The Pokemon Unite community, at least the vocally online portion of it, is in the middle of a revolt. Many months of frustration and mounting resentment, players are now calling for a boycott on all in-game purchases until their demands are met. Co-opting the The Asian American Foundation’s anti-racism slogan, Pokemon Unite fans are using the hashtag #UniteForChange to bring attention to the ongoing issues they desperately want TiMi Studio Group to address.As a long time Pokemon Unite player, I’m well aware of the game’s shortcomings. Unite is full of outrageously expensive cosmetics and aggressive monetization tactics that have only gotten more expensive and predatory over time. Matchmaking issues that create untenable imbalance between teams have plagued Unite from the very start, and communication from the developers has been consistently abysmal. I was surprised it took this long for people to get fed up with Unite’s issues, but I was even more surprised when I found out why they’re boycotting. What’s their unifying demand? The whole reason all these people have joined together to say ‘enough is enough’? They think one of the Pokemon is too strong.I don’t want to sound totally dismissive. The Pokemon in question, Zacian, joined Unite in February, and immediately became an issue. I was critical of the launch, not because it was overpowered right out of the gate (I actually like that), but because players could pay $20 to get the Pokemon three weeks earlier than everyone else. Zacian was a monster even in the hands of an amateur, and stopping it from steamrolling your team required a level of coordination rarely seen outside of the competitive scene. Everyone knew Zacian was a problem immediately, and many expected an emergency patch would come within days, just as it had for Sylveon when the Pokemon launched in a similar (though less OP) state. But that patch never came, and four months later Zacian has only had a fraction of the nerfs it probably deserves. A balance patch at the beginning of April attempted some pretty drastic changes to Zacian. Its attack in early levels was lowered, the cooldown on Agility was extended, and Agility lost its Full Heal effect. But last month’s nerf’s were not enough though, as Zacian remains the Pokemon with the highest win rate, according to UniteAPI.Zacian ought to be nerfed, but I’m still struggling to understand why this has become the rallying cry for disillusioned Unite players. According to the data, Zacian only has a 21.9 percent pick rate, and a 55.53 percent win rate. That means Zacian is only showing up in one out of every five games, and only winning a little more than half of those. Perception doesn’t always match the data of course, but is this really the thing that Unite players want to go to war over? Is nerfing Zacian going to fix the real problems that have been plaguing the game since launch? There's other complaints too, hidden away on the Mathcord server, but the Zacian issue is the crux of the boycott, and the demand being shared on social media. I’m with the boycotters in spirit, but I think they might be fighting the wrong battle.
Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of demanding balance changes. There is no rule in game design that every character must have a perfectly even win rate, and it’s not necessarily the case that unbalanced characters are bad for the game. Sometimes developers intentionally ‘design for impact’ because they want the thing they’re introducing to the game to be disruptive, game-changing, and a point of conversation. While I agree that Zacian is both too strong and too easy to play, I don’t think it's anywhere close to the top of the list of Unite’s biggest problems.If balance is such an issue, why aren’t we hearing about Lapras? It has a 52.87 percent win rate - less than three percent off Zacian - but it’s getting picked 32.78 percent of the time. Lapras is creating way more unbalanced games than Zacian is, which is still a relatively small number of games.I realize it's not just about Zacian. The frustration has been building for a long time, and nerfing Zacian is a simple request to rally around. What the boycotters really want is to be acknowledged. They feel hopeless about Unite’s issues, and they're tired of offering feedback and never getting any kind of acknowledgement from the developers. This has come up several times over the last couple of years, and TiMi Studio Group has promised on more than one occasion to be more communicative with its players, but hasn't followed through. If the devs fix Zacian, then the boycotters will feel like they have some influence and power, which is what they ultimately really want.I'm not against consumer activism in principle. If I was, I wouldn't have joined my colleagues in protesting Hogwarts Legacy earlier this year. But when you decide to stop financially supporting a game, or any product, for ideological reasons, it's important to understand that boycotts do not work. You can stop spending money on Pokemon Unite if you’re upset with the state of the game, but you should never expect that to lead to any kind of meaningful change. This kind of conditional 'give us X or we'll stop buying Holowear' has never been proven an effective strategy to move corporations.
Pokemon fans should understand this better than anyone. The Dexit Boycott was meaningless - Sword & Shield outsold every Pokemon game that came before it except the originals. Earlier this week, Pokemon Go director Michael Steranka said the team has no plans to reverse the recent changes to Remote Raid passes, despite the backlash from the community. The ‘Hear Us Niantic’ campaign is no different than the #UniteForChange campaign. Neither will have any impact on how either studio runs its games. Your boycott will not have the effect you want, they never do.
If you’re unhappy with Pokemon Unite, stop playing it. Take a break, do something else, and come back later if you see positive changes. This is a video game, not your job, and there’s no point trying to unionize to fight the developers over something as trivial as a balance patch. I understand the investments people make and the communities they build around their favorite games, but at the end of the day you just can’t put this kind of energy into being mad about an OP sword dog. If anything, you’re making it even more unlikely that TiMi Studio Group will nerf Zacian. Do you think they want to get spammed with #UniteForChange every time a group of players decide another character needs a balance patch? Let the developers develop, and if you don’t like what they do, there's a lot of other great games to play.