Dear Pokemon Unite Players, Stop Surrendering For No Reason
Pokemon Unite players surrendering halfway through a game is extremely annoying.
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Category : Pokemon
The more I play Pokemon Unite, the clearer it becomes that it’s one of my favourite games of 2021. That might not seem like a big deal at face value, but when I stop to consider my own personal preferences when it comes to video games, it shocks me with more oomph than a super-effective Thunderbolt from Zapdos. I know Unite doesn’t technically adhere to traditional type-effectiveness, but you know what I mean – I look like Ash Ketchum after his first lightning-infused cuddle from a particularly cheeky Pikachu.
There is one thing about Unite, however, that consistently makes me want to hockey my Switch off a wall and then my own head: Too many people surrender for literally no reason. The amount of times I have witnessed a failure to grasp simple mathematics leading to randomers I’m matched with thinking we are destined to lose when we are, in fact, winning is causing me to lose faith in humanity’s capacity for intellectual thought. The sheer volume of single-digit arithmetic blunders I’ve seen makes me wonder if people have fallen victim to Orwell’s Party – two plus two does not equal five, mate.
In some ways, I get it. If you’ve yet to destroy a single one of your enemy’s towers and they’re dunking 100-point scores outside your base after taking down Zapdos, you’re probably hundreds of points down and the last minute of the match is purely going to consist of you getting smashed up by sore winners. What I hate is when people start spamming surrender as soon as the option becomes available halfway through the match. With five minutes left, there’s still plenty of time for an upset – even if the leveling economy is firmly against you, you can farm, strategise, and group up to steal Zapdos, pulling off a comeback for the ages.
The weirdest thing about this is that I initially thought it was a problem endemic to lower competitive ranks. I saw it happen a lot in Expert tier and concluded it was probably an issue born from a lack of game sense – if you don’t know where you’re supposed to be for 8:50 bees, you probably don’t know how to keep proper track of where your team stands at the five-minute mark. To my shock and horror, it only gets worse the further you progress. I’m currently about five wins away from Master rank and most of my recent losses have come from premature surrenders where all four of my teammates decided to pack it in before even trying to turn the game around. It’s extremely infuriating.
Take a game I was in earlier on: I was jungling as Zeraora and the other team had one more tower intact than we did. As a brief aside, if you’re planning to jungle in Unite, please only do it if you know how – you don’t get to lock Greninja and go mid just because you hate playing Support. Anyway, by the time the first Drednaw appeared, I had two levels on the opposing jungler. Naturally, my team and I killed ‘naw and proceeded to steal our enemies’ bot farms, implementing a massive divide in the leveling economy. We lost a second tower within the next minute or so, meaning that the other team was leading 5-3 in terms of intact zones… But we had a massive level advantage, which is all that really matters once you get to the late game.
When Zapdos spawned at the eight-minute mark, I was confident we could kill it and blow up all the remaining zones before making a strong push on the enemy base. Unfortunately, a cheeky Cinderace stole the Legendary Bird with one of those annoying little flame rabonas – but remember, we had a drastic level advantage. I ulted and took out four enemies, while someone else on my team took care of the fifth. I had 50 orbs on me and I imagine the rest of my team all had either the same amount or close to it.
Because of the respawn timer extensions at the end of a match, these circumstances meant we had free rein to dunk 500 points between us. But no, the enemy had killed Zapdos. It didn’t matter that we reversed that. It didn’t matter that we were seconds away from certain victory. What mattered was that people saw the Zapdos notification start with “the opposing team” and started sulking. “Vote to surrender” appeared on my screen. Green, green, green, and green. We lost a winning match because people were too stubborn to actually think – too soreish a loser to even consider a win.
In my eyes, this kind of behaviour is stubborn, selfish, and a special kind of stupid. If you want to mess around with half-arsed matches where you surrender as soon as it’s time for a sulk, don’t play ranked. In standard games, you can leave as much as you like – it doesn’t have an impact on anybody but you. In competitive, however, there are people who are sincerely and emphatically that: competitive. They want to win and progress and work their way up the ladder to a higher calibre of play. It is extremely frustrating when all of that is impeded by a few people who decide to do a big wahwah because the enemy Charizard outplayed them. Pokemon Unite is a team game that can only be won by literal teams. If you’re only interested in yourself and how much foam spills out of your mouth in any given game, you’re never going to win – and neither is anyone who plays with you.
Pokemon Unite is already one of my games of the year, which is high praise when you consider how much I love The Forgotten City, Loop Hero, New Pokemon Snap, Persona 5 Strikers, Metroid Dread, Sable, and loads more. If you asked me back in January if I thought I’d care about a Pokemon MOBA, I’d have laughed and walked out of the room. Now, however, I can tell that Unite is excellent – the only thing setting it back is the people who ruin it for everyone else.
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