Given the franchise’s popularity, there are two “key ways” to play Pokemon games. The first is to enjoy the main game via the campaign, wandering the new region, and trying to “Catch ’em All!” the second is to build up your party from scratch and do whatever it takes to make them strong enough for online play. In the online modes, you can battle friends, and random players, be in tournaments and even try to rise through the ranks on the global leaderboards. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet will start their first competition battles in December, but a bug might hinder that if not fixed.
On Reddit, a poster noted that they had something odd happen to them during their online battles. When they used the move Frost Breath, which has a 90% accuracy rate in combat, as the first move in a fight, it would miss every time. They were curious about this, so they did 14 straight battles with Frost Breath as their first move and missed every time.
As some have pointed out, a move can miss 14 times in a row, but the odds of that happening are incredibly slim. What’s more, other people were able to reproduce it.
Just as problematic, another player posted that the move Sheer Cold, a one-hit-KO move that is only supposed to hit 30% of the time, was hitting whenever used at the right point in the battle.
The reason this is a problem should be apparent. First, if players can figure out the “patterns” of what moves will always hit or always miss, they can abuse them. As shown already, they’re starting to figure the patterns out. This is fine now, as all the matches in the current play aren’t recorded for global rankings. But if this isn’t fixed before competitive play starts? That would drastically alter who wins because of the abuse of the system.
All players would need to do is ensure their Pokemon moves first, which is easier to do than you think, and then use a one-hit-KO move, and they’re already at a huge advantage. Another problem is that players only recently noticed these issues and started replicating them. That means they possibly have been in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet for a while, and The Pokemon Company didn’t notice.
Many will chalk this up as another “major bug” in the game, which won’t make players happy. After all, the game already has plenty of bugs.
Source: Reddit
