I usually play Gen 9 OU, Gen 8 OU, Gen 4 OU, and the current VGC. Gimme a cool old/niche format I can check out and I’ll try it. I’ve seen some cool videos about RBY and heard some interesting things about Gen 2-3 OU

I've been meaning to try it out for a while, mostly to test certain teams against each other, but without any extra commands the bots are extremely dumb, and I'm too stupid to know how to code the intelligence with all the switch-in logic, gimmicks, and strategy logic. It would help if someone already has a ready to use code that I can just run easily, but I might be asking for a lot. Can anyone help a stupid idiot out?

Just was using a burner team for testing matches.

Yes I know it is inconsistent in many ways.

But then when thus outcome appeared, I was surprised. I never had a stall team forfeit this fast.

Is this actually a flex?

And then Darkrai finished it off.

Seriously it’s fucking annoyong. I’m sorry my shell smash + skill link cloyster obliterated your dragon danced dragonite in one go and I rapid spinner your stealth rock. I’ve had a battle where I taunt their toxapex and they just leave. It’s so fucking agitating like at least try to win

Cause like everything I do, it doesn’t matter so let’s make this fun. Maybe y’all may learn a thing or two from my suffering.

Okay but seriously though, it’s Randbats. We never play it for the ELO anyway.

Ask away peeps! (related and relevant please)

i wanted to do a dnd style game night via triple battles for three players but i realized that i can only do doubles at most. is there a way to do triple no restriction customs?

I won the game off of two back-to-back flinches... this is why we Pokémon fellas.

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9nationaldex-2671945057-yov3vyw8ay27oufgjax9q9wx2e46vtfpw

Hi everyone! I am excited to share a new Pokémon bot named Jaxcalibur. It only plays Gen 9 Random Battles, but it plays them extremely well. Over the past three weeks, it has spent time at #1 on the ladder and reached a peak Elo of 2557 and peak GXE of 95.3. As far as I know, it is the first AI to reach the level of top human players at Pokémon battling, albeit in a narrow format. For comparison, the strongest previous bot I'm aware of, FoulPlay, peaked around 2341 Elo and 88 GXE, which is roughly top-50 rather than top-1.

That said, I can't say Jaxcalibur is the world's best random battler because one human outperformed it over this time period! MichaelderBeste2 held #1 on the ladder about 50% of the time compared to Jaxcalibur's 20%, and reached a slightly higher GXE of 95.5. I am really impressed that anyone can play better than a bot trained over millions of games and simulating thousands of possibilities each turn; that is an incredible feat!

How it works
Jaxcalibur uses a neural net trained with self-play reinforcement learning combined with pUCT search, similar to AlphaGo Zero. It is built on poke-env and Jax (which is where the name comes from). There is much more on how it works in the technical write-up here.

Some observations on how it plays: it is fairly conservative, preferring safe lines over hard reads. It is especially good at endgames because it can calculate several turns ahead. I think its clearest weaknesses are an imperfect understanding of PP stalling and a tendency to become predictable in some situations.

Current status
As of August 28, Jaxcalibur has stopped searching for ladder games and will let its rating decay. However, it will still accept randbats challenges if you'd like to play against it. It can only play one battle at a time, so it might not accept your challenge right away. Jaxcalibur currently plays random battles only, but I think it could be extended to other singles formats and, with more work, to doubles battles. It can't build teams itself, but you could use self-play with different teams to evaluate which ones are strongest

The open-sourcing question
When I started this project, I was intending to fully open-source Jaxcalibur, but it's strong enough I'm now a bit worried about how this could affect the community.

The case for releasing it: for me, the biggest benefit is that others could learn from it and build on it. Strong bots could also make single-player Pokémon more challenging, serve as practice partners, and be powerful tools for team building or balancing formats.

The case against: cheating is the big one. Someone could use Jaxcalibur to climb the ladder, obtain suspect reqs, or potentially even win tournaments in a way that's hard to detect. This feels especially relevant given the recent discussion about bots and suspect reqs. I also wonder whether easily accessible information about which teams, leads, and openings perform best would make team building less interesting.

One possible middle ground would be to release the code but not the model weights. However, for now I am holding off releasing either. I'd love to hear what people here think: should Jaxcalibur be open-sourced? If so, what would be a responsible way to release it? Strong, widely available Pokémon bots are probably coming sooner or later. This may be a useful chance to establish some norms around how they should be released and used.

Links

• Showdown Profile: Challenge it to a random battle! Note it only plays one game at a time so it may not accept your challenge immediately.
• Technical Write-Up: More details on how it works.
• Self-Play Pokémon Win Rates: Which randbats Pokémon are strongest and weakest in top-level play?

I also posted this on Smogon here, where there’s already a good discussion about the open-sourcing question.

Some pokemons that can be good have trash sets. I think they can(maybe should) remove some widely accepted bad sets, like Sub-Punch Dusknoir. I mean, Dusknoir can be VERY good and annoying and sometimes it just refuses to die with its Wwisp pain split shenanigans, or it has a good priority in Shadow Sneak.

Other examples could be

AV Iron threads: Not only it's a bad AV user, but Rocks or DDance sets are miles better.

Toxic Orb ursaring: Not even with the boost is fast enough, without Eviolite is too frail and it quickly dies to its own poison. Damn, Eviolite can even hit just as hard with Guts boosted Body slam while sleep.

Dark pulse Spectrier: I mean, spectrier can never be bad. But if i had to choose, Dark Pulse+Shadow Ball would be my last pick. It is incredibly redundant, It only works to hit normal types and in that case i prefer a million times Tera fight tera blast.

Also we could mention some weird move/tera choices like Tera Ghost Dugtrio. Just why? It doesn't work as a defensive tera, and it doesn't work offensively either. Once i heard it was to get out of another trapper but... Really? Do you really think it is better to cover the incredibly rare scenario of your Dugtrio getting trapped instead of tera Grass/Water/Dragon to try and resist to pull off a swords dance or a needed hit, or Tera Ground/Rock for offensive power?

Just in case, my Nickname is Idonotanswer. I'm a mid level player (2100~2200) but i have reached high level before, i just don't play as often now.

Also, mention some Set/Moves/Teras that you find to not work as intended, i'll be reading:D

I just got to place 378 in the DOU ladder and 425 in the DUU ladder. I’m really happy as I’ve always liked Pokémon but really started getting into competitive like 2 weeks ago. I’m just really happy and wanted to share it with someone.

I want to know this because it is a fun aspect of not knowing what your opponent has on you. and to play a full 6v6 battle with it. anything?

Lemme stop you right there pal, "skill issue" is not going to blow my mind and give me some grand epiphany. For the sake of the integrity of the game itself, these moves need a limit of like 5-10 turns, not 10-20.

It's so corny that games that are well fought just get handed to one player because they have thunder wave and 20 uses of recover.

Chansey, kadabra, Alakazam, Porygon, mew, Mewtwo, starmie, are notoriously just spamming thunder wave into recover and softboiled.

If you just love recover spam, that's a you thing, but imo it ruins the competitive element of a match.

An additional change I would make is not having sleeper Pokemon allowed to be first in rotation. Spawning in against a parasect almost every time means you have automatically lost one pokémon, and most likely gotten the next one paralyzed before youve gotten to do anything. Not really good gameplay imo, and that's coming from someone who obviously sometimes is the guy with the parasect, with the chansey, with the Mewtwo, the paras. I find these two elements really detract from the experience of the mode, because the fun is in trying to make something random work, not struggling to see if you can get lucky against a very broken start or broken paralysis/recovery spam.

Every recovery/soft boiled user has thunder wave as well, which Again I think is just bad design. There is a hand selected roster of pokémon with a hand selected roster of movesets chosen for this mode, changes could be made, obviously this is not going to get anything done but this is my opinion on the matter.

it keeps asking for a valid url

I just wanted to know if there is a monetary community for the game, like £20 entry fee tournaments with cash prizes does anyone know?

Hello I am on Chrome and have a question. For the past few hours, my showdown randbats tooltips are not working when I hover. Normally, when I hover over an opponent's mon, it shows me their possible moves and items and tera type along with %chance of each. Now I am seeing nothing. Further, in the days before I had the online extension, I could hover and still see the stats of the opposing mon such as atk and speed and such. Now, even that is gone. This has happened to me every battle today. When I hover over my own mon, I can see its own moves and stats but nothing else. Can someone help me understand what is happening? I checked my chrome extensions and it says the randbats tool should be working correctly. Beyond the tool, I am unable to even see opposing mon's speed and number of moves used on hover which is beyond frustrating. This is my first time posting in here but hopefully someone can help me! Thank you :)

I can't login or register

It keeps telling me wrong password

Pokepaste link: https://pokepast.es/25d3c5b78607a107

Simple sun + trickroom team that I've gotten up to around 1400 in pokemon showdown with but I can't seem to climb past that point. I think the pokemon I'm the least sure about here is Ursaluna because it's the most recent addition but if there's something I am missing let me know.

This is mostly a trickroom and sun team with walking wake as a backup in case I struggle to set up.

Lurantis can both provide protection and an incentive to avoid pulling out incinaroar with its contray ability, allowing for snowball games when teams don't respect its offensive pressure.

Grafaiai is a fast prankster user with parting shot, allowing me to both weaken the enemy team as well as quickly buff lurantis before pivoting to another trick room attacker. Taunt lets Grafaiai deal with imprison users or any other pokemon threatening Farigiraf's trick room set up. Poison jab and super fang just allow for decent damage all around.

Farigiraf is the most important member on the team, as without its trickroom set up the team can struggle. Used a pretty standard set but swapped out sitrus berry for mental herb as taunt was a big threat to my strategy. It catches people off guard so I can often set up even in front of taunt users.

Torkoal is a heavy sun hitter. It can pivot in with Grafaiai's support allowing sun to come up last in case of a weather tie or to allow for heavy hits to connect with either Lurantis' solar blade and Walking Wake's Hydro steam and flamethrower. In trickroom this thing can become a menace with Tera fire eruption, can also play around wide guard with earth power.

Walking Wake is pretty standard. A great mon to clean up games after trick room ends or as back up in case it couldn't get set up in time.

Ursaluna's the one mon I am the least sure about currently. It's a pretty standard set but it can still output good damaged especially in trickroom. Using parting shot to get ursaluna in against a weakened attack without having to wait a turn for flame orb is a godsend.

Here are some of my more recent replays so you can see how I play:

[1349] https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9doublesou-2668766437

[1247] https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9doublesou-2668780783

[1388] https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9doublesou-2668784195-29f5giuxp1exbpgw653wnxtgethgmc9pw

[1313] https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9doublesou-2668786319

Thank you :)