When you tap your screen really fast, your Pokemon attacks, it builds up a meter and then you get to do a special move. Cool. I use Dragon Tail and when it fills up the meter, I get to use fly.
Right. I can see that the amount of damage it does is 14 and 90.
What that means?
That means almost nothing. I think the 90 is hit points. You can see my Solomon says 172 hit points above. So that seems like it's a big number.
Sure.
But um that's what they tell me. And I believe the two things next to fly
Mhm.
means that it it is a more energyintensive move. It takes longer to power up.
You can hold two charges of it.
No, all moves can hold two charges.
Interesting. Okay. So, I don't know. Is it Is it two charges? Is it okay?

Yeah.
Just
Okay. Well, let's let this roll for a moment. So, at the moment, I know for fighting I have dragon tail and fly,
right?
So, I can go up to the Pokedex part, which shows me for a moment here. If you pause it a second, I can see the types again. dragon and flying. I can see the kinds of Solomons I've caught. I've caught a regular and a shiny and a lucky, but I haven't caught 100% or don't have 100% the extra big or extra smalls, mega purify, like their collector versions. I've gotten pretty far on all the variants you can collect,
right? So, so, so let's assume, by the way, let's assume that Salamance is the last Pokemon. It's not. It's not even close, but let's assume that it is because we know that it's number 373, right? Okay, great. Awesome. So,
yeah, that is the three 73 is that's the number of release,
right? Okay, cool. Great. Awesome. So, ju just to put this in perspective, right? If there were only 373, that's still
eight meaningful variations per. So,

we're already heading towards 3,200.
Yeah.
Individual Pokemon that they want you to have, right? And you've been playing for a long time.
That you could have. And by the way, this is having this um if we went to actually let it scroll down for a second. Let's look at the sheep or it's going to go oh it's going to go over to info. Okay. Um let's pause it a second here. So tab number one we saw was kind of caught and it um tab two shows you its evolution and describes it a little bit for you.
And
so I can know the names
and shows its mega evolution if applicable.
Yep. And um by the way, if I catch a shiny um the final version of it,
I don't get the shiny Bagdon or Shellon marked, I have to you have each instance has its own set of um recordings. So like if I get a lucky bagon and evolve it to a Sheldon and then evolve it again to the

Solomons, I then have lucky marked for all three. But if we do if my wife and I do a trade of Solivances and it turns lucky, the Bagdon and the Sheldon are not marked as lucky for things I've collected. Just mentioning this is an aside. This has nothing to do with the obstigation. This is just
if you like collecting things. All right. And then we've got this screen.
Okay. So, let's pause here for a second. I can see the types. This is a more recent edition, by the way. This didn't launch. This shows me what it's resistant to and weak against, which is great. Um, like that used to be a thing you have to have a little third party or a little cheat sheet for. And as soon as it got to two types, like most people's head exploded,
right? Because two types uh so um fortunately it's all uh double or half, right? So a single type is something is super effective, it's doubly, it's doubled power. If it's not very effective, it's half. But the second you

get to two types, you get uh your weaknesses and your strengths cancel. Your weaknesses and resistances cancel each other out. So it's just flat. Um you can have double resistance or double weakness. So you can have 4x or a quarter as well. So it gets like the chart for complex typing is weird and complicated. And this is one of the things that I learned delving into the PVP, which I'll get back to, is certain types based on meta might have weaknesses that are almost never used by the current meta or be heavily resistant to other Pokemon that are strong in the current meta. Meaning that as you're battling them, and the same with raids, if there's a big raid coming up, if you can find a Pokemon that you have that's strong that has double resistances to whatever you're going up against, that means your Pokemon's going to survive a lot longer getting wolved by a huge mega raid boss,
right?
Um, as you're fighting it,
let's also, real quick, um, you you

mentioned the meta. I just want to address like what that is, right? So, um, in in a Pokemon in a regular main Pokemon game, right, main series Pokemon game, you have a known set of encounters, right? You have a known set of encounters. You know what's in the Elite 4 for every Pokemon game if you care to look it up. That's a huge part of nuzlocking at the highest level is looking up those things and knowing what your encounters are going to do. The metag game is that, but for PvP, you need to study what the percentage chance is that you're going to run into a particular thing, right? in I I do this all the time in Magic, right? I have multiple decks, some of which are very good and very prevalent and some of which are very good against the very good, very prevalent decks specifically. And I make a meta call on what I'm going to play as an example. Right? So like that that whole concept is a big part of PvP specifically that's not necessarily present in PvE and may not be obvious to people who don't play a lot of PvP games.
But on an offiscation level if you've

never played any of the other things this is what you know hey my Solomon is resistant to all these elements and weak to these couple. I don't know what resistant or weak means. It doesn't show me the doubles and the um or the quadruples and the quarters.
Right? It is. This is what I know right here.
And remember, well, how we had two um attack an attack and a super attack.
Yep.
If we scroll, let the video roll for a minute more. Let's check. Let's look at the fast attacks and the charged attacks.
Uh go ahead and pause it as soon as it go scrolls a little further down.
Oh, yeah. You want the elite?
Okay.
Yeah.
So, this is the pool of attacks my Solomons could have. When you catch a Pokemon, they have these randomly, except for the elite ones. We can talk about that later. And sometimes when you evolve, they change. So, for example, my Bagdon might not have access to fly as a charged attack because it can't yet fly.

So, let's look at the info here. This is all of the info I have. I can guess what typing it is because there's a symbol next to it. Like I had dragon tail. It I don't think it almost I don't think it tells you anywhere that matching your type with the attack type gives you a bonus,
right? It's called stab. Same type attack bonus. And it's almost never mentioned in most Pokemon games unless you talk to the right NPC.
Yeah.
Stab.
And so I see that I could have a fire attack, a dragon tail attack, or a bite attack. I can see Hold on. I need to move this screen for myself. I can see how much damage they do. And you'd think I would just pick the highest damage one, but one of the stats they don't tell you is how fast the attack is or how much. So, in other words, dragon tail does happen to be the best one for this. It's the best combination of it's the best DPS. Attacks per second can or

time between attacks and how much damage the attack does. So, damage per second is the calculation. But nowhere here does it list that and the same will going down. Remember you were like oh it can hold two charges. If you look at all the charged up attacks like does a two a big one or a small three does that mean is it cheaper to cast?
Right?
Does it take more energy to cast?
Right.
And this is all I I assume it feels like this is left to the player to discover as an exercise.
Right. But it's a little hard because every Pokemon you get randomly will have different sets of attacks and you don't usually have four Solomonses to like compare between,
right?
The moves are the same between different like if if I had a if I had a oh I don't know um Dragonite that had Dragon Tail, it would have the same timing for the attack or if it had um fly instead of

outrage instead of something else.
Mhm. But um like that's still there's a whole bunch of information left out here.
Yeah.
That you don't know both for raids and for PvP. And by the way, Will, you can change these.
Yeah.
So you can get you can get special items that again they don't tell you much about that will change your fast attack or your charged attack to another thing randomly in the pool.
Right? The only guarantee is you don't get the thing you just had. So if I wanted to try and get, for example, fly for this one, which I did, I'm rolling a d6 and if it's a one, it rolls it again. I can't get fly again. But say I get hydrop pump. If I still want to try and get fly, there's no guarantee that I don't go back or if I want to get fire blast, there's no guarantee I don't go back to fly by rolling the d6 again on my next use of one of these expendable items.

And they're not easy to combine. You can't actually buy them in the store. They are only found through questing and doing other things. So,
getting the right move set
onto a Pokemon can be a challenge. And you have to know what the right move set is,
right?
Before you even do that. Because one of the things that's worth noting is that in addition to not really explaining the nomenclature here for what damage really is or what the charge bars mean or how what the attack speed is, some of these have additional effects which are listed nowhere.
That's Thank you. So see you. Don't all of these look like a thing you might tap on.
Yeah.
Like to learn what Fire Fang does?
Yeah.
They're not selectable. So I don't know. for example, that outrage lowers attack if I successfully cast that. Um, or any of the other things that might be associated. I don't know that using brave bird will make me hit hard, but we

like we like I don't know any of the things associated with any of these because they're not listed anywhere in the entire app
or even on most websites.
Yeah.
They don't know. They don't list what these kinds of things are,
right?
Um, so as I was trying to figure out what makes a good Pokemon for PvP, like this is the information I could look at here. I can look at my number. I can look at my IVs. I can now look at the pool. They didn't used to show this. Oh, and see that elite attack. It's an elite attack. I will never roll that in the pool,
right? The only way to get an elite attack is they will give you occasionally very very special TMs that will let you choose anything from the pool, including the elites. I have two of these. I've never used one total, like from all my play. Or on a once a month community day for 3 hours, if you

evolve a Pokemon from its lowest form all the way up to its highest form, you will get the elite attack. Um, again, nowhere in the app has it said that. I I found that on a website and it seems to have been confirmed.
Yeah. Yeah. They they they have advertised
for a second.
Yeah. Yeah. They have advertised community days as like giving specific Pokemon access to specific moves if they're evolved during that event. Um, before uh that was true when I was playing last. It's Yeah. This is the private cost we pay for that one week of of world peace, right? Yeah. And and I think Andrew's uh got a really great point here. So for instance, Crunch has a defense drop chance, but Brutal Swing has a shorter cool down, but other but as far as the game is concerned, they look identical, right? Like those are true things about those moves that aren't explained to the player at all. So um and and I I think that this is this is a common take, right? Glom says,

"It continues to frustrate me. The Pokemon in every game they publish never adds a way in game for you to get all the information you require, and it would be so easy to do." That's kind of what we're talking about, right? So, we're going into like how it's obfuscated and what isn't shown, right? And then we're going to talk a bit a bit about the why, the how, and the like what the benefit of this is. Is there a benefit to this? Yeah. What if we just don't tell anyone about most of our mechanics and expect them to figure it out? Well, there's actually a benefit to that. Um, which we'll get to.
Actually, let me address part of this for a moment. Yeah,
I may sound like I'm complaining about this, and in some ways I am.
Sure.
The discipline of their design team and their producer for this is legendary in my mind at this point cuz Pokemon Go only succeeds by being huge. Like they have the Pokemon license. They have to make a mass market game.
Yeah. like they and like

just from the from everything they're doing, there are so many things they could have done to make it so that when a 5-year-old picks it up, so that when my wife who's not actually who likes certain games but is not a gamer of this type picks it up and plays for a while or all of these other people that you see walking through malls and other places doing this, like you don't get to be the number one app and stick there for 10 years by not going hugely wide. And the discipline that I think it took them to not add in to the things that would make it extra confusing is extreme because every design and the design team too, but like designers want to explain systems. We've learned that putting in tutorials is good and help boxes and all of this other stuff. They have kept this streamlined and basically said, "Well, if the players really want

to know, they'll go figure it out." And we're going to get to that.
Yeah.
In a minute. So, anyway, I'm looking at all of this stuff and I'm like, I want to make a good PvP team.
Yeah.
But I don't know about are some attacks better? I don't know this combination of elements against what I'll be fighting. I don't know what's going to be good. I don't even know what I can power up that's going to hit its right power levels at a 1500 point or 2500 point league. I didn't know that max IVs are great for raids, but in PvP because of how heavily they weight the attack stat and how much bonus you get from leveling up that it's actually best to have a very low attack stat, very high defense and hit points, and to let basically the level carry you as opposed to the stats that one stat car like all of this stuff

was hidden.
Yeah. And and it's it's very important to note that like there are more complicated reasons why your PvP team wants a zero attack stat. I got into this briefly before I stopped playing Pokemon Go. We're going to elide to it is good to have a low stat and we're not going to explain all the mechanics. We'll be here for like a half hour just explaining that bit, right? But like just know take it on faith that we're right on this.
Yeah. And part of the problem too is like um actually here we go. This is perfect. My wife will never care that much.
Sure.
I didn't care that much up until my child got high enough into PVP that he was getting really frustrated at losing. Not because he's a bad player, but because he was going up against teams that he just statistically from a mathematical perspective would almost never beat,
right?
And so I'm like, "Okay, f it. I'm gonna go figure this out."
Yeah.
So, hold on. Let me warm up a screen, Will. Okie dokie. Uh, send me the link

when you got it.
Yes. Let's see if this tanks my frame rate.
This was the tech problem we were experiencing earlier. Jeff has a very cool spreadsheet he wants to show off and some other info, but uh, when he tried to do this, it made him go all fuzzy,
which was really odd.
Yeah. No, super weird. Tech Gremlins exist. Um, come back. The one downside, Will, is too many windows. There we go. Okay.
Right. Actually, I I I think that this is it. I think I think Lark's got it exactly, which is um how do you how do you go from a casual player to competitive scene? Getting destroyed in a match at Googling it. Yeah,
that's
sadly um Pokemon Go does not have any good way of doing that transition.
Yes.
And I think that they've just said they are they're not going to do it.

Y
um and we can talk about and this is what we're going to kind of get to on the pivot.
Yeah.
Okay. So, I got put this in here. Hit. Okay. Do this. And then let's see if Let's see if it works. It does. Hey. All right. So, this, by the way, right here, because this is who I am, and I'm a game designer and a stat nerd and all the other things, this is my ranked sheet of Great League Pokemon, meaning Pokemon that can be up to a 1500 CP based on two different websites that I've used um for both ranking and then a separate one ranking where I can kind of look across along with what I've actually got
because of course, I don't have every single Pokemon or of good good enough stats to use.
Uhhuh.
Along with what I put together and the moves they should have. Moves with a little asterric means it's an elite

move, which means I have to evolve it from the base state or use one of my two um things that can change it, of which I've only ever gotten two along the way. So that's also like I could have a pretty good furator, but I don't know. Do I want to use you know
what is I
yeah use the thing I have a small stash of Pokemon waiting for the next community day now in its own little tab of I will evolve all of these on community day and see if it actually gives me
that thing and and important to note the other the other uh valuation right is not just is it worth it to do that is it's the margin between hydropump and ice beam in the case of for alligator worth the limited time expendable like what is the percentage difference, right, between hydrocanon, a water move that gets stab versus ice beam, a move that doesn't, but also covers different resist. Like, and now my brain hurts and we're just talking about one life.
Exactly. And like I even color coded here, green means, for example, I had a

Pokemon of close enough that powering it up would cost x amount of stardust, which was acceptable, where purple was like, "Wow, this will take a month's worth of gathering stardust just to power up this one Pokemon."
Yep.
Or I don't have enough candy and would have to use some of the special like
all sorts of interesting things. And so like I was going to websites here like this is PV poke was seemed to be recommended as one of the best ones. This is one of the other best ones to like put together tierings. Oh Will.
Uhhuh.
I get to tell you my great AI story.
Okay, great. Awesome.
Okay, this actually was amazing. So one of the things I I have mixed feelings on AI.
Yeah.
But I realized looking at this I'm like, wait, this is a sheet. I can expand each of these. He gives me lots and lots of information about each pokey. Yeah. What if I go up here to Gemini
and I basically say, "Hey, Gemini, for the tab I'm viewing, go find these things and I listed the stats I want."

Yeah.
And just capture them and throw them in a spreadsheet or you know.
Yeah. So you you were you were using it as a scrape and an analysis tool on existing
script analysis tool. Thank you. That is And I was like, "Sure." And it took like 5 seconds.
Yeah. which would haveaused which would have taken you
a day,
hours.
Yeah.
At least. And poof. Hey, look. There it is right there. But I found out a really interesting thing. So, I did this and I'm combing through and I'm looking at stuff and at a certain point I'm like, "Oh, like see you see the editor's notes. They also had suggested teammates."
Like, and I was like,
"A couple of these feel off." Like some of these suggested teammates feel weird. And it took me like a day to realize that when I asked it to do the scrape here, it didn't have the ability to sandwich out or accordion out each of these things. So, it collected the stats it could see here and then it hallucinated

all of the rest of them.
And that like it's so close. It was so close. All it had to do was say, "I'm sorry. I don't know what that thing that you're asking for is." That's all it had to do. It said it made it up,
but it hallucinated um all of it hallucinated the note and the suggested teammates
entirely, but it hallucinated them. There's enough information. I thought it was only looking at the tab.
Yeah,
it somehow went wider and pulled in enough information that it was a
it seemed good. Like they were solid editors notes regarding PvP pokey in the current meta and suggested teammates. It wasn't perfect. I was looking for like a ranked site that did this,
but it was
and that's
really enough. I didn't notice it.
Yeah.
For like a day and then I had to go back and I expanded each accordion out and then asked it to capture and then it was
Yeah.

fine at doing that. But it was like it was an amazing AI hallucination.
Yeah.
That hallucinated well enough I couldn't tell.
Yeah. that that is and and sort of it is one of like the thank goodness it was for Pokemon and not for something important, right? Like and it is also the problem where like if you if you'd taken all of it and hadn't noticed and started losing, you would have become even more frustrated because now you've done all of this work and you have all this information and it's still not working and why isn't it working?
Yeah. But like out of I would say realistically somewhere between 10 to 15 hours worth of research. Y
I now have five Pokemon for the 1500 point league.
Okay.
That I think are optimal for what I have. Could power up. Spent a whole bunch of stardust, which is their in-game currency. Um to unlock Oh, Will, let's let's close this down a second. Let's go back to the Pokemon picture.
Uh yeah. Do you wanted this?
Uh yes. Um,

let it go down to his move a second again.
There we go. See where it says new attack right there?
Mhm.
You can pay that amount of stardust and candy to get a second charged up attack on every Pokemon so that when you charge up, you can pick which one to use. So, in addition to all of the Stardust cost for powering them up on all the candy, any good competitive PVP Pokemon has a set of two moves they can use just to play off against meta types. So, those five both have all the right moves and a second move that I paid. Like, it was an expensive process.
You you may sometimes, by the way, hear this referred to as a coverage move. often times though not exclusively it is a move that excels against Pokemon that you are worried like it's the it's your it's it's your move that you take for things that you think are going to give you problems right it's your ace in the

hole sort of where you're like this Salamance folds immediately and completely to an ice type but if it's my last Pokemon I need it to clutch up against an ice type I'm going to give it a fire move as its second new attack I don't know if that's actually the I actually just did that. I I ended my um
oh, what's it called?
I'm forgetting the name. One one of my good one one of my good bird flying types
finished off a match with a flamethrower which completely surprised my opponent and took half of its health bar. Actually, will throw in the last video while we're talking and we can just throw some B-roll. The uh PvP one.
This Yeah.
Oh, that's the first video.
That's the first video. No, that's that's the this is the PvP one. Oh, is it? Okay. Oh, you're right. It is. Never mind.
I got them in order. I got them. I got them all.
You are correct, sir. I was I saw the little ball and I thought it was the first one.
Right. Yeah. Okay. So, you have a fortress, an Altarion, a Tinkaton. God, I love Tinkaton. It's such a stupid

Pokemon and I love it so much.
The Alurion's the one. Um, it's funny. My very first video I captured, I had like three alerts come up and had to abandon it. It was actually an even better match.
Sure. But um
so
Fortress is a t is a beast in the 1500 point meta,
right? Okay. So I also just want to point out like so that we're all on the same page.
Mhm.
You did 15 hours of research to get five Pokemon
for a team of three. I'll use
for a team of three that you will use
to play the competitive non-main move or non-main mode in a mobile game.
Yes.
Okay.
And specifically again because my child really enjoys this one and I wanted to build him at least a couple of teams that he could use so that he can play and not be frustrated.
Yeah. And I think that's fair because
I have done things like this for other games I have played. Yeah. Like I have

spreadsheeted out games 100%.
Yeah. Uh Andrew wants to know what are the other two Pokemon in your group of five.
Um hold on. Um and after the next community day I will evolve and I'll probably double that up to 10. But a lot of them have special moves that I just can't unlock until then. Um let us see here. I need to look because of course I made a little tab grouping for them
of course.
So we have Tinkerton, Alaria, Fortress, a Greedant.
Okay.
Uh which is
a squirrel.
A squirrel.
Yep. Squirrel.
And a Florus.
Okay. Who's a flower? Who's a actually a fairy?
Ah, okay. Cool.
Fairy that looks like a flower.

A fairy that looks like a flower. And the greedant is a normal type um who has a really good set of charged up attacks that he can use.
Mhm.
That um just and a really really really quick regular shot.
Mhm.
So that you could basically just power it up and try and break people's shields.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, cuz um
it has a very specific role,
right? There's a whole other tempo thing that we're
Yeah.
like this is not how to be good at Pokemon Go PvP. This is what is required to understand Pokemon Go P.
This is your table stakes. And I think actually I've now played this that team I think somewhere between 12 to 15 matches and I'm so far undefeated with it. So, I think doing all that research has put me up to the point where I can probably get in the top 5% of that league would be my guess. Like, I wouldn't be top 1%.
Yeah.
But I definitely can get in the top 5%

based on the research I've done, what I now understand, and the team I've assembled for the 1500 point league.
Right.
I'm working on the 2500 point league one. I'm not even going for the unlimited yet
because I haven't caught enough highlevel
Yeah.
raid Pokemon
to be able to compete in that
Yeah.
arena.
Yeah. Okay. So, all of that setup having been done, I think I think we're done with with example stuff for now. Jeeoff, shall we?
Yeah. I'm going to stop sharing that spreadsheet.
Okay. Let's
just in case let's put our let's put our examples away and and talk for a bit because because I think we've we've sort of set up what we're trying to talk about.
So, Pokemon.
Actually, can we show one more thing just real quick?
Yes.
Show the second to last video.
Uh, okay. Uh, that's this
one. Right before that, one of the things that's amazed me. So, will remember I was talking about big raid Pokemon to catch.
Yep.
Um, you have to go to a place in person.

This is Pokémon Go is a movearound game. So, if I want to go catch a Tapufini, I have to find a place where there's a raid and then enough other people gathered there.
Yep.
Oops, it just switched videos.
Yeah, it did. Uh, that's because I forgot to click a button on this one.
Um, it is exceedingly hard to find big enough raids with enough people unless you're in a very, very densely populated area. Something I discovered actually through my nephew is that a group of people made a third party app completely independent of Niantic that will list all the raids, let you become a raid leader, put it up on this app. What that does is I can then go queue into a raid type. It will match me up with somebody hosting a raid. I will send them my player code. they will friend me, send me a raid invite cuz you can send raid invites to

your friends remotely and I can then spend remote raid pass which is a thing you can buy for real money or in-game currency to battle a raid I'm not physically present at. So, there is now a whole third-party apps ecosystem designed to let people fight raids remotely. And when the extra extra juicy raids come out, they basically it goes from a free app to oh, if you want to participate in one of these and get a Mewtwo, here's our subscription fee for the month,
right?
Which is more than I spend on Pokemon Go per month if I actually decided to subscribe to this. But I participated in a couple of remote raids for this. But this is enough of a problem that again Niantic wants people to go do things in person,
right? Niantic wants people.
Yep.
Yeah.
But so it's just it's interesting to me the third party ecosystem that goes around this, not just on websites and um wikis, which we're going to talk about, but also on things like finding ways for people to do raids remotely.

Yeah.
Within the rules of play that Niantic has set up.
Right. Yeah.
So just wanted to show like this right here. Like,
yeah, it's a it's a good example. So, um Okay, so
let's let's just recap real quick.
Pokemon Go is a game that is designed to have mass market appeal. It is designed to be accessible to everyone from about the age of five up, right?
And that's what's made it the number one AR app in the world for the past decade.
Correct. Okay. So,
or one of the things
and as part of that, as part of that app, there is a player versus player mode, probably due to player demand that has a completely different set of needs, requirements, understanding than the main game with no in-game onboard to really get to the level of complexity

and understanding that is required. ired to participate in that PvP.
No, actually, let me I would say anybody can participate and do well
for a while.
Sure.
But you will very quickly reach the point where you're, you know, Pikachu is using a flame attack and you're wondering why it isn't doing as well.
Or you're bumping into other people whose Pokemon seem to be more resistant to yours or charge up their special moves faster and you just start losing,
right? Or or the the IV thing, right? If we both even even if we both have Pikachus, right, and yours is 100% Pikachu
and mine is uh you know um a a zero 1515 Pikachu.
Mhm.
I will probably do better because I have more HP and defense than you do
for an equivalent
CP. Right. in a counterintuitive enough way that is

right
does not immediately make sense to people
and so the particulars aren't incredibly important but I think what we've demonstrated is that there is a successful game with a successful PvP scene with a completely opaque layer of necessary complexity
actually s like surprisingly like I did not expect casual Pokemon Go to have the depth of the system of the consoles for their PV for their PvP play.
Yeah,
I see. It really is for their raid. It's for all the battles, but when you're doing a raid with like 10 people,
right,
you're not really noticing exactly what your move does. You're like, "Cool."
Yeah. It it's also um the difference between the the the the upper end optimization of the raid system is how few people can we do this raid with because that makes it easier to fire raids. So like if you are if you have exactly the right

counters to a particular raid Pokemon, there is a level of optimization there that is rewarded by I can raid more, which is good,
right? And actually they have for some of the mega raids. Mega raids are how you get something called mega energy. So if I mega raid against a um Growon or an Arcanite, I will get if when we finish the raid, if we're successful, we'll get mega arcanite energy that I can then use eventually to power up one of my archanites to be a mega arcanite.
Yep.
The faster you complete a raid, the more mega energy you get. So
they actually put in a little bit, but it is really optimizing,
right? For most people, they jump in with a big pokey. They bash the thing and they're like, "Hey, we did it."
Okay.
But there is the entire console level system under the hood that they just put in without telling anybody,
right?
For a mobile Pokemon,
right,
game like this.
Okay. So, so, so we've laid out the problem. We've laid out the complexity.

Blows my mind.
Why, why do games plural do this? Right. because we've used Pokémon Go as sort of an example,
but I need to
Why do they do the obiscation?
Yeah, the the obuscation of deeper mechanics. So, um I've got a couple of examples. I would love to hear from chat. What games besides Pokémon Go can you think of that do this level of obfuscation that have deep complex mechanics underneath the surface that the game refuses to expose to the players or intentionally hides from you or whatever? Right. What What
basically necessitating a third party to get the information if it is a thing you're interested in.
Ly says monster hunter. Okay, great. Yep. Uh Thunder's going to bring up Final Fantasy Tactics, right? Okay. Paradox mainline games. Soul. Uh, not that one. Souls games, right?
Oh, man. Yeah. Some of the souls,

right? Overwatch, right? Uh, Mario Kart rubber banding item boxes. That's a really good one that a lot of people don't think about. Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress is all obscurity. Dwarf Fortress is a layer of obfuscation with a game somewhere underneath it. Um, uh, Balders's Gate 3, um, Persona. These are all really interesting ones. H, how about, how about another incredibly popular game?
Shall I type it in, Will, so you can Oh, somebody just put it on screen. You can click it.
How about Minecraft
as an example?
There you go.
Right. Minecraft is one of the most popular games in the entire world. Right. It topped the mobile charts for a gajillion years. It sold millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of copies. It is beloved by people around the world and played by kids of all ages and adults of all ages and it's wonderful. Okay, cool. Great. How do you get to the Nether? Well, you make a Nether portal. Okay.

How do you do that? Until they added ruined portals, there was no clue. You had to know from someone else outside of the game. And even when they added ruined portals, it's clearer, but not clear how you do it. Because ruined portals can have crying obsidian in them, which blocks you from lighting the portal until you remove it and add other stuff. You might not have enough obsidian. It might not be clear to you, right? These are this is a fundamental mechanic of the game that is in fact necessary to beat the game that's not well uh illuminated, right? You can't beat Minecraft if you don't know how to go to the Nether. Well, you can. It's very low odds, but like and similarly, you there it is slightly better for eyes of ender. There is an achievement I will fully grant for follow an eye of ender that that will tell you, right? But build light and go through a nether portal is far less clear. When you don't

know what the construction of a Nether portal necessarily is or what a Nether portal is, you don't know what the Nether is. you have no reason to believe that that obsidian structure is connected to a thing called the Nether. Kind of just have to figure it out, right? So like again, this is not just Pokémon Go. There are plenty of games that do this, so there must be a reason why,
right?
And let me even just for a moment, almost every MMO
Yeah.
like um League of Legends does great documentation, but also like we you played for a while. Can you tell me the difference between lethality and armor penetration
or% on flat armor penetration?
I I Yeah, there's a there's a math difference, but I couldn't tell you offhand.
It's also been I will also say more than a year since I played, but yes.
Sure. But like there are things even in somewhat even in games that document somewhat well where at a certain point and I will now broaden this out the design team looks at this and says are we aiming for clarity or are we aiming

for ease of use
right
and at a certain point for a lot of games when your systems are this complex you can probably do both. The more and more complex and interactive your systems get with the more different things that input in them, the hard the more you start having to make the choice between super clear or um sup what was the other one I said clear and
murky obfuscated.
No. Or basically you're choosing between oh sorry explaining everything or making it easy to use.
Yes. Yeah. So you can either have clarity or ease, but not but generally speaking, not both.
Right. Once your game goes past a certain level of complexity.
Yeah.
And certain games do it better than others, 100%. And Pokemon Go is just a reallyam good example of a game that has very very high complexity under the hood, but has

dialed their clarity versus easy to use all the way over to the easy to use.
Yeah.
One. And again, I think for them that has been one of the huge secrets of their success.
Yeah. And the discipline it took to do that must have been astounding because any amount of people were probably like, "We're not explaining all of the stuff in this part. We're only explaining like that little difference in part is what we're explaining. All of this is left unexplained." And they're like, "Yep." But our goal is to keep this dialed all the way over here into easy to use,
right? It it should be as easy as possible for someone to have a good time booting up Pokemon Go, taking a walk, fighting a gym, collecting a thing, right?
Um yeah, and and and Dr. Rose has has it exactly right. There's um IV break points, bulk points, CMP, move timing, move set, over farming, undercharging, timer misalignment, team comp, line sequencing, energy counting, sack swap,

turn waiting, cycle resetting, etc. But nic would even show move energy on the MON card. Yes.
And I understand about half of those. And I played and I did some of the work that Jeff has done to look into PvP before I stopped playing.
Um, yeah. No, this is it, right? Let me explain. No, there's too much. Let me sum up.
A great quote from a great movie, right? And I think that that is that is common, right? I think the other thing that is interesting as a note is that this is a form of um an interesting barrier to entry for higherend stuff, right? That like if you are interested in raiding in 14, right? 14 also obscures an awful lot of its mechanics. Really does. It does not do a good job of explaining what the stats do or how some things like buff snapshotting work, right? Um

there is a bar to understanding at bare minimum what your stat priority is, right? Which is not clear at all based on what's in the game because the game prioritizes your item level above everything else, which is normally correct, but in cases where you have two items of the same item level, it often prioritizes wrong. Um, so like there is a barrier to entry that is built into the game of if you would like to become better when you've reached this point, it requires some effort on your part, which is in some ways bad and in some ways rewards players who take that leap. Jeff, did you enjoy under like gaining this understanding? Was it an enjoyable process for you because you had a goal in mind and you feel like the knowledge that you've gained has been rewarded in the form of winning more in PvP?
So yes and yes, but I also think I'm very atypical. Like I'm a video game

designer who is a systems designer. I mess with systems professionally. I build systems. So this was me reverse engineering a system based on what other people have done and using spreadsheets which are my one of my tools of choice that I use a lot and figuring out how I could actually make AI once I tamed it some dump a whole bunch of the base work in so I could do the interesting part of the work
sure
into a thing. So, I did like I enjoy understanding. Do I want to go to the next level down?
Probably not.
Like, I think I've hit my happy level.
Sure.
On this, but I enjoyed it enough and I enjoy the result enough that my son now has a set of Pokemon he can fight with that make him happy and less unhappy. Like, that was also part of its own that like my goal on that is achieved.
Yeah. Yeah.
Now I just need to find bigger, stompier Pokemon in the 2500 league cuz like he's

winning with the ones, but he wants ones that also look big and stompy.
Sure.
Yeah.
All that too. But like it's an interesting thing.
Yeah.
But when you look at the games doing this, like intentionally obscuring the mechanics makes it easier to learn.
Yes.
It makes it harder to master.
Yes. So, one of the things they're saying is this gets people in easier and especially for free-to-play games or games you want people to come in easy to learn is a good thing. It also for really big games in a strange way makes it easier to localize and keep localized.
Yep. Like if this g if will imagine if they put all of the information needed to explain all of this
right
in and then imagine that this is deployed to say I don't know 80 languages worth of countries
right instead of regionalizing 80 Pokemon names that you already have a style guide for you have a style guide for every Pokemon term right

you now have to explain the technical terminology in another language that gets expensive immediately for one other language let alone
and every time they update, patch, or add a new feature, they have to look through all of the stuff they've done and update it to make sure that it still works.
Yeah.
And part of the thought on this, and I can tell you, is that the dev team or the producer is sitting there thinking, well, we could do this, or some people running a wiki will do this for us, and one of those doesn't cost us any money. I hate the necessity of gaming wiks. I love gaming wiks. I hate that they're necessary. I have like a personal unending grudge. I wrote a script that we ended up never using
five, I think, years ago on the wiki problem because I think that this problem is sort of uh a thing that irks me specifically about games, right? that

like I am of the opinion having played a lot of games that do obfuscation that how to play the game with all of its details and complexity is a thing that the game should explain and how to win the game optimally that's on players right but I'm kind of of the opinion that like each individual like all of the mechanics of the game should be explained at the That's that's my personal belief, but I think everyone's going to run it like a different level of this. One of my favorite games is um Last Epoch because they have an in-game wiki that includes the armor formula. If you've never if you've never stopped thought about it, one of the biggest examples of uh terms don't mean what you think they do is the term armor.
Armor means something different in almost every game.

In Dungeons and Dragons, armor is what how hard it is to hit you, absorbs nothing. In Champions, there's couple types of armor, which absorbs the damage, but has nothing to do with your ability to get hit. In Battletech, armor is ablative. Once you are hit, the armor goes away like hit points until you get to internal structure of armor. In League of Legends, armor reduces damage by a percentage, but it's not a flat percentage. It is a percentage based on the amount of damage done and how high your armor is scaling.
Yes.
Um what's a game that does flat? Anyway,
armor that same term can have a variety of implementations. Those words is off the top of my head.
Yeah. And and so music men has it exactly how to defend Elden Ring is an example of how to play the game. Where Moonvail is, that's on the player, right? The game doesn't need to tell you where Moonvale is or even that Moonveil exists, right? That's a thing that's on players to figure out for themselves, right? Um or some people want games where figuring out the game is the game.

Sure, 100%. And there is definitely a category of games like that.
I feel like that overlap with PvP specifically is weird,
right? Like specifically we're talking about PvP, people who have done this work have a pretty significant I was going to say massive. I don't know if it's massive, but it's a significant advantage in tiers over people who have not done this work.
Oh, 100%.
Because it's not exposed to the player. And so that's one of the reasons that I feel this way. I'm much more open to the idea of going into a PvE game that explains nothing and tells me it's going to explain nothing. That's cool, right? But a PvP game feels less like that. Feels less like it participates in that space successfully, at least to me. Um,
yeah,
I'm just putting notes down. Um,
yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
One of the other ones too, um, and this may be particular real for some of

these, you might not know your own game's best strategy.
You might have all of the together and you realize that past a certain point, you know, you can explain the basics, but if you're trying to explain how all of these work together, there's explaining how they work and there's kind of guidance explaining. Yep.
Like a lot of games will explain how they work, but they won't be like, and it's best strategy to, you know, conal lethality for a while up until you reach a certain point and then switch to so and so because that may not be true or it might be true for some player or characters and not others. or they might put in a new system that like there's all sorts of things where the own the game team itself may have general ideas, but if they write these as broad things, they realize that it will actually be misleading in sometimes and so choose just not to do it and let other groups
do it. And you also might not want to

expose all of your stats and mechanics in the game.
There are plenty of games that are like, here's the couple things we think you should know. the rest of this is going to work under the hood,
right?
And for a lot of players, it's fine, but there are certain ones who really want to know what those under the hood stats are. And this goes back to VCR design, which we've talked about sometimes, which is keeping the numbers small makes it easier for most people to understand.
Mhm.
And in this cases, you're just choosing not to reveal the other ones. Um, and there may be groups also that just think it makes the UX worse. Well, or the UI or the UX. If you get into a game well and you see there's 40 pages worth of stuff you need to read to understand it, you might not keep doing the game. Or if it's easy to get into and eventually you're like, "Oh, it's time for me to go learn more about this system." Like there's a lot of reasons to hide and obiscate things.
Yes.
But it can be really frustrating at a certain point when you reach the point where you've tapped out of what the game will tell you.
Yes. Absolutely. So I think um

like as a good as a good example, right? Like even Tempmtemp, which was created with the explicit goal of being more transparent about its mechanics and stats, has a limit to how much they can explain. And there is more under the hood because there like even in cases where that is a like a design um like a like a like a design uh impetus to explain mechanics, right? Um
it's a tricky thing.
Yeah, it's a tricky balance, right? And and um to to Andrew's question, right? Why would it be a problem to allow the the hidden data to be revealed in the game somehow? Because every time you put that screen in, it's a risk that someone checks out. Every time you expose information to a certain group of players, and in the case of Pokemon Go, it's mass market, right? There are people who will look at that screen and go, I don't understand this, and it feels like the game wants me to understand this, so I'm going to dip. That is a real concern, especially

for games that are attempting to do player retention of life that way. It's not a huge concern, but it is a one of the concerns, right?
And it also makes you question like when Will and I started playing our Pokemon playthrough.
Yeah. what like last year or whatever that was.
I was asking in a couple of places, Will, isn't this a game designed for children? Why is it so hideously complex? And Will was saying, well, there's a certain amount of the population that go show keeps showing up for the complexity.
Yep.
And like Pokemon is a weird example of a game that is probably way way more complex than it needs to be for I'd say 95% of its player base,
right? And it's atypical in that I think it's a game that thrived even with that,
right?
Because most games that get too complicated end up becoming obscure.
Like it's hard to do a mass market game that is
I'll just say hideously complex.
Yeah. I think the other thing that

that's important to remember too is that it's not cost effective to put this information in in the case of Pokémon Go, right? Okay. So a more concrete example, right? Let us say that you spend 10% of the budget for a live service game creating a new ultra highlevel area.
And then once it's made and in the game, you discover that less than 5% of players are interested in or ever get to that area. that's probably not a good use of your spend, right? If they spend a lot of time, money, effort, and energy updating, maintaining, and including that information, and the majority of players don't care, and I guarantee you the majority of players don't care, right?
It might not be the overwhelming majority, but the majority of Pokémon Go players don't care.

Um, then it's not really a worthwhile spend, right? which is like unfortunate calculus, but like that is the calculation that goes on, right?
Yeah. And it's hard. Um, you know, it's kind of going back to this like not feeling like you have it makes you like that is the thing too like
Yeah.
having too much can make you check out for some people. Not having enough can make you check out for some people.
Yeah. And there isn't. And to me, this is actually if this wasn't Pokemon, if this was any other game will that was doing this, I would say that the design team had overengineered their systems and made them too complex.
Yes.
And that it was the design team's fault for making really complex systems so complex that they weren't interested or able to show them to a majority of their player base.
Yeah.
Because at that point, it just feels random.
Yes. Yeah, I I 100% agree. And like I don't know, I'm thinking

I'm thinking about like Valve's design impetus, right, for Dota and Deadlock, which are both incredibly numerically dense games with tons of concepts. They have done consistent work over a long period of time to put to cram information into those games with a hydraulic press. Like they are making those games UIUX scream for mercy with like everything that goes into them. But I also think that those games are incredibly self- selecting for the people who are going to play about them and care,
right? Like you can do it. You can absolutely put all that information in to a PVP game and have it all there.
But there's a reason that League is more popular than Dota
and it sucks.
If you're a Dota, if you're a huge Dota fan, like I'm not telling you it's a good thing.
I am saying that there are there are reasons that League is way more popular than Dota.
Yeah.

And that is part of your calculus when you're designing a game is level of complexity versus mass market.
Yeah,
it is really really hard to make a complex mass market game.
Yes, absolutely. It's a reason why games like go and chess and shogi and checkers
have endured, right, is that they're
solitire.
Solitaire, right, is that they they have incredibly high mastery levels. But I can teach you how to play Go in five minutes,
right? I can't teach you how to play Pokemon Go PvP in an hour actually. But you could teach somebody how to play Pokemon Go as well in five minutes.
Exactly. So, which is one of the reasons that it has
Let's go walk around. Hey, look, there's a Poke.
Yeah,
let me teach you how to throw a ball. Right.
Correct. They'll teach you that part actually when they give you your starter. Mhm.
Um, yeah, I I I just think it's so interesting. And then there there is one

other thing I just wanted to to bring up as part of this, um, which is one of the big disadvantages that kind of goes handin-hand with the wiki thing.
The third party economy around this stuff
can be bad. Like one of the things to keep in mind uh, when we talk about this is that like often times players who want that information will resort to third party tools. And we're lucky that like Pokémon Go has a good self sustaining like we have we have found a section of the Pokemon Go PvP environment that has a uh nonpredatory third party support system that allows it to overcome the barriers that Niantic has placed on it to get things like raid Pokemon. But Jeff, how much was it a month to get the premium special pass?
I think it was $17.99. That's a lot the number of players that,
right? Yeah. Times the number of players that use it. Plus, we saw ad support and like some of it, right? There were ads

playing. I'm sure the premium pass removes those ads, but there's still ads.
I'm sure 95% of the people never pay.
Sure. But but it is still an amount of money. And there are definitely other places where um there are paid services that promise to expose that stuff and to help you become better and like to give you data analysis tools and give you all of the hidden information. And that is another risk that games are bringing on to themselves when they obscure this stuff is that people will take advantage of the lack of knowledge provided to the player to get money out of that ecosystem.
Yeah, I it was way more expensive than I thought to on that. I I think that they Here's the thing. I think that the people who really want to be able to go catch a Mewtwo from anywhere in the world for the little bit of time it showed up have invested enough into Pokémon Go mentally.
Yeah.
That they're looking at this and they're like, "Hm,
I could go drive around the city for hours trying to find a raid
or I can pay this sit in my on my couch

and just go hop in a raid right now.
Pet my cat and play a raid." Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep. So it Yeah, it it is horribly expensive.
Yeah.
But they're offering a service that I think for the people who are really into it and that gets you the thing for a month.
Yeah.
So it wasn't a per raid basis. It's here you've unlocked this tier for a month,
right? For sure.
Go hop in.
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Uh
um
Yeah. Do do we do we have any other do we have any other thoughts or things to bring up on this? I think we've done a good job of outlining the problem, talking about why people doing it, talking about the problems with doing it. What What else? Is there anything else, Jeff?
Oh, so by the way, we're talking about the third party. Like you see, um Dark Wolf sees, you know, groups in his town that come together to go do things. And this is for a lot of games. And that's what Pokemon Go had originally envisioned is that, you know, you'd go find your community clubs and other things that are like, "Hey, it's, you

know, it's raid day. let's all go out and do the raids of the thing and that it would be a social event because Pokémon Go really wants to be communal and social and get you outside and walking and doing other things and a lot of their development has pushed towards that.
Yep. So it's just they're a game that is stuck by their ethos on that part of it which is commendable like a lot of but it's also again it doesn't serve all players and that is one of the hard things about making really big games is you can almost never serve all your players and whether it be the level of information you expose and need for wikis or all of the other stuff it's hard.
Yeah. But as I said, to me it was just fascinating that while trying to find information to get my shorty, you know, a team they could go play in PvP that all of this level of info I bumped into of what's going on under the hood of what I thought was a much more casual game.
Yeah, absolutely. 100%.

Uh all right, I think that is going to do it for us today. Tune in next week again. That'll be our uh last week. That will be our last episode on a Thursday.
Correct.
We'll have a week off.
Yep.
And then the week after that, we'll be starting
on Tuesday.
Yep. Tuesday the 16th will be our first Tuesday stream. Thursday the 4th will be our last Thursday stream. So until next time everybody, take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Uh and uh say bye to the people, Jeff.
Bye to the people, Jeff. See you everybody.