Following the disqualification of all four finalists in Korea’s biggest Pokémon tournament last week, Pokémon Korea (TPCK) has now permanently banned those Korean players from participating in its circuit.
The official ruling came today after the players all agreed to run Metronome-only teams in the final rounds of the 2023 Pokémon Trainers Cup, South Korea’s national championship, as a way to protest the structure of their circuit. Metronome is a Pokémon move that picks a random attack for the user, meaning the entire finals would have been based on randomness and luck rather than strategy.
After submitting their teams ahead of the finals, the four finalists were disqualified from the tournament and stripped of their day two invitations to the World Championships. And TPCK took further action today by banning the players from its circuit.
As Nash, one of the disqualified players, mentioned on Twitter, a couple of new reasons for their bans were added on top of the previous ruling by Pokémon Korea—the biggest being the use of hacked Pokémon. “Changing and adding reasons just now seems intentional,” he tweeted.
Hacked Pokémon or not, that wasn’t the point of their protest. Throughout the season, players from Asian regions have vocalized their frustrations about how their circuits work. Their qualification systems, for example, often come down to best-of-one matches rather than best-of-threes. But when bringing these issues up to The Pokémon Company (TPC), players have only been met with a combination of silence, disqualifications, and bans.
After news broke about the bans today, the VGC community showed their support for the Korean players.
As 2016 Pokémon world champion Wolfe Glick said, things could have played out differently if TPCK had listened to the points the players were trying to make. Instead, it’s coming off as TPCK punishing anyone who tries to speak up about making meaningful change.
Dot Esports has reached out to The Pokémon Company for comment.
