Online Pokemon League

[Haddez]

I suggested this back on the Indiedb forum but I will suggest it here too.

An Online Pokemon League.

It happens once a month.
There is a qualifying round held a few days before the tournament and the top 100 trainers advance through the the main league. This is a knock out tournament and anyone playing the game can go and watch the battles.
The winner becomes the 'Champion' for that month and the people who placed 2-5 become the
'Elite 4'
The next month the Champion and Elite 4 gain automatic entry into the top 100 so then it becomes the top 95 qualify for all months after.
From the quarter-final onwards all games are played one at a time so they can all be viewed by the spectators.

It would also be good if the Champion and Elite 4 got some kind of award too.

 

[JojoP]

Very good idea but there are too many ways too cheat in the game's current state. It is far too easy to just boost all your stats to max and any implemented item can be cheated via simple editing tools.

That guy who posted his server test on the other forum had a working server, so we could make this event on a public server every month. Connecting to the test server was as easy as connecting to any other host I didn't even need the port to connect.

 

[Haddez]

Well this wouldn't be added until the game is in 1.0 anyway so by then i am sure there wont be a way to mod your stats .

 

[DracoHouston]

Well this wouldn't be added until the game is in 1.0 anyway so by then i am sure there wont be a way to mod your stats .

Whoever ran the tournament could check parties for obviously hacked ones. Someone would have to run this, making a system to automate it is no small task

Also, realistically you aren't going to get over 100 people doing this I would love to see a ladder thread when battles are in. If no one else does one I'll try and start it.

 

[Haddez]

When the game is ready and online is working if you could get something like this working let me know

 

[MrTimoshi]

I had suggested in the original thread that there be an online battle system between the tournaments (well... Haddez suggested that, I just took it one step further). You could connect to random battles based on your party's average level. Wins and losses would be tracked on a leaderboard. The top 100 players on the leaderboard would be entered into the tournament. A notification would be sent to their PC mailbox notifying them of their entrance into the tournament as well as when their first battle would take place. Only players who have collect any eight badges would be eligible.

 

[DracoHouston]

I had suggested in the original thread that there be an online battle system between the tournaments (well... Haddez suggested that, I just took it one step further). You could connect to random battles based on your party's average level. Wins and losses would be tracked on a leaderboard. The top 100 players on the leaderboard would be entered into the tournament. A notification would be sent to their PC mailbox notifying them of their entrance into the tournament as well as when their first battle would take place. Only players who have collect any eight badges would be eligible.

This is basically blizzard's world of warcraft pet battles PVP, except they don't have a ladder in that. You could make a team of pets of any level and if you click 'find battle' it adds up the levels of your pets and looks for someone with the same total number of levels, which usually resulted in pretty even games. It worked at every level, you could start doing pet battle PVP with all level 1s, though that would be kind of boring, lol. I usually started looking for battles when my party was around 10. Also, if you party was all level capped you'd only fight other people with level capped pets.

This sort of thing requires a back end though, blizzard had the advantage of building their pokemon game into an existing MMO. At some point nilllzz should probably add an account system

 

[MrTimoshi]

At some point nilllzz should probably add an account system

He could just do what Minecraft did and have the website accounts be the game accounts.

 

[DracoHouston]

He could just do what Minecraft did and have the website accounts be the game accounts

Account systems are a huge problem involving not only your back end (the program/script that handles the server for accounts etc, edit databases and send the data to the client) but the client as well, which would require a bunch of ui for it, ways to receive the data and use it, so I wouldnt hold my breath on this one, but it would be cool.

With an account system it would be possible to store characters in ~the cloud~ by saving them on the server when a user saves their game in the menu. Saves could be saved locally too as a fallback for people who don't have the internet for whatever reason (maybe you're playing on a laptop and have no net access at that moment and want to get your pokemon 3d on). Cloud saves could be 'trusted' then, it would be difficult to cheat, making anti cheat a lot easier to do. It could allow a central place to put cutsom skins like minecraft has and send the skin to other clients (it can just ask the server to give them that player's skin's png file, instead of needing to get it from peers, that could still happen as a fallback though for games played on LAN while there is no internet, but you could just as easily fall back to trainer red or something)

 

[MrTimoshi]

Having cloud-saves would be overkill. Unless this was going to be an MMO it would be pointless. To battle online all the game would have to do is send the .dat file with your items and party to your opponent.

 

[Haddez]

I would like something like cloud though. I have 2 computers, one at my mums and one at my dads. So when this game gets trainer battles and I start playing it I will want to have my save and just carry one.

Also if an Online Pokemon League does happen cloud would be ideal. If someone breaks their computer or something like that and they have entered into the League they will have to go in with low leveled Pokemon.

 

[DracoHouston]

Having cloud-saves would be overkill. Unless this was going to be an MMO it would be pointless. To battle online all the game would have to do is send the .dat file with your items and party to your opponent.

The game already can tell other peers that your character has moved or you sent a message so yeah, he's got a system for sending things over the network that works already.

I Understand what you're saying though, it might be surplus to requirements, but once implemented it would potentially allow for multiplayer that happens outside of a 2-4 player coop game. We could seriously have an Online Pokemon League and quick matchmaking etc.

It's all up to nilllzz what direction the game goes in, but you can do these sorts of things without making it an 'mmo' (think battle.net, not just bnet 2 but the old one as well for diablo 2 etc that was just a chat room, server browser, patcher and what was basically cloud saves). really slick online services are more the domain of big companies though because it takes hell of effort. but the rewards are substantial.

 

[Haddez]

Just thought of another thing that could be added.
Instead of a qualifying round, there could be 8 online gyms, run by the staff of the game. For people to gain entry into the online Pokemon league they need all 8 online badges instead of the offline ones.

 

[MrTimoshi]

Just thought of another thing that could be added.
Instead of a qualifying round, there could be 8 online gyms, run by the staff of the game. For people to gain entry into the online Pokemon league they need all 8 online badges instead of the offline ones.

That would be too much work for the staff.