Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's Battle Stadium May Have a Very Big Problem

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's Battle Stadium may have a major issue tied to determining whether or not a move hits. Multiple Pokemon Scarlet and Violet players are reporting an issue with the game's Battle Stadium mode, which allows players to participate in online battles with each other. The issue seems to be tied to the RNG (Random Number Generator) seed that determines whether or not a move actually hits or not. While the game is supposed to generate a new seed at the start of every battle, it appears that the Battle Stadium is using the same RNG seed every time, which means that certain moves will always hit (or always not hit) depending on when they are used in battle. For instance, one Reddit thread notes that Frost Breath (a move with 90% accuracy) missed the first time it was used in battle during 14 consecutive battles, while the One Hit KO move Sheer Cold (a move with 30% accuracy) is always hitting the first time.

What's worse - Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's Ranked play is supposed to start in just a few days. While ranked online tournaments don't start up until the spring, players were supposed to be climbing the ladder beginning in December. It's unclear whether Pokemon plans to delay the start of ranked season or if they were even aware of the issues, as fans only noticed them this weekend. 

Obviously, this is a problem for several reasons – the biggest reason being that players can effectively abuse the system in multiplayer tournaments as they know which moves will hit and which moves will hit. It's also another example of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet having something egregiously wrong with the game that should have been fixed before it was sold. The good news is that this should be able to be patched pretty easily - Pokemon Scarlet and Violet developers likely used a fixed seed while developing the system, so they should be able to make sure that the RNG generator is turned back on pretty quickly.