Why Does This Keep Happening? | Pokemon Unite

Honestly it’s so hard climbing every season with the amount of bad teammates, constant afk’s and back caps

I have a few theories, and I think a combination of all of them are true. 1) When a Pokémon is buffed, players who are "in the know" (and tend to play better) switch to the buffed Pokémon. When a Pokémon gets nerfed, players who aren't "in the know" continue to play it, while more skilled players drop the Pokémon for something more effective. When Charizard was awful, most Charizard players I saw had awful macro. Same for Zeraora before the rework, and Gengar right now. Sure, there were good players too, but MOST of the people playing these weaker Pokémon, from selection screen to in-match, didn't seem to know what they were doing. I'd also like to point out that Pokémon with a greater "cool factor" (Charizard, Gengar, Zeraora) are likely more suspectable to unskilled and out-of-the-loop players choosing them, playing their favorite Pokémon regardless of their ability to use it properly. This is probably why Dodrio has consistently better win-rates than Zoroark. 2) This is probably much more obvious, but people get used to a Pokémon's pre-patch capabilities and limits. When a Pokémon gets nerfed, players take risk they could handle before but can't handle now. When a Pokémon gets buffed opposing players will more readily challenge it, not realizing what it's now cabable of. 3. Most straightforwardly, strong Pokémon preform better and week Pokémon preform worse. Just one of these factors alone won't account for the wild swings in win-rate, but all three combined might explain it. I'm curious to hear people's takes on these theories, especially the first one.

I think some people don’t really know how to play and just play the broken stuff because it gets them wins. However, after the nerfs they just abandon it or keep it but lose everything.

Yup. People are bad at the game, but even worse, the game purposely puts the worst players on your team when youre good, which is why the game will die.

I feel like it when something is really strong people start playing the mons in a way where they are getting away with things that no other mons, so when the mon does receive a nerf they carry on playing it the same way and get punished for doing so.

I definitely sucked before watching your videos, like a 40% win rate. Now I’m at like a 55% from your videos learning about the “Macro” of the game. Thanks for that. And I definite agree. People overreact to the smallest things. It’s kinda stupid, but I will say this mega is super flatlined to the past. Thanks for your thoughts!

I literally just got off the game after playing for five hours straight just to earn ONE STAR. It was literally a one step forward two steps back as a SoloQ f2p, just praying I don't lose a star with every loss lmao

You answered your own question, Cowboy. Most players don't have a good understanding of macro. Busted pokemon can somewhat overcome this deficiency, which is why you're seeing the swingy win rates. The reason I think macro is the culprit is simple: I've been playing for a year, regularly reach Master and I myself still don't feel like I have a good grasp on proper macro. Lots of streamers focus on presenting builds and strats for individual pokemon, largely because they change somewhat regularly with patches. Few streamers teach proper macro (because compared to builds and strats, it's complicated and difficult to teach, sometimes) and the game does nothing to teach it. The MVP system sometimes even rewards bad macro. So, Cowboy, do you want to belly up to the bar and serve up a round of ice cold macro lessons? The community would be better for it if you did. Yee-haw, my friend.

Teammates make a huge difference, and if a Pokémon isn’t insanely broken, then it becomes difficult to carry these awful teammates, and thus the winrate goes down Like for me personally, normally when there’s a Pokémon that I play a lot, such as my top 4 most played Pokémon, they have over 60% win rates each, but with Ceruledge even right now, my fifth most played with around 200 battles, I still struggle to get past a 52% winrate (Username in game is Ruinatiøn)

True, I think that they would overextend themselves because the Pokemon would handle it before the nerfs, and it’s hard to think about that.

I just wanna see a meta where nothing is obscenely broken in this game and see how much the player base straight up panics when they can't play something broken

Yup, people struggle in this game. I don't think any amount of buffs or nerfs will fix that.

Here for that moustache

I completely agree with you, the biggest part of the playerbase is just straight up bad. Best example for this right now is charizard, the Unite was insanely overbuffed and the pickrate blew up with it by 36%(!!!) in just one week. Most of the people pick broken mons so they don't get punished for bad decisions they make in a match and so they think they are "good" at the game. It really started to show when Mewtwo got released and it will keep going until things like the horrible matchmaking and the very questionable system for MVP are fixed. Also there should definetly be some guides for items so we lower the chances of seeing for example another special attacker with attack weight or something like that.

Mobas are hard. If you aren't playing games like them routinely playing them, you get real rusty real quick. Then you take a break for a few months or just come back for the Anniversary event (me), and the only thing you have to go off of as far as what to pick are tier lists. Win or lose, pick whatever's in the S tier.

Dude I hate the matchmaking in this game, dude my teammates suck SO much, like I keep losing.

Part of it is that near the start of the season, top players(that they get their results from) get a lot of bot matches, you can tell because X attack(the item Tyranitar bots use) with a 57% use rate, with a 29% winrate, so a lot of the Pokemon bots play tend to have super low winrates at the start of the seasons

It feels like there's a confidence factor that players in unite have or lack, entirely dependent on if they have a positive or negative recent patch experience Someone could see that "decreased" line on the notes and decide a mon is now in the shadow realm and they could never do the same.... even though it's just a 5 attack drop

I definitely feel like the macro decision making hurts a lot of teams. People aren't showing up to objectives as they spawn, they're using their unite after the 2:30 mark, back capping, etc. I get that Unite is a very trimmed down version of most MOBAs but you still can't autopilot. The decision making absolutely matters for the match.

Honestly imo this stuff happens when content creators post troll builds and then other people want to try it and so they do. Like some troll leftovers, rollout wigglytuff, lane cinderace, Flail snorlax, goal getter talonflame, the list goes on etc. The ex mons aren’t helping either, when mewtwo released you didn’t need a brain to play it.