[E18] Supervised Testing, Days 2-3 (Patreon)

picking up where we left off before! more shenanigans from testing 

More Ghosts

a certain character left us this episode.
unfortunately.
like with my ghost, and that other character i mentioned, we saw them again.
all we had to do was exit and re-enter the map and they were saved.
good as brand new.
wouldn't talk to us though.
but take that, killer person.

sighs about it, just stay dead.

2spoopy

so ikaru walked in somewhere, talked to a couple people and left
wait, talk to that kid, i said.
what kid,  he said, three seconds before noticing the kid.
so he did, and the kid says something like "hey there's something really scary will you follow me to it?"
so naturally protagonist says yes, and the kid walks off and
crashes the game because i forgot to remove a tile where he was going 😅
"talk to the kid, she said" ikaru grumbled.
"that is very spooky, a kid who crashes your game. i'm scared," inuki agreed.
i had to apologize a lot.

Too Meta

when i was going through stuff this episode, i taught kanaya how to make trainer battles.
i clearly missed a detail or two though because...
ikaru fought one of her trainers... he was a little underprepared, sure,... but he was especially  under-prepared for her to send out mega-metagross suddenly.
only.
when i say mega-metagross, i dont mean she sent out metagross and then it mega evolved.
nah
this lass found a way to straight up encapsulate the mega forme and just send it out willy nilly
(it's an oversight and i should have checked her team better but.
you know.
I'll still laugh as ikaru gets swept.)
i had to apologize some more.

Crash and Duplete

i told you yesterday about how ikaru doesn't like kanaya's work very much for his own reasons. unfortunately, the megagross incident didn't exactly help that-- but you know, we move on!! no big deal, right!
so he gets to another NPC, and as he's talking to her, realized she was also done by kanaya
then NPC gives him an item.
unfortunately the item's name was misspelled, so the game did the only thing it knew how to do
which is, of course, crash.
and also, i had accidentally put the same item in twice in two different places.
having had enough of my shenanigans, he closed what was left of the game and left the call.
and. 

i had to apologize some more
but i was kinda over apologizing cuz he knows the shit we get into every episode ^^;
either way he was very notHappy and i felt bad but also laughed some more.

-- so that was ikaru yesterday.

now let's talk about inuki.

inuki isn't officially part of supervised testing, he just usually happens to play along when we do and we make a fun time of it-- it's been a tradition since E13 basically. dan also sometimes joins.

the thing about inuki is he really loves field effects.
specifically setting them on fire.
like if you find a trainer in-game who sets a field on fire, inuki probably made it. 

but that love of fields extends beyond arson and in-game trainers-- every single playthrough he does of the game uses a unique field effect gimmick team. further, he and dan also often challenge themselves to find unique strategies around things like garchomp each time they play through-- never doing the same thing twice.

for instance-- ah, no, here's a gif inuki made showcasing his current run's battle against arceus in action:

...tl;dr
prankster to make murkrow go first (it wasn't expected to live, xd) to tailwind to make lopunny fast enough to switch lagging tail onto it which makes arceus always go slow enough for koffing to outspeed

normal paralysis is soooooooo seven episodes ago.

the other thing that he and dan always do amidst this chaos is... inevitably get frustrated at me when the admittedly very clever and creative gimmicks they come up with somehow always manage to fail in the code
like i swear upon a heck, every god damn time
there's just a growing list

hey ame, remember dragon rush--
hey ame, remember normalize--
hey ame, remember quash--
(yes, these fools found a way to make quash work. i love them.
but it was bugged. so they did not love me.)

this time it's hey ame, remember klutz--
that's right, this man is counting on klutz-- the ability that should have no apparent benefits.
and gosh, lopunny is cute, and i love it so much but it's just an awful ability.
but here we have inuki.
the clever reader already understands that lagging tail always makes its user go second, so even with tailwind there's no way lopunny should have been able to outspeed arceus to get lagging tail onto it
but with klutz which makes its user unable to gain the effects of held items--
it still wouldn't work because klutz was bugged with lagging tail.
lagging tail just straight up ignored klutz and made lopunny move second anyway.
so the class pattern continues.

inuki fixed that, however, and so the gif you see above was able to be made as intended.

but wait there's more

like most healthy modern players, inuki and friends do not like bennett very much.
in fact they rather dislike him.
in fact inuki dislikes him enough that he goes out of his way to do bennet a suffer in the iolia valley battle. 

you probably know this about the cave field:

* Stealth Rocks damage is doubled

you probably also know that bennett's team consists of 5 pokemon that are 4x weak to rock, dustox and venomoth. 

what you may or may not know is this:

* Telluric Seed boosts Defense and damages the user with Stealth Rocks

do you see where we're going yet?

i can more or less narrate bennet's battle for you turn by turn. my memory sucks but i can do this. 

turn 1-- inuki sends out diggersby vs larvesta. diggersby uses bulldoze, transforming the dark crystal cavern to cave. larvesta flame charges. 

turn 2-- diggersby attacks but is weak af despite pure power for some reason. larvesta KOs it.

turn 3-- inuki sends out the onix from the peridot ward. it is level 16. it is very important it would be at this level in particular because 16 is the level it learns Stealth Rocks at and to raise it any higher before bringing it into the fight with bennett would not be nearly as disrespectful.
larvesta attacks; onix survives with sturdy and stealth rockses.

turn 4-- larvesta KOs onix.

turn 5-- inuki sends out lopunny. lopunny KOs larvesta.

turn 6-- bennett sends out scyther. scyther immediately loses 100% of its HP to stealth rocks damage.

turn 7-- bennett sends out dustox. dustox loses 50% of its HP to stealth rocks. lopunny KOs it.

turn 8-- bennett sends out vivillon. vivillon loses 100% of its HP to stealth rocks.

turn 9-- bennett sounds out yanmega. yanmega loses 100% of its HP to stealth rocks.

turn 10-- bennett sends out venomoth. venomoth loses 50% of its HP to stealth rocks. lopunny uses switcheroo, trading its held Telluric Seed to venomoth. telluric seed activates, boosting venomoth's defense, and applying 50% max HP stealth rocks damage to it, KOing it. 

turn 11-- bennett sends out butterfree. butterfree loses 100% of its HP to stealth rocks.

he only made six moves, but that's all he needed to win.

incidentally, that is not how the battle went the first time.
the first time, it all went the same up until the point that he sent lopunny out--
at which point, telluric seed immediately activated, damaging lopunny with stealth rocks and being consumed.

i will remind you that lopunny has klutz.
so not only did inuki's lagging tail-klutz strat fail because of script problems, so did this one.
so inuki fixed klutz for all the seeds too.
good lad, that one.

i swear klutz is implemented.
...i think.

but that's just the sideshow.

although inuki has made solid use of klutz lopunny this run and has made me a very happy fan of it despite the bugs, inuki's actual gimmick this playthrough is his Inverse Field team.

and more specifically, Inverse Field with Wonder Guard.
the clever reader remembers the shedinja from the gif up there.

theoretically, by turning inverse field on and off as he needs it, he can make shedinja effectively immune to all types of damage as he sees fit. 

but in class reborn fashion,
it doesn't fucking work.

apparently wonderguard's current implementation just........ doesn't work at all with inverse field.
like you can have shedinja in inverse, and it'll take a fighting attack no problem-- but fighting attack should be 4x effective. and for all other purposes, it is *,
but not for wonderguard.
shedinja just does not care.
meanwhile fire moves still eat it. 

so that kind of ruined his entire gimmick.
again. 

* actually there was also a bug that immunities in inverse field were becoming 4x effective instead of 2x.
but he fixed that too.

also this whole wonderguard thing totally turned against him when he was against Radomus and Gossip Gardevoir was sent out only to trace Wonder Guard.
cya.

thomas had never seen such a mess.

Waste-racer

while not a bug, there are certain pokemon that you just really don't want to accidentally get speed boost.
on a list of those pokemon, i gotta say, alola-muk is pretty high up there for me.

that was unfortunate.

a farfetch'd outcome

today ikaru fought a certain battle
his opponent was about 10 levels below his mons over all.
unfortunately, his opponent also had a farfetch'd.
did you know that with leaf blade or night slash and while holding the leek, farfetch'd has an 100% crit rate?

ikaru did not win that battle.

--

so we're through the supervised playthrough now! 

i have a handful of minor bugs to fix, and a few more pressing ones...
but honestly, aside from the few crashes and the little niche collection of gimmicky problems that inuki's unearthed, there actually really isn't much of concern in the playtest so far. 

the most concerning things would be the inaction errors like we got last time. we did find one of those. but we only found one of those (with fire spin-esque moves-- just a mistype) and its already been fixed. 

there are a few AI cases where some values need to be fixed. most notably the AI was handling a set up war pretty bravely-- i liked its pizzazz... up until it used calm mind for a 7th time. oof. that was a deal breaker. specifically our checks for zeroing it out at +6/+6 aren't working for that and likely similar moves. so we'll check on that and the other cases-- but even those can probably be counted on one hand.

i would like to comment on the strength of this episode's leader... unfortunately when ikaru got the badge i had accidentally set the gym to the wrong leader battle so uh. oops. kind of a freebie. i guess we'll see on internal testing-- likely this weekend or early next week.