RNG Manipulation in Pokemon Showdown

asbdsp said:
Bro you're overthinking it.
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Maybe! But it's also a fun scenario for me to think about.

Probability management is a cool skill and all but it also is one that only really bears fruit when the sample size is large enough. Individual Pokemon games are usually just not that large and the value gained/lost from the dice rolls can very easily overshadow what's generated from the other skills involved in the game. (especially in matches between strong players where the two are usually tugging over small value margins to begin with) Of course, this just the nature of the game and I think most of use here have already accepted that fact.

In this pretend version of the game's history, knowing the match's rng seed from turn 1 would be public information for both players and integrated into the simulator ui for convenience. Instead of testing each player's skill in managing probability we would instead be testing each player's ability to manage rng calls. The fact that this new skill is almost entirely dependent on the choices that the players make in the teambuilder and in the match itself means that it ties in directly with the skills we already test and tend to view favorably as a community. Instead of the rng being 3rd party, it instead becomes an added layer to the mechanics that drive player to player gameplay dialogue.

Simply for the anecdote, playing with perfect knowledge of both players' Pokemon movesets is something that already exists. VGC has been using open team sheets for the majority of their official tournament play since the start of SV. I don't have any hard statistics but, as a personal anecdote, most of the players that I've talked to very much prefer this ruling change and tend to be frustrated with closed-team sheet events like the online GC events.

I agree that being able to manipulate the game's rng would make simulator Pokemon a completely different game. It's hard to imagine if it would be better or not due to just how many things are impacted. Maybe someday there'll be some niche OM format designed around this concept?
 
For reversing RNG in Gen 3 OU after counter-trapping Dugtrio with Porygon2 I now wrote a more user-friendly specialized program:


It doesn't require you to know the opponents attack EVs, because there is a "Guess Attack" button, that tells you all possible attack stats compatible with the damage rolls.
So after 16-17 damage rolls you can usually figure out the attack stat, and then figure out the RNG.

If there are crits it needs slightly less damage rolls. It needs one damage roll less per crit, because a crit gives exactly as much information as a damage roll does.

This might now be user-friendly enough to be used in Gen3 tournament games, whenever a Porygon2 and Dugtrio meet.
 
Hecate

Announcement Thread 'On RNG'

A few days ago, user: Myren Eario posted a thread and accompanying YouTube video in which they demonstrated how to use Metronome calls to reverse engineer the battle's seed and accurately predict the subsequent battle RNG for all gens bar 2 and 4. While obviously a competitive issue, the likelihood of someone bringing this to an SPL game and pulling it off is rather low. A few more days after that, however, a new video was posted showing how damage rolls can be used to achieve similar results, granted you know the exact stats of the opposing Pokemon. While both of these...
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Summary of this thread
  • Pokemon Showdown applied Gen 5 RNG algorithm to all Gens.
  • However, Myren Eario had showed that that RNG can be inferred through reverse engineering and it may be viable in a real game.
  • In response, PS Admin took measures to prevent changing the character of the games in Pokemon Showdown by changing the RNG algorithm to one which is difficult to hack.

I greatly thank that Myren Eario was a white-hat hacker who used his technical skills not for his own benefit but to make the problem known, and that PS Admin was quick to make rational decisions and amend it.
 
Myren Eario said:
RNG Manipulation is back, because the cryptographically secure battle RNG gets seeded using Math.random() which is not cryptographically secure:

If you get the input log of one battle, you can predict the RNG of the next battle on the server.
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This exploit has been patched.

In the future, we would really appreciate if you DMed a PS! admin and alerted us to any exploit that could affect our the integrity of our tournaments, so we can patch it before it's announced publicly.
 
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