Fix Impossible Nicknames

[DragonWhale]

One of the major elements in competitive Pokemon is information management. Whether it be big things like using a popular team that completely reveals all your sets to an opponent that knows the team, or small things like having a female Greninja which telegraphs to a competent opponent that you're not Battle Bond, all form of details of a team that reveal some sort of information to the opponent should stay true to the game.

Nicknames shouldn't be an exception. A lot of viable Pokemon and their sets rely on specific events, and a majority of these events don't allow you to change the nickname of the Pokemon. A legal event Pokemon would be locked into these nicknames, and should reveal information about your Pokemon to the opponent if it's impossible otherwise.

Some examples of Pokemon that will be unnicknameable include:

• Jirachi, Keldeo, Meloetta, Genesect, Diancie, Hoopa, Volcanion, Marshadow, Zeraora, Ash-Greninja
• The shiny event Suicune, Entei, Raikou and Heatran with Eruption
• Any Pokemon with Celebrate in their moveset. Shaymin, Pikachu, Vulpix-Alola, Comfey, Eevee, Rayquaza, Ho-oh, and Magikarp has their Japanese name. Their evolutions can be in English since names change language upon evolution.
• Any Pokemon with V-Create. Rayquaza needs to have its Japanese name.
• Jirachi with Meteor Mash, Follow Me, Moonblast, Heart Stamp, or Celebrate needs to be Japanese.
• Arceus if it has Roar of Time, Spacial Rend, Shadow Force, Hydro Cannon, or Blast Burn. Needs to be in Japanese or Korean if it has any of the last two moves.
• Victini if it has V-Create, Fusion Bolt, Fusion Flare, Blue Flare, Bolt Strike, Glaciate, or Celebrate. Needs to have the Japanese name if it has any of the last four moves.
• The shiny Genesect needed for the moves Extremespeed, Blaze Kick, and Shift Gear needs to have its Japanese name.

There's more unnicknameable combinations but the ones with any competitive merit are the ones listed above.

 

[TheMantyke]

Caveat to consider for many of these: an event Pokemon's nickname can be changed if you have the same name, gender, TID, and SID as the event Pokemon. It's theoretically possible to soft reset until you get lucky enough to have all that information or you can manipulate the RNG into giving you that combo. Therefore, it's perfectly legal to get all of this stuff nicknamed.

That said, the nickname would have to be in that same language since you'd need that exact name. This would narrow the effect of this proposal to event Pokemon that weren't released in all languages.

Event pokemon that weren't released in all languages then have the nickname options of:
-Default name in that language
-Same Language Keyboard Nickname
-For JP Events,ｆｕｌｌ ｗｉｄｔｈ ｔｅｘｔ nickname that's 5 (Pre Gen 6) or 6 (Post Gen 6) characters in length.
-For Pokemon evolved from these event Pokemon, any region's default name.
-For Gen 6+ Events, the default name of the Pokemon in any language. (Gen 6+ Events check your cartridge's region, but you can set your language to any language at the start and get the event in that language)

If you want to ignore the niche nicknameable situations for the sake of easier implementation, that all could just be reduced to:
-Same region default name for anything that can't evolve
-Any region default name for stuff that can evolve
-For Gen 6+ Events, any region default name

I think that's most of what to consider here for implementing this accurately. I'm not as hot on Pokemon legality as I use to though, so paging local wifi folk shiny finder .com Nexus LegoFigure11 if they care about this and I missed anything.

 

[Lego]

Would just like to add that in the last week or so there have been major developments with Gen 7 RNG, and now getting the right ID to nickname an event in ANY generation is actually feasibly doable in under an hour if you have the right setup (making me hesitant to want to "ignore the niche nicknameable situations"). Thanks to Max. Optimizer and Djura for providing this screenshot of a nicknamed Ash-Greninja to further my point:

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This means that everything in the list in the OP is actually nicknameable, as per TheMantyke's rules, with one small correction (proven by Wyrx):

• For JP Events,ｆｕｌｌ ｗｉｄｔｈ ｔｅｘｔ nickname that's 5 (Pre Gen 6) or 6 (Post Gen 6) characters in length.

Wyrx RNG'd an ID in Gen 7 so that he could nickname his Gen 3 Latios to a name that exceeds the old gen character limits. As such, even past gen events may conform to the 12 (latin-based) or 6 (non-latin-based) nickname character limits. Additionally (I'm unsure if it's relevant to any events but I'll note it anyway), Korean Gen 7 games have a 6 character limit, but DO NOT use ｆｕｌｌ ｗｉｄｔｈ ｔｅｘｔ english characters - they use the regular ones, meaning that any current or past gen event with an English OT that has less than 7 characters can have a Korean nickname.

 

[Eternal Spirit]

Im totally against it, how will i be able to bait people to think that my protgren is ashgren (or vice versa) if i cant call em "MAKES ME WONDER" or "FREE ME"? Also i wont be the same if i end up not being able to call my dear Diancie "ENCHANTIX" or my Victini "PROMINENCE" wtf.

Dont do it PLEASE.

 

[teal6]

Different proposal: force every single tournament player to nickname their Pokemon according to Ojama's naming conventions where you take like four letters from the mon's name and use that only.

 

[cityscapes]

i strongly disagree with this proposal.

nicknames aren't something for which ps mirrors in-game mechanics in that you can have 18 characters and you can use anything in the unicode alphabet. this is generally accepted as a good thing, because it allows players to have more creativity in names.

more importantly, though, i fail to see how enforcing this lock would actually affect the competitiveness of the game. all it really does is add to pokemon's already tremendous entry barrier by punishing new players for nicknaming their mons.

with the shiny lock, there are legitimate competitive implications out of rare cases. for genesect in particular, if it's not shiny you know it doesn't have extreme speed, shift gear, or blaze kick, but if it is you know it's hasty. the nickname equivalent of this would be, say, if jirachi had to come from an event with nickname x to learn iron head, and it had to come from a separate event with nickname y to learn healing wish. no such cases exist.

seeing as there's no downside to having no nickname on your mon, i think the play here is to just not enforce a lock, and treat the pokemon as not having a nickname. because let's face it: people like nicknames. implementing a nickname lock would do a lot more harm than good, so it shouldn't be added to ps.