Pokémon Scarlet & Violet – offline players have nothing to worry about but this could break the competitive scene (pic: The Pokémon Company)
The competitive Pokémon scene has discovered an exploit in online multiplayer that can let players predict which attacks will hit.
From the moment it launched, most of the fan discussion surrounding Pokémon Scarlet & Violet seems to have been centred around its performance and technical issues.
Some fans have gone so far as to describe it as unplayable and request refunds from Nintendo, with mixed results. Others have leapt to the game’s defence regarding its perceived performance issues, including one of our readers.
The newest problem, however, concerns the online multiplayer; namely, an exploit has been discovered that’s in need of fixing since it can give players an unfair advantage.
To keep things simple for those who may not understand the technical aspects of Pokémon, there is meant to be a randomised element to battles that determine whether an attack hits the opponent or not.
These accuracy checks occur every turn and the random number generator (RNG) used to determine whether the attack lands is supposed to be, well… random.
However, players believe that this isn’t the case for online multiplayer battles and that the RNG doesn’t change between turns. What this essentially means is that it’s now possible to learn which of your attacks are guaranteed to land.
This is especially useful for one-hit KO moves, which are designed to have low accuracy rates, given how powerful they are.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet – the exploit also seems confined to online battles against one another and not the Tera Raid battles (pic: The Pokémon Company)
Word of this was first brought up on Reddit, with user Lord-Trolldemort discovering that Frost Breath, an attack that should rarely miss, would never hit the opponent if used on the first turn.
‘I’ve played 14 battles where Frost Breath was the first accuracy check since I started recording, and Frost Breath has missed 14 times. For those doing the math, that would be a one in 100 trillion chance if the RNG were working correctly,’ they explain.
Twitter user Sibuna_Switch has corroborated this, highlighting several online matches where they used the move Sheer Cold and it always landed, despite having a very low accuracy rate.
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The good news is that this doesn’t seem to affect the main game so anyone who only plays offline has nothing to worry about.
However, this is a serious problem for the competitive scene. If not fixed, some players can use the exploit to guarantee easy wins. Hopefully, Game Freak is already aware of the issue and is working to fix it with a patch, which should be relatively easy.
Pokémon Scarlet & Violet is available for Nintendo Switch.
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The competitive Pokémon scene has discovered an exploit in online multiplayer that can let players predict which attacks will hit.
