To my knowledge this is the first documented glitch for PBR regarding Metronome, enjoy! This is my final video of the year. Thank you for your continuous support!
Am I questioning why a pokemon battle revolution video popped into my feed? Yes. Am I now remembering my favorite 3 pokemon games (this, soul silver, and platinum) yes. Time to try and find a Nintendo wii and a copy of the game to play with my pokemon platinum on the Nintendo DSI
It's not so much a glitch as just a small oversight that only comes into play because of the extreme lack of variation in moves and teams. PBR just either uses the same starting rng seed on game boot, or sets the same starting rng seed at the start of vs matches, and then seeds all rng rolls off the previous rng roll. Either way, it really isn't an uncommon thing for most games to do. PBR probably doesn't have much or any elements that roll rng in the menus, and players that were joining the tournament likely quickly mashed through the menus as fast as they could, and as a result a few of the tournament rounds started off with the rng seed on the same step. And since everyone only used the same exact move, it had the same exact outcome. And the reason why the match rng would slowly diverge away from each other is because the pokemon doing their alternate idle animation is based off of rng, so how fast the players selected their moves ends up affecting the metronome rng. If you decide to do another metronome tournament in the future and don't want this to happen again, you will just need to ask each player to do a single offline random battle before they join the tournament, or tell everyone that they need to randomly wait 30 seconds to a minute before they select their first attack in battle. That will guarantee that the rng seeds should diverge far enough that you don't see the same moves again.
Like the other guy said, it wasn’t about using a specific move first. It was that online battles always used the same rng seed so sheer cold would always connect on the second turn no matter what. Thankfully they patched that after a few weeks, but the incompetence was jarring.
RNG is best understood by the speed running scene. I think some games always start with the same seed, and certain player inputs inputs modify the RNG over time
Which is super interesting to think about when talking about the inputs that’s possibly effecting it too. Perhaps players just made it all the same as each other somehow without realizing?
@@BigNation1 It seems likely, the input windows are generous enough that speedrunners can force an RNG window and if you're doing a pure metronome battle they might be simple enough that people do the same. After all you'd just start the battle and the select the only move as fast as possible most of the time. As battles drag on the odds of different input timing increases and so it slowly diverges. I don't know which inputs impact RNG and which don't so I can't suggest a test. But I think RNG in the mainline games is well documented (it changes from gen to gen and sometimes from game to game) so if you're interested I'm sure you could set up a test
reminds me of the glitch in scar/vio launch that caused all online battles to use the same seed, meaning that correctly timed usage of a ohko move would always hit, etc etc would be interesting to see if that's the case here as well. I wonder why this glitch was not found in the same amount of time it was in Gen 9? I don't think many official tournaments were hosted in PBR were they? Probably why it wasn't as well researched until now. (Man, I miss these stadium games...) To be specific-- is the battle seed the same every time, or just the first game after booting up? Does this sequence of events change if you reboot the Wii? Whose Wii is used to determine the battle seed? Some can be answered easily, others may require digging into the code, but I think these answers can be found empirically and could shed some light onto how PBR handles random number generation.
I had no idea about the Gen 9 glitch, that’s interesting! Correct not much was played on PBR back in the days for official VGC tournaments. So the technical side of things weren’t dived into. Seed is new after every reboot of the game though who’s seed is used, not exactly too sure when it comes to online.
I've seen this type of thing before in some Gen 6 battles by maybe HoodlumCallum and the gang a good half decade ago. They got a few moves like 3-5 times in a single battle multiple times - more than enough to be statistically significant. Metronome should pick a move out of all the moves available, but it simply doesn't. Odd.
Were these being played on real consoles, and did those consoles have correct clocks? The current time is often used for random seeds. If the consoles' clock batteries had died, they might have been frozen at some default time.
What I believe the issue to likely be is that the game only advances the rng seed when something random happens. This would mean that the metronome moves are not predetermined, but since the seed doesnt advance unless a random event occurs, the same outcomes happen. Most games advance rng at least once a frame to prevent this type of problem
Man this reminded me of something that happened ages ago in the gen 6 days, would do metronome battles with my friends and one of their mons had a bizzare affinity to roll imprison, which obviously just wins them the match since everyone had metronome
It is at best an "exploit", since it is "working as intended", and therefor not a "glitch". What I like about this video is that it is basically saying "we've found something interesting, see? And would like more information about it if anyone can explain how this works". I'd say go ask the speedrunning community since we know a lot about game seeds. They're usually connected to the in game timer, and therefore chosen at a specific time in the game. So if everyone is just mashing buttons trying to get their game to load as fast as possible, assuming everyone is running similar hardware, it should load at a similar speed, and therefore a similar time and end up on the same Seed each time. If only a small number of seeds are available then that increases the likelyhood that you'll get the same one over and over, or if it is randomized less frequently. Sometimes game seeds can be connected to inputs, so if you use the exact same number of inputs each time you get the same seeds, but this is not likely the case here.
Seems that while a bit cumbersome, for future PBR tournaments you could make a rule that each player needs to do at least one offline battle before moving to the online mode. The differences in player inputs and game decisions should diverge the seeds far enough where battles are sufficiently random, but that might warrant some further investigation.
Really interesting to finally see someone document this. I used to do metronome battles with my friends waaayyy back in the day and we noticed this and would just start a new battle whenever it occurred. I didn't know this was such an unknown thing! There are a few other common strings too but this is the most noticable since it seems to happen somewhat frequently on the first battle after booting the game. Happy PBR battling!
That and run-on sentences; I had to rewind the first 15 seconds of the video over and over since my small brain was immediately bombarded by information.
fuck now im sad because you made me remember playing pokemon battle revolution so much as a kid getting to see my pokemon from platinum and soul silver come to life was so exciting
@BigNation1 technically it's a wiki, anyone can butt in and write. Well if you don't respect the guidelines, your addition might be reverted, so maybe go to the "talk:metronome" page to mention it
Hmm yes I would have reached out to a coder before making the video. You've discovered the glitch but I'd appreciate knowing more about whats going on behind the scenes or how to work the glitch in the user's favor. This video would be legendary if you uncovered how to abuse Metronome to call specific moves in say a normal HGSS playthough. Everytime I try PBR, it tastes watery. What am I doing wrong??
Man I missed PBR. Used to have a friend when I was way younger that had it before I got my own copy, all I'd do when I went over was play PBR with them either online/offline cuase of the silly formats (that damn spinning wheel, even if it has a method to the madness)
Never knew about this glitch. It’s always nice that even though a game is old, it still has some interesting secrets hidden that are yet to be discovered.
Well you’d have to ask someone to check the game’s coding but its possible that this game chooses a set number of moves at random at the start of the battle and then Metronome chooses randomly between those moves. Devs usually do that cuz the processing power couldnt keep up with loading and randomly selecting from all moves everytime Metronome is used which could lead to lagging and possibly crashing. If this is the case then this is not a glitch but a program design
Hard to say because of the moves used was practically pre determined with same results that different users experienced. If it takes a pool of moves and the game chooses randomly between the ones selected then I believe we wouldn't have seen what we did during the tournament in that case. Such a mystery!
@@BigNation1If you’re all using the same server at the same time, then its possible that the chosen set of moves is chosen for that server and any user in it that uses Metronome will use a random move from that set.
Processing power has nothing to do with it; randomizer functions are not computationally demanding. BigNation was correct about this being an RNG seed issue. Emerald Version actually has something similar- the initial seed when booting up the game is always 0. This makes it particularly easy to perform RNG manipulation to get shiny/good IV Pokemon in that game. Most games will randomize the initial seed based on something like the exact time that the game was launched.
@@tokugawashigeshige8862Its not about the randomizing function. Its about loading the move list every time the metronome is used. Rather than loading the entire pokemon movelist every time, it loads from a smaller movelist so that the game runs quicker and smoother. They might’ve programmed it this way since this is online and the server has more functions to deal with.
@@primechamp7841I really don't think that's the case. The attack graphical effects are simple enough that the wii is more than capable of loading them off the disk on the fly as needed. And the game doesn't need to use a turnicated move list. The full move list for every attack in the game, plus their battle effects, would only take up a couple kilobytes of memory at most and is almost certainly always kept loaded into memory for quick indexing. You vastly overestimate how demanding it is to load things that aren't textures or models, or to keep them loaded in memory.
To my knowledge this is the first documented glitch for PBR regarding Metronome, enjoy! This is my final video of the year. Thank you for your continuous support!
Am I questioning why a pokemon battle revolution video popped into my feed? Yes. Am I now remembering my favorite 3 pokemon games (this, soul silver, and platinum) yes. Time to try and find a Nintendo wii and a copy of the game to play with my pokemon platinum on the Nintendo DSI
Now that’s gaming!
It's not so much a glitch as just a small oversight that only comes into play because of the extreme lack of variation in moves and teams. PBR just either uses the same starting rng seed on game boot, or sets the same starting rng seed at the start of vs matches, and then seeds all rng rolls off the previous rng roll. Either way, it really isn't an uncommon thing for most games to do.
PBR probably doesn't have much or any elements that roll rng in the menus, and players that were joining the tournament likely quickly mashed through the menus as fast as they could, and as a result a few of the tournament rounds started off with the rng seed on the same step. And since everyone only used the same exact move, it had the same exact outcome.
And the reason why the match rng would slowly diverge away from each other is because the pokemon doing their alternate idle animation is based off of rng, so how fast the players selected their moves ends up affecting the metronome rng.
If you decide to do another metronome tournament in the future and don't want this to happen again, you will just need to ask each player to do a single offline random battle before they join the tournament, or tell everyone that they need to randomly wait 30 seconds to a minute before they select their first attack in battle. That will guarantee that the rng seeds should diverge far enough that you don't see the same moves again.
Reminds me of early stages of SV competitive where someone discovered that Sheer Cold would always hit if used after Fake Out/Air Slash/Icy Wind 😂
Wait what there’s no way 😂😂
online battles were all in the same seed for a period.
Like the other guy said, it wasn’t about using a specific move first. It was that online battles always used the same rng seed so sheer cold would always connect on the second turn no matter what.
Thankfully they patched that after a few weeks, but the incompetence was jarring.
@@UncalibratedAimbotActually, it was both. Sheer Cold would always land on the second turn if Fake Out was used on the first.
RNG is best understood by the speed running scene. I think some games always start with the same seed, and certain player inputs inputs modify the RNG over time
Which is super interesting to think about when talking about the inputs that’s possibly effecting it too. Perhaps players just made it all the same as each other somehow without realizing?
@@BigNation1 It seems likely, the input windows are generous enough that speedrunners can force an RNG window and if you're doing a pure metronome battle they might be simple enough that people do the same. After all you'd just start the battle and the select the only move as fast as possible most of the time. As battles drag on the odds of different input timing increases and so it slowly diverges.
I don't know which inputs impact RNG and which don't so I can't suggest a test. But I think RNG in the mainline games is well documented (it changes from gen to gen and sometimes from game to game) so if you're interested I'm sure you could set up a test
@mnm1273 I guess any switches would affect it.
Fire Emblem (GBA) is always the same seed. You have to burn RN's to get random outcomes.
reminds me of the glitch in scar/vio launch that caused all online battles to use the same seed, meaning that correctly timed usage of a ohko move would always hit, etc etc
would be interesting to see if that's the case here as well. I wonder why this glitch was not found in the same amount of time it was in Gen 9? I don't think many official tournaments were hosted in PBR were they? Probably why it wasn't as well researched until now. (Man, I miss these stadium games...)
To be specific-- is the battle seed the same every time, or just the first game after booting up? Does this sequence of events change if you reboot the Wii? Whose Wii is used to determine the battle seed? Some can be answered easily, others may require digging into the code, but I think these answers can be found empirically and could shed some light onto how PBR handles random number generation.
I had no idea about the Gen 9 glitch, that’s interesting! Correct not much was played on PBR back in the days for official VGC tournaments. So the technical side of things weren’t dived into. Seed is new after every reboot of the game though who’s seed is used, not exactly too sure when it comes to online.
I've seen this type of thing before in some Gen 6 battles by maybe HoodlumCallum and the gang a good half decade ago. They got a few moves like 3-5 times in a single battle multiple times - more than enough to be statistically significant. Metronome should pick a move out of all the moves available, but it simply doesn't. Odd.
Were these being played on real consoles, and did those consoles have correct clocks? The current time is often used for random seeds. If the consoles' clock batteries had died, they might have been frozen at some default time.
Love that there's someone still passionate about PBR to this day. Keep the flame alive. ❤
Trying my best! 😁
@BigNation1 Got access to my Wii again. If there's any PBR event in the future, I'd love to join
Feel free to join the Discord, we currently have tournaments that go on monthly!
What I believe the issue to likely be is that the game only advances the rng seed when something random happens. This would mean that the metronome moves are not predetermined, but since the seed doesnt advance unless a random event occurs, the same outcomes happen. Most games advance rng at least once a frame to prevent this type of problem
Man this reminded me of something that happened ages ago in the gen 6 days, would do metronome battles with my friends and one of their mons had a bizzare affinity to roll imprison, which obviously just wins them the match since everyone had metronome
It is at best an "exploit", since it is "working as intended", and therefor not a "glitch".
What I like about this video is that it is basically saying "we've found something interesting, see? And would like more information about it if anyone can explain how this works".
I'd say go ask the speedrunning community since we know a lot about game seeds. They're usually connected to the in game timer, and therefore chosen at a specific time in the game. So if everyone is just mashing buttons trying to get their game to load as fast as possible, assuming everyone is running similar hardware, it should load at a similar speed, and therefore a similar time and end up on the same Seed each time. If only a small number of seeds are available then that increases the likelyhood that you'll get the same one over and over, or if it is randomized less frequently.
Sometimes game seeds can be connected to inputs, so if you use the exact same number of inputs each time you get the same seeds, but this is not likely the case here.
Seems that while a bit cumbersome, for future PBR tournaments you could make a rule that each player needs to do at least one offline battle before moving to the online mode. The differences in player inputs and game decisions should diverge the seeds far enough where battles are sufficiently random, but that might warrant some further investigation.
Really interesting to finally see someone document this. I used to do metronome battles with my friends waaayyy back in the day and we noticed this and would just start a new battle whenever it occurred. I didn't know this was such an unknown thing! There are a few other common strings too but this is the most noticable since it seems to happen somewhat frequently on the first battle after booting the game. Happy PBR battling!
Yeah it’s so strange, glad to hear this wasn’t just a one off issue that was discovered!
Cool glitch! Glad you documented it. But consider putting the thesaurus down and sticking to words you know well when writing a script.
That and run-on sentences; I had to rewind the first 15 seconds of the video over and over since my small brain was immediately bombarded by information.
Best move in the game!
Facts!!
fuck now im sad because you made me remember playing pokemon battle revolution so much as a kid getting to see my pokemon from platinum and soul silver come to life was so exciting
Such good times 😭
Does this only occur on emulators or also on real consoles? I wonder if the seed is based on variables like current time, MAC address etc.
I believe there were participants who were using consoles. So I doubt the platform effected what seed was generated tbh.
Nice touch with the TCGP music!
Thanks! Great OST in that game!
I think you guys should try and find more glitches and exploits in pbr, would be cool to see more
If there’s anything else we encounter then for sure!
that's not on the bulbapedia's page on metronome, it would be interesting to write on it
Technically this has nothing to do with Metronome, but with the PRNG.
@pi_xi Yeah but that's at least trivia worthy
I’m not sure what the prerequisite/requirements are to post on that site. 🤔
@BigNation1 technically it's a wiki, anyone can butt in and write. Well if you don't respect the guidelines, your addition might be reverted, so maybe go to the "talk:metronome" page to mention it
Hmm yes I would have reached out to a coder before making the video. You've discovered the glitch but I'd appreciate knowing more about whats going on behind the scenes or how to work the glitch in the user's favor. This video would be legendary if you uncovered how to abuse Metronome to call specific moves in say a normal HGSS playthough.
Everytime I try PBR, it tastes watery. What am I doing wrong??
Seems to be more complex than you think to have it potentially work in one’s favor since it’s all predetermined. Resources are scarce.
Man I missed PBR. Used to have a friend when I was way younger that had it before I got my own copy, all I'd do when I went over was play PBR with them either online/offline cuase of the silly formats (that damn spinning wheel, even if it has a method to the madness)
Neon Colosseums wheel is so aggravating if you don’t master the technique to get the pokemon you need haha
Very cool glitch I must say
i am also a PBR fanatic, love picking some up after work!
Now that’s a vibe 💪
Do the same moves happened in ds Battle or local battles ?
From what I gathered yeah because of the seed
Oh I have this game! I played it a lot as a kid but never noticed this!
The more you know!
Never knew about this glitch. It’s always nice that even though a game is old, it still has some interesting secrets hidden that are yet to be discovered.
That’s what makes the game so fun. Some things will always be hidden.
This title is questionable. ...
Well you’d have to ask someone to check the game’s coding but its possible that this game chooses a set number of moves at random at the start of the battle and then Metronome chooses randomly between those moves. Devs usually do that cuz the processing power couldnt keep up with loading and randomly selecting from all moves everytime Metronome is used which could lead to lagging and possibly crashing. If this is the case then this is not a glitch but a program design
Hard to say because of the moves used was practically pre determined with same results that different users experienced. If it takes a pool of moves and the game chooses randomly between the ones selected then I believe we wouldn't have seen what we did during the tournament in that case. Such a mystery!
@@BigNation1If you’re all using the same server at the same time, then its possible that the chosen set of moves is chosen for that server and any user in it that uses Metronome will use a random move from that set.
Processing power has nothing to do with it; randomizer functions are not computationally demanding. BigNation was correct about this being an RNG seed issue. Emerald Version actually has something similar- the initial seed when booting up the game is always 0. This makes it particularly easy to perform RNG manipulation to get shiny/good IV Pokemon in that game. Most games will randomize the initial seed based on something like the exact time that the game was launched.
@@tokugawashigeshige8862Its not about the randomizing function. Its about loading the move list every time the metronome is used. Rather than loading the entire pokemon movelist every time, it loads from a smaller movelist so that the game runs quicker and smoother. They might’ve programmed it this way since this is online and the server has more functions to deal with.
@@primechamp7841I really don't think that's the case. The attack graphical effects are simple enough that the wii is more than capable of loading them off the disk on the fly as needed.
And the game doesn't need to use a turnicated move list. The full move list for every attack in the game, plus their battle effects, would only take up a couple kilobytes of memory at most and is almost certainly always kept loaded into memory for quick indexing. You vastly overestimate how demanding it is to load things that aren't textures or models, or to keep them loaded in memory.