There’s been a lot of buzz about the big Charizard and Garchomp buffs, but the real winner of the most recent Pokemon Unite patch is the Quick Chat menu. It doesn’t matter how strong your fireballs are or how many points you can score if you can’t work with your team, and the new Quick Chat options have the potential to dramatically improve teamwork and communication in your games - if they’re used correctly.
Before the update, there were only a few things you could say to your teammates in game. You could tell them what lane you're heading towards, ask for back up, tell them to group up, tell them to retreat, and tell them to keep the pressure on. Those commands are essential tools for coordinating with your team, especially when it's time to group up and take objectives, but they’re extraordinarily limited in the context of a complex game like Unite.
Say for example you want to bait the enemy team into collapsing on you so you can use a Unite Move. You may want to start attacking Dreadnaw to get their attention. That way, you can Unite when they arrive and your team can come in from behind to clean them up. The problem is that there’s no way to tell your team the plan, so as soon as you start attacking Dreadnaw, a good teammate will come over to help you. This increases the chance that the enemy team will steal the Dreadnaw, since its health is now lower than you anticipated, and you’ve lost your opportunity for an ambush.
This is just one of countless examples of specific plays that the Quick Chat system isn’t equipped to handle. Telling them to retreat would only confuse them, and telling them to keep the pressure on or group up would ruin your plan. Luckily, Patch 1.4.1.2 brings an assortment of new, customizable Quick Chat commands that can improve every team’s coordination potential considerably.
Open up the settings and navigate to Quick Chat Settings and you’ll find 19 new commands to choose from to replace your lane designation commands (“Headed to the X path”) and “I need backup”. Among these messages are defensive calls like “”Defend our goal,” “Let’s wait for our allies,” and “Watch out for surprise attacks”; offensive calls like “Let’s set up an ambush,” “Let’s attack wild Pokemon,” and “Now’s our chance to score”; and position-focused communication like “Let’s gather at the central area” and “Let’s Retreat.”
These commands can improve teamwork tremendously. In the aforementioned example, you’d just need to tell your team “Wait a sec” or “Let’s set up an ambush” and they’ll know to hang back as you head towards Dreadnaw. There are so many great ways to use these messages to help your team avoid some of the most common mistakes in the game.
I used to spam “retreat” at my team every time they broke a tier one goal and fruitlessly pushed towards a tier two goal, but what I really wanted to tell them was “Let’s attack wild Pokemon” so that they know we should continue farming. Before, it was impossible to tell my team that I wanted to group up for an objective if I wasn’t already at it, but now I can say “Let’s gather at the top path” no matter where I am and everyone will know I want to team up to fight for Rotom. One of my favorite commands is “Please let me level up first,” which is useful for Pokemon like Cinderace and Machamp that have weak early games and need to level up quickly. These commands are going to solve a lot of communication problems and help people get better at the game.
Moving forward, the challenge will be deciding how to designate your four Quick Chat slots. There’s just no way to say everything you need to say with only four commands, so choosing the most important ones can be difficult. Players that typically take jungle should probably still stick to the three original “Headed to the X path” message because it gives laners important information, but that only leaves you with one slot. I’d like to see the “gather here” and “I’m headed here” commands get turned into a permanent button so that everyone has access to them without needing to use up these important Quick Chat slots, because they’re just that important.
There’s also some messages on the list that I know for a fact will only be used for harm. Commands like “You can do it” and “Thanks” don’t serve any strategic purpose whatsoever, and will only ever be used by troll and BM teammates. This isn’t an opinion; you can look at any other competitive game that exists, from League of Legends to Hearthstone, and see that commands like “Thanks” are always used to annoy and frustrate other players. I’d like to see these commands get removed in exchange for more useful ones.
There's a few more messages that Unite really needs. Too often players with a small amount of Aeos Energy will score in front of a player holding a lot more and break the goal, ruining the opportunity to overdrunk. “Let me take the lead” might make them back off, but what we really need is a “Let me score first” message. “Let’s defend the goal” is a great way to tell your teammates not to let the enemy score points for free, but I’d also like to see one that says “Don’t break the enemy goal,” since it's often better to leave a weakened goal up and save it for a big overdunk later than break it early and give the enemy a ton of comeback experience.
Finally, I think a command like “Save your Unite Move” would help teams win a lot more Zapdos fights. Too often players will blow their Unite Move right before the two-minute mark during a fight that doesn’t really matter, then head into the final Zapdos fight at a huge disadvantage. It would be great if we could remind players not to use their Unite Moves right before Zapdos spawns so we have a better chance of winning the final team fight.
The abysmal state of matchmaking and the outrageous price of cosmetics can sometimes make me feel like the developers don’t actually care about the quality of matches, but this overhaul to the Quick Chat system shows that the devs are working to make the game more competitive and fun to play. If you use these messages correctly and pay attention when your teammates message, you’re practically guaranteed to improve your win rate. Healing, CC, and taking objectives are all important, but good communication will always be the best way to support your team.