I may be a veteran Pokemon Unite player, but I wasn’t particularly happy when the game lumped me into Veteran tier yesterday afternoon. After dozens of hours spent grinding, I’d finally managed to smash through a sky-high competitive skill ceiling to reach the highly coveted Master rank. And for what? So Timi could turn around and say, “See all that work you put in mate? No you don’t.”

This happens with online games: a new season starts and your rank is auto-adjusted based on not just the rank you were previously designated, but your performance within that bracket in relation to other players at a similar level. Generally speaking - or perhaps ideally speaking given that this premise seldom serves its intended purpose - this offers talented but unfortunate players a rare chance to climb the ladder while punishing complacency in higher tiers. It’s a great concept, although as is usually the case in online games with competitive scenes, the implementation has been fairly wanting.

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When I logged into Unite yesterday, I was rewarded with a whopping 20,000 Aeos tickets for reaching Master rank in season one. To put that into more practical terms, I was able to buy 2,000 item enhancers, meaning I had almost enough to bring an item the whole way from level one to 30. “This is great!” I thought to myself before remembering that hope is pain.

The issue with Unite season two is that this admittedly decent reward was immediately soured by what followed it - a relegation not just to Ultra 5, but Vet 3. In order to reach Master again, I need to win 24 more matches than I lose or draw. Put plainly, I might as well be starting from scratch.

I’m not even being hyperbolic here. If I were to start over from zilch, Beginner and Great would be a breeze. Expert might have a few decent players, although I don’t reckon there would have been much in the way of resistance there either. Veteran is where Pokemon Unite’s competitive scene starts to shape up in earnest. People know where to be for 8:50 bees; nobody steals jungle farm until at least the seven-minute mark; losing Zapdos is not seen as synonymous with losing the game; Zeraora doesn’t automatically get 400 kills for merely existing. It’s a much better, faster, tighter game.

This same skill level is generally maintained from Vet 2 up to Master, which is why the relegation stings. Again, I understand these alterations are usually made based on performance, although my performance has been particularly good of late. I wasn’t expecting an artificial boost up to Master 2,000, although I didn’t anticipate even slight relegation, let alone a drop this pronounced. At the risk of sounding like a great big baby, it just feels arbitrary and unfair. Like the game’s arcane patch notes, no rhyme or reason has been provided. I’ve been knocked down 24 rungs of the competitive ladder just because.

I’m not just doing a big wahwah here, by the way. There are plenty of other issues with Unite’s second season too, the most prominent of which is probably Greedent, the game’s newest playable character. Basically, Greedent is broken. That’s it. It is, at the time of writing, the single most overpowered character on the entire Unite roster, to the point where I’m starting to think if Arceus - literally Pokemon God - is just Greedent in disguise. Maybe that’s what I should have written my 3,000-word Legends: Arceus theory about. At the peak of Mt. Coronet, where the Earth and sky meet, a little squirrel lad sits hoarding berries and enacting violent Judgment on all those who defy it. I can see it.

Meanwhile, Pokemon Unite continues to ignore categories like All-Rounder and Support in favour of adding yet another Attacker to the game. I mean, we don’t technically have confirmation that Decidueye is an Attacker yet, although I can’t see it fitting any other role. It’s not bulky, it’s not fast, and it has triple-digit Attack and Special Attack stats. It’s also based on an archer, meaning that on top of Gardevoir and Sylveon, it’s yet another post-launch ranged DPS. I recognize it’s the final form of Rowlet and is therefore being used as a means of promoting Legends: Arceus, but we could have easily got Samurott as an All-Rounder or Typhlosion as a Speedster. That’s not to mention the irrefutable fact that Rowlet, cute as it may be, is nowhere near as good as Oshawott or Cyndaquil, two of the three best starters in Pokemon history. Unite still seems hellbent on proving its fundamental misunderstanding of the series it’s based on at almost every turn.

All in all, Pokemon Unite is entering its second season as a bit of a mess. It displays no knowledge of properly realigning the ladder for a new competitive season, is choosing to leave its most broken character to date emphatically broken, and continues to ignore would-be phenomenal picks like Scizor and Heracross for mid-tier starter evos like Decidueye. If I didn’t love this game as much as I do, I wouldn’t be fussed enough to write about it. The annoying thing is that as always, Unite’s biggest problems only further demonstrate its massive potential. Every time it makes a mistake, all I can think about is how good it would be if it just… didn’t.

Despite how often I criticise it, I also regularly champion Pokemon Unite for its strengths and it’s still easily one of my most-played games of 2021. It’s for this precise reason that I feel as if playing Unite is basically just consigning yourself to an occasionally rewarding war of attrition. When it’s good, it’s outstanding - I can’t remember the last time winning five matches in a row has felt so satisfying. When it’s bad though… yeah. I’m starting to get a bit worried about how much longer I can play Unite for without a hefty Greedent nerf. I don’t think I’ve hated a cluster of pixels this much since Morgana told me to go to bed for the 500th time.

Anyway, here’s hoping Pokemon Unite sorts its shit out before season three. It definitely won’t, but yeah. Whatever.

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