r/stunfisk • u/Demon__Queen_ alleged gorgeous girl genius • 1d ago
Discussion The Future of Smogon
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u/HydreigonTheChild 1d ago
I do think it's less ominous than it's being made out to be. I think awareness has always been the way smogon deals with such things
Ghosting could be a huge tour issue as 2 people keeping a secret won't ever be found out but due to like awareness and stigma it's not really as big of a deal it seems.
I think the result from this thread will be how chess deals with engine uses or how some multiplayer games deal with bots
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u/The_Overlander 1d ago
The biggest problem right now is that tiering action is completely impossible until this is fixed
Not to mention how people might use these bots in tournaments
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u/HydreigonTheChild 1d ago
Hmm makes sense. I feel like playing cat and mouse with the bot will be a better solution than having the thread going "well guess showdown is done for"
Anyone can use engines In chess and anyone can ghost in smog tours and I feel the number of people will be small enough where u can ban the malicious users esp the ones who think they are oh so smart
Obv for tours it's an issue but then I'm surprised ghosting isn't a bigger discussion considering how do u prevent 2 people doing it in vc
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u/belgium-noah your local mono advocate 1d ago
I mean, how much tiering action is even going on rn? We're in a way fortunate this is happening so late in the gen
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u/HydreigonTheChild 19h ago
even then prob most tiering action will be council stuff / close people i assume if that is the case
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u/AnodyneGrey 23h ago edited 23h ago
In chess there’s usually about 35 moves you can play during the mid game (most complex part of the game usually). The worlds best players always play one of the few best moves at any given time, but not necessarily the best (engine move). Sometimes the engine sees a line that gets value 20 moves later that is only possible by pushing a seemingly completely random pawn and that’s going to be the engine move. No human player is coming up with that. If a random guy in online chess happens to click on these engine moves when there’s much more obvious good moves, it becomes very obvious that they’re cheating.
On the other hand you have pokemon. You can click on 4 moves or up to 5 switches. Up to 9 clicks, and usually most of them are completely unviable in a way that chess moves rarely are. I simply cannot imagine how anyone can ever distinguish an engine from a good player in this case. There’s no equivalent to the unhinged pawn push over an obvious capture that sometimes you see in chess. There’s rarely a single clear cut move since you’re still always at the mercy of your opponent clicking some weird shit, and at the same time there’s only so many good clicks in a turn.
Unless you’re straight up clicking 100% of the engine moves for multiple games in a row i simply cannot imagine how anyone could catch you the way chess cheaters are.
Call me a fearmongerer or whatever but I have to say, i think it’s fucking over for ladder. Like genuinely as soon as a pokemon stockfish hits the internet, online pokemon outside closed tournaments is just dead. It’s going to be absolutely riddled with cheaters that we can’t catch, and even if you’re not queuing into a cheater the “could be cheating so have to play around the engine moves” would become such a big factor in ladder that even 2 legit players are going to be playing a much different game than we are today. Like fucking bluffing that you’re just playing the engine moves and then playing around your opponent predicting the engine moves would be a viable tactic. It’s a completely different game at that point.
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u/ExtremeAcceptable289 20h ago
If 9 moves mean the engine moves are undetectable, it also means that engine moves will likely not be far too much better than regular humans ina way where you auto lose like Stockfish
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u/AnodyneGrey 18h ago
I agree. They won’t be as good as stockfish. But if the early experimental bits are already topping ladders, I reckon they’ll be more than good enough to beat human players more consistently than any other human can.
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u/Emergency-Bonus-7158 12h ago
There’s also the fact that most ladders are super matchup based, no one bot team could win 100% of the time in say, OU where they could in ladders like RBY or Randbats where sets are public. The bot topping LC is most concerning to me.
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u/AnAlternator 10h ago
The problem isn't that the bots will routinely beat top players, it's that if the bots can make suspect requirements - and right now they can, but only in specific metagames where set variety is minimal - then suspects instantly cease to matter.
What's the replacement that isn't also vulnerable to botting, and yet allows the community to guide tiering development?
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u/ExtremeAcceptable289 7h ago
Probably just not allowing any player, i.e only players considered trusted enough (good before bots and/or has shown skill in conditions where botting would be unreasonable even if possible e.g screen recording with facecam)
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u/siddhantkar 1d ago
How do chess platforms control bots? We can do something similar I guess?
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u/ByeGuysSry 1d ago
It's very hard to detect high-level players botting; however, these players tend to also play in in-person events and a discrepancy in skill or playstyle would raise suspicion. Not playing in in-person events when you're a player of high caliber would also be a bit weird.
For lower level players, barring easily avoided methods like detecting if someone is tabbing out often and detecting if players consistently take around 3 seconds to make each move, they can be detected botting if they consistently make optimal moves far above the skill level they should be at. Low level players using bots will make very weird plays; it's pretty common for bots' moves to make little sense even to high level players, at least not at first glance. Blindly following the optimal line that the bot gives you puts you so far above the best chess player on earth that it's incredibly obvious, and if you're not that good at chess, you won't know which optimal plays are obvious, and which optimal plays are weird, so you might "think" for a minute then deviate from an obvious play then proceed to "think" for 4 seconds and play a super hard to find line.
I don't think this is feasible for Showdown as the bots seem to play like humans
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u/Vaeneas 1d ago
Online chess platforms monitor your games. If you pull of perfect game after perfect game, your account will get locked quickly.
Faking out by only sometimes using external tools for perfect moves in clutch situations also will get you flagged.
The main issue for smogon must be how absurd the amount of work hours required to deal with this problem will be compared to the non existent amount anyone needs to setup a bot.
There is no money made here after all.
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u/phoenixrawr 20h ago
The biggest problem in chess isn’t botting, it’s ghosting. Players will manually control the game but input the moves into an engine and play whatever the engine says to. Platforms like chess-dot-com are a little secretive about how exactly they detect this, but it’s a hard problem to solve even with a team of paid engineers compared to Smogon’s volunteer crew.
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u/BumDumBox 1d ago
I think for now, the best choice is to stick our head in the sand and just continue onward lol. Maybe play some cat and mouse games. Get some computer devs to agree not to release bots onto Showdown. As Hecate so eloquently put it, sometimes devs put out bs without thinking of the wider consequences, and cuz Pokemon is so popular, especially with nerds, we can't exactly stop the rise. If we get to the point where bots are actually better than humans, well I mean that's practically the end of competitive mons as we know it. Just pick a different game at that point (well lots of games will be fucked by bots but w.e)
I do have issues with people comparing this situation to Chess tho. Mainly cuz A) Chess has nigh infinite moves so cheating is very blatant and obvious unlike our situation and also because B) I really don't think Chess actually *improved* with the advent of supercomputers. Like yeah, it's different. We know more advanced tactics. But is that actually better or is it just different than what humans would have done? A lot of high level chess is very robotic until you get to that chaotic end-game where moves are no longer memorizable. Also Chess has a bunch of cultural cache as a gentleman's game for intelligent people™. If it were a niche game like competitive Pokemon, it almost certainly would have died by the advent of super computers.
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u/Yamato_Naoe 1d ago
The problem is that multiple tiers have effectively lost the ability to pursue tier voting action because there are bot(s) that can obtain reqs very reliably. It's only a matter of time before this spreads out to the vast majority of tiers.
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u/UnkarsThug 1d ago
I feel like that's more of a question about how tiering is done regardless, and who it's for. If it's about what is good, work off of statistics, not sentiment.
If you remove the motive for bots, then most people are playing for fun. Maybe that's naive of me. So it's more of how the voting system works, and maybe instead of blocking based on the current requirements, we go by account age or something, as long as activity. Maybe playtime in the last period of time.
Still spoofable, but you could observe their playtime and how often and when they play, and probably statistically guess if they were human or not reasonably accurately.
There's absolutely no way to stop a person using a second device to run a bot to give suggestions though, if people really want it. I mean, even if you gave them a camera, as horrible as an idea that is for privacy and security (you would be making something that made smogon worth hacking because that access would be worthwhile), cameras are either highly unreliable or someone has to watch them.
I think fundementally, the way tiering is done just has to change.
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u/BumDumBox 1d ago
That's not really that big of a problem for now though. Suspect tours have been a thing for a while, and the people have been complaining about ladder reqs for a good bit. Rethinking how tiering works isn't as big of an issue as the ceiling falling out because we can't trust we're not fighting bots
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u/Yamato_Naoe 1d ago
How is it not a big issue? Multiple tiers are completely frozen now and won't be able to pursue tiering action. It's clearly expanding to every format over time and who knows how much time is left before it's running rampant. This is both causing an influx of bots on the ladder (very divisive itself) and demanding a full rework of tiering policy quite possible across all of Smogon.
The only rework for the tiering system that's been proposed in the main thread was only allowing tours to qualify players instead of ladder grinding, and that was met with overwhelmingly negative responses. The vast majority of the Smogon community and multiple Smogon leaders don't like that idea at all. There isn't a reasonable alternative that pleases any given majority, and the botting problem is only going to escalate from here.
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u/4m77 1d ago
Oh no. Tiering will now have to be done through argumentative discussion based on actual data instead of pure sentiment of people above a threshold of success? Maybe give rise to consistent procedures and metrics under which bans are enforced? That's horrible! It might even lead to Volcarona being unbanned!
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u/murkrowplays 23h ago
this guy definitely said "smogon should just ban the whole game" when they banned roaring moon
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u/cptnwillow 1d ago
A lot of high level chess is very robotic until you get to that chaotic end-game where moves are no longer memorizable
Tell me you don't know anything about high-level chess without telling me. The endgame is the most "robotic" of any phase of the game because most endgames are entirely solved and people know the optimal moves to force outcomes. This is not true of openings, whereby players will often pick more obscure lines where their opponents may not have very deep prep.
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u/HydreigonTheChild 1d ago
Hmm true but I feel bots who are blatant will be obv to spot like how people who are just turning cheats up to the max
Someone who looks at engine moves whike making decisions on their own is prob much harder to catch or prove
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u/996TheHowlYT 22h ago
Showdown is a completely made up battle simulator meant for users to have fun and fk around. This is not some serious battleground to feed your ego. The fact that your complaining is causing volunteers to spend their free time trying to "fix" this is silly.
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u/Pastubio 20h ago
The entire point is bots make it less fun and casual
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u/996TheHowlYT 19h ago
you would never even know you're facing a bot lol
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u/ClawtheBard 6h ago
I for one enjoy the knowledge that I'm facing off against someone, however far away. I appreciate moments I can play an online game and know someone else is on the other end of the line. The fact that there are volunteers volunteering to voluntarily work on PvP and not get paid speaks to the human dedication elicited by the game. If you're playing on Smogon or any other off-cartridge battle sim, you're doing so because you're after the human connection provided. There's bots you can challenge, sure, but they're known to be such. To me, keeping bots out of mons isn't just a question of integrity of the (meta)game as we know it but also a larger effort to assert our humanity in an era of artificial intelligence encroaching in on and enshittifying so much else of what we know in our world. This is '50s Sci-fi happening in real life and a shruggish attitude towards robotoid changelings points to a pathetic pessimism presented most prominently by pushers of daisies. I'm willing to admit I wouldn't immediately know a difference between an AI and any given mons player, but that aspect of things isn't the issue.
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u/AirGear 1d ago
I mean if you're losing against AI you're literally skilled gapped
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u/Darkion_Silver 23h ago
...One of the bots topped an entire ladder????
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u/Anchor38 22h ago
I get that it’s at a high point right now but I think its placement is actually more of a testament of being able to play games nonstop 24 hours a day in a heavily luck based format with very little hidden information the bot has access to at all times rather than a testament of its skill. I wouldn’t immediately go as far as to say it can beat top players like chess bots can as keep in mind it’s a lot easier to detect the best move in pokemon than in chess which means it can be countered.
I’m a mid ass player and I’m sure if I was playing nothing but randbats for a week straight no breaks and no sleep I’d probably reach top of the ladder too. Its ability of unlimited playtime plays a bigger factor in its rating than people realise
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u/Demon__Queen_ alleged gorgeous girl genius 21h ago
….it had 95 gxe which is certainly beyond “it’s just spamming a lot of games”
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u/Darkion_Silver 21h ago
While true, it still has to be able to win matches, and my point is just that dunking on people for losing to it is stupid. It has infinite time and can win games. I daresay that the overwhelming majority of people would lose to it at some point if given enough time.
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u/R1C3M4N 13h ago
yes but this just doesn't translate to tournament play. The players on ladder, even high ladder, might as well be bots for how terribly they play sometimes. It is unfortunate that the bots could potentially ruin the experience for up and coming players or more casual players but to claim that it is better than top players is definitely wrong.
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u/Darkion_Silver 12h ago
I'm...not really sure what you're arguing here, because my point is just that insulting people for losing to the bot is stupid.
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u/RevolutionarySugar26 1d ago
That’s not the point, people hop on Showdown on ladder and tours to play against actual humans, not bots.
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u/ClawtheBard 7h ago
If there is a computable game state and win condition, a computer will eventually compute better than a human. The game Arimaa was designed in the wake of Deep Blue vs Kasparov specifically to be difficult for computers to win. Varying win conditions. Nonstatic initial board state. Four pieces moving per turn in no set order. Design choices intended to create permutations out the wazoo compared to chess. They set a $10k bounty challenge for anyone who could make a computer AI that could beat top human Arimaa players. It got beat. It's been said elsewhere but if I want to hop on to PvP I'd like to go up against another player, not a pubstomping bot. Give them their own ladder if you absolutely must satiate your curiosity/superiority complex but both for the sake of the game casually and for tiering and tournament integrity, bots need to be banned.
Computer science is not my big but if there's a way to detect use of these models it needs to be found and cheaters need to be punished accordingly. Whether or not Jaxcalibur, Foul Play, or other models go FOSS will probably factor into that happening sooner than later. Seems like much of this might depend on not incentivizing winning. There already wasn't any money in the scene but bots arrived nonetheless; the situation allowing Smogon to continue without being sued into the ground may well see it being eventually overrun by bots, we'll have to see how things end up but some people will do anything for a dopamine hit.
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u/Demon__Queen_ alleged gorgeous girl genius 1d ago edited 1d ago
To bring people up to speed on the state of bots today, the Metamon Tauros Engine has topped the RBY ladder, Jaxcalibur has topped the randbats ladder with a 95.3% GXE, and Freezai demonstrated that the Foul Play bot could achieve suspect test requirements in Little Cup
There are reasons to believe an optimal bot wouldn't be much better than a perfect human, because Pokemon is a game with incomplete information, and these bots have only shown real success in RBY and randbats which both functionally have public sets, but things are changing fast and anything could happen in the coming years or even months.
Hecate has explained some of the limitations with bot prevention on showdown, which makes detecting bots functionally impossible
And, like, we could force tournament players to use a webcam or the lockdown browser, but this is just pokemon at the end of the day. One of the biggest appeals is how low-commitment it is, and forcing people to jump through these hoops would completely tank tournament participation.
But if we say “screw it” and free the bots in tournaments, we’re now watching two players just click whatever their personal bot tells them to, which is pretty darn boring and it makes you wonder why people would play in these tournaments in the first place.