The lack of communication between Japan and the rest of the World

[Mekkah]

For what it is worth, the Japanese Players HATE the fact that they have to discard their supporter after play too. They wish that could be changed back to next to the active for the turn, then discarded at the end of turn.

They actually enforce the supporter discard really heavily here, which is really silly when you think about it. You'd think the rules on such a thing are geared towards making the game as easy to play as possible.

 

[ExoByte]

One of my main goals since I started here has been to eliminate the concept of "How it's played in Japan vs. How it's played in the rest of the world." Some of that has been through wording updates (now we have "this Pokémon" etc.), ruling tweaks, and finding weird things like this. Are we in a better spot now than when I started? I absolutely think so. Is there more room for improvement? Absolutely, I currently have quite a few things in motion for the future. I was certainly surprised when I heard the way Random Receiver was being ruled, although based on the previous (incorrect) Quick Ball ruling, it was following precedent. We got it fixed pretty quick once I heard about it (sadly not in time to save this Prize Penalty though).

 

[Kayle]

ExoByte, do you believe there is a way to entirely eliminate these communication issues, or do you think it's something that will always exist when cards are translated between languages and rulings are released based on individual translations? Do you think there might have been a reasonable way to prevent the Random Receiver ruling (confirming the decision with Japan, etc)?

 

[ShadowGuard]

Actually, in Pokémon something like this happens quite rarely.

I heard from some of the YGO people that even the judges didn't know the rulings at a major tournament because it's not just about Japan and the western world, but there were different rulings at every single previous tournaments.

Also, most of the card rulings at Pokémon are quite logical. There are a few exceptions (Dusknoir Lv.X and Machamp Lv.X, Magnezone Prime and Mismagius etc) but these are, as stated, exceptions. From all I heard, in YGO there isn't even a locigal guideline for approaching rulings.

 

[ExoByte]

ExoByte, do you believe there is a way to entirely eliminate these communication issues, or do you think it's something that will always exist when cards are translated between languages and rulings are released based on individual translations? Do you think there might have been a reasonable way to prevent the Random Receiver ruling (confirming the decision with Japan, etc)?

That's what I'm working on.

 

[Aron Figaro]

That's what I'm working on.

I'd love to see it - and I think you'll have a rather illustrious career if you can pull it off.

 

[PokePop]

If this is true, then what is your explanation for NA judges getting the Random Receiver issue wrong? I find it hard to believe that no one asked the question on the forums here. In fact: http://pokegym.net/forums/showthread.php?t=164288&highlight=random+receiver on May 14th.

Sorry, but what????

Have you read the English language Random Receiver?
It doesn't end in "shuffle your deck" now does it?
It ends in "Shuffle the other cards back into your deck."
Not the same thing, is it?

 

[K2theAblaM]

eh nevermind. 2short

 

[ChaosJim]

Aron Figaro, could you link to the website for "Guild"? I tried to find them online and couldn't. I wouldn't even know where to pursue this magazine based on my failed Google search.

As we improve our sync with Japan in the rules, I think it's really unfortunate that the last two sets haven't upheld that sync (only shiny Ray, Ether). Honestly, I'm looking forward to a simultaneous release. I don't understand why almost 15 years later we aren't noticeably closer to it.

 

[Yako]

Sorry, but what????

Have you read the English language Random Receiver?
It doesn't end in "shuffle your deck" now does it?
It ends in "Shuffle the other cards back into your deck."
Not the same thing, is it?

Actually, according to the rules, it is. The correct way to play Random Receiver, as Exobyte has stated in this topic, is to shuffle all the time, same as with Quick Ball which you guys also got wrong in the compendium. People come to you on this site asking ruling questions all the time, in topics that only you can reply to. When you make a wrong ruling, it affects a lot of people outside of Japan. What measures are you taking to avoid this? If you read ExoByte's post, he knew 100% that you had to shuffle your deck all the time for Random Receiver, and was surprised to see that it was being ruled the other way. He works for TPCi, which begs the question: Where do you get your answers from? If I'm not mistaken, PokeGym is responsible for the compendium. How many other errors are there in the compendium?

As a community, we look up to you and ask questions that could have potentially large repercussions. For example, the question of Mew EX using Drilbur's Hone Claws one turn and Registeel's 30x3 spread attack on the next. Can you imagine if someone brought a really strong deck based on that mechanic (you said that Mew EX using the Registeel attack would do 60x3 after Hone Claws) to Worlds and found out during his second turn of the first round that only the active takes 60 and the other 2 pokemon take 30? I have no clue whether you ruled that right or not, but do you see why it's important for you to be 100% sure when you post card rulings? Since so many people come here for rulings thinking that they are official (I know I did), you, as well as TPCi, have a responsibility to the players to minimize these mistakes. And every time you make one, it becomes harder to trust your rulings. Thankfully, in this case it really doesn't change much for the average player (except for that Japanese player who actually played the card right and got a prize penalty for it, and his opponent), but one day it might. You have to be aware of this.

 

[ChaosJim]

Yako, before you get reamed, realize what actually happened here.

Quick Ball wasn't translated as it should have been. A correct ruling based on the English text was made.
Random Receiver was translated similarly, the same ruling was applied.
At Worlds, the weakness in the translation became apparent, and it was fixed as best as possible. Unfortunately, there was damage.

Pokepop does many things, but he isn't fluent in Japanese (yet) and doesn't read over someone else's shoulder while they do the translations.

 

[Kayle]

^ That, and also, English rulings have to be made based on English translations of the cards. That is a consistency and feasibility issue. We can't ask Japan about every rulings question ever posted in ATRT just because a chance exists that we made a vague mistranslation that matters in SOME cases.

If the English card says "Shuffle the other cards back into your deck", we have to rule based on that sentence. We don't currently have the luxurious context of the Japanese translation.

Maybe that is a future solution consideration, but right now, we don't have it. No point in getting argumentative over something we don't have right now. Be suggestive instead!

P.S. If you're asking Pop whether he knows how important it is to get his rulings correct, I really get the impression that you haven't been here that long and/or don't know much about ATRT. Welcome.

 

[PokePop]

Actually, according to the rules, it is. The correct way to play Random Receiver, as Exobyte has stated in this topic, is to shuffle all the time, same as with Quick Ball which you guys also got wrong in the compendium. People come to you on this site asking ruling questions all the time, in topics that only you can reply to. When you make a wrong ruling, it affects a lot of people outside of Japan. What measures are you taking to avoid this? If you read ExoByte's post, he knew 100% that you had to shuffle your deck all the time for Random Receiver, and was surprised to see that it was being ruled the other way. He works for TPCi, which begs the question: Where do you get your answers from?

Yako: Let me be very, very clear here.

Every single ruling posted in the Compendium is signed off on and approved by Pokemon R&D.

Every.
single.
ruling.

Now, I'll post rulings in Ask the Rules Team without running them by Pokemon R&D when I have a certainty that my answer is correct. (not to say that I've never ever been wrong. I am human, after all)

But if I am not 99% sure, we won't post an answer even in there without running it by Pokemon R&D.
But, before we post ANYTHING in the Compendium, it has been reviewed and approved by Pokemon R&D.

You're looking for 100% accuracy with no errors ever?
That's our goal too.
But we recognize that it is a limit to approach as closely as possible. That it will never be absolutely attained.

I'm not sure how long you have been involved with Pokemon, but we have pushed the bar of obtaining consistency in game rulings for the players of this game a long way from where it was when the Compendium was first created from the logs of the old WotC customer support community chats.

 

[Yako]

I've been playing Pokemon TCG since May 2012. Yes, all of 6 months. I've been playing TCGs competitively since 2002, first with SWCCG, then with LotR TCG, and then with WoW TCG. I earned enough money between LotR TCG and WoW TCG that I came out ahead after factoring in card and travelling costs.

To be honest, I've never played a card game where the cards/rules' primary language was not English. I understand the issues involved with translating cards and making rulings based on the translated versions. That's the problem. Why is that what we are doing? Would it not be possible to have access to a Japanese person working for the card game over there who communicates decently in English to obtain rulings? Failing that, could we simply get more accurate card translations? Perhaps if a Japanese player who understood how the cards worked translated them, we would have less of these issues? I understand that no system is perfect. Using what we have to work with, we have to do the best we can. I'm not concerned with the past and how things have improved. I'm concerned with now and the future.

As far as the compendium goes, I have 1 issue with it. The very first meta-ruling on the list: Effects on the Attacking Pokemon cannot add to damage done to a Benched Pokemon. Examples: PlusPower, Darkness Energy (special), and Strength Charm. (Jan 31, 2008 PUI Rules Team). This is in direct contradiction with this: http://pokegym.net/forums/showthread.php?t=167591&highlight=hone+claws

Here's a note on the meta-rulings from the compendium:
Meta-Rulings are based on the underlying rules of the Game which cannot be bypassed by a card or card effect. All Meta-Rulings in the Compedium BW have been reviewed and approved by the TPCi Rules Team

Either that Meta-Ruling should not be a Meta-Ruling, or the Mew EX/Prime-Hone Claws-Spread Damage ruling is wrong. They can't both be right. The whole point of a meta-ruling is that there are no exceptions. Coincidentally (or not), all the cards listed in the example of cards that don't add to the damage dealt to a Benched Pokemon specify that they don't in their text, which leads me to believe that we don't really need the meta-ruling. After all, Hone Claw doesn't have that specification and it seems to increase damage to Benched Pokemon as well, as one would expect if the meta-ruling didn't exist.

I know there is no single person to blame for all this, I realize my previous posts made it seem like I was blaming PokePop. I'm not very tactful. Rather, there is an issue with the system. Consider the Japanese player who got that unfair prize penalty. What if it would have knocked him out of the LCQ? Let's look at the failings along the way.

1) Random Receiver was mistranslated
2) Questions were asked about Random Receiver on PokeGym, which is considered an official source for rulings, and were answered incorrectly
3) A judge at the World Championships ruled the issue incorrectly.
4) The Japanese player failed to appeal the judge's decision. Yes, he shares some of the blame too. I'm not saying you should always appeal a judge's decision, But in this case, it was an easy call.\

In light of this, what are the steps being taken to minimize such occurances? I've suggested some solutions in my post, however I don't work for PokeGym OR TPCi so I have no idea how feasible it is to incorporate them and what costs are involved, etc.

 

[ApachePrime]

1) Random Receiver was mistranslated
2) Questions were asked about Random Receiver on PokeGym, which is considered an official source for rulings, and were answered incorrectly.

Boom. Done. Once the card is mistranslated, there can only be rulings made in regards to it's official translation. The ruling was answered correctly, as the card was worded. It was then pointed out the card was worded differently in Japanese, and a new ruling was required for the new wording.

The onus of responsibility is not on the Compendium team in this case, but the localization team. Obviously, there is some interpretation to how Japanese cards are worded, and there's a good chance the sentence as translated was close, but had a different colloquial meaning. Either way, Pokepop/The Compendium Team made a ruling as they are required, and it was correct. In May when the question was asked, there was no indication that the Japanese wording was different.

 

[Yako]

Well then let's wave a magic wand and cast a translation spell!

How often can the localization team get the shuffle your deck sentence wrong though? Apparently it was wrong on Quick Ball, and it was wrong on Random Receiver. Don't THEY check with someone in Japan if they aren't sure? What else can they do to make sure this doesn't happen?

Since I've been playing for such a short amount of time, I know very little about the top Japanese players. How are their English skills? Would it be possible to ask them how cards work in Japan when we aren't sure?

 

[AyameHikaru]

Japanese students are required to learn English in middle/high school, I believe. However, I've been told by a friend in Japan that the average Japanese person isn't comfortable conversing in English unless they've been specifically trained for it, like a businessman. My guess (and it is a guess) would be that Japanese players hoping to get to worlds would be a little better at English than the average, but unfortunately I've never talked with any.

As far as the mistranslation goes, my guess is they just copied the template from Quick Ball. Wording on cards follows a certain pattern, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of master template that they adapt from as needed.

Honestly, I think it's a minor thing. The ONLY way I could see this being a major thing is if Pokedex was played, or maybe Musharna. Bottom line is, random is random. If your deck is sufficiently randomized, it shouldn't matter if you shuffle your deck again. Yes, a penalty was issued for something that was later fixed. But, if that penalty caused the error to get the spotlight and get fixed, wasn't it worth it? We're only human, after all.

 

[Otaku]

As far as the compendium goes, I have 1 issue with it.

...and you go on to cite a recent rulings controversy.

Six months. Not six years. Not 12 years. Not the entire run of the game.

Being new to the game does not invalidate your opinions, but it does require you educate yourself. I don't know you, but imagine you were doing something well, perhaps extremely well, for over a decade (work, a TCG, some other hobby, etc.).

Now a fairly new customer comes in and says you do a questionable job because of mistakes made by your boss, and poor communication between your boss's boss, and because your bosses decided to reverse a decision made over a decade ago. That's the rulings situation.

WotC, the company that previously held the license for Pokémon TCG card outside of Japan and handled everything for it, wasn't willing to pay enough to retain the license and rushed out the sets they still had the rights for. This was when the first "shuffle only the revealed" cards translation error may have arisen (I need confirmation on that, if anyone knows the Japanese text for Fast Ball).

This was nine years ago. They also made some incorrect rulings at this time that were reversed by under what became TPCi. WotC was known for trying to use Pokémon as "Magic Jr." and even cut the 15+ age bracket from organized play (not that they even gave us a lot of tournaments); this was undone later.

Just over five years ago, we got Quick Ball which had similar text, and similar rulings were made about revealed cards and shuffling the deck. Did we establish that the card didn't work that way in Japan? I know for Random Receiver it has been confirmed different? I ask because of the issue with modifying Bench damage.

Before I get to that, Random Receiver was released outside of Japan in May of 2012. That's this year, shortly before World Championships... so the ruling error based on older errors, including errors from those no longer involved in the game, was actually caught just a few months later.

As for the whole "adding to Bench damage" thing, the problem there is that the Compendium hasn't apparently been updated, plus the fact that this change in the rules still is a bit annoying. You could not increase damage done to the Bench with other effects in the Pokémon TCG since the first Bench-damaging cards debuted in... was it Fossil? That was the second expansion (third set) of the game in the U.S. and I could be wrong and just forgetting something from one of the two older sets.

It didn't change until a ruling on some obscure combo came into existence after the release of Black & White in April of 2011. I think we've had one other similar combo also contradict the ruling, but for all older cards, for now, it still seems to work this way. I think. Yes this is a mess... but it is sort of "the" mess with no older, similar issues.

As for the communication thing in general, translation is an odd thing, and transliteration often a "bad" thing (where words are translated "directly"). Japanese and English to not correlate directly to each other with sentence structure. So even if we have fully bilingual employees translating and testing cards, it is easy for situations like a Random Receiver hitting a Supporter right away to not register as issues.

Better communication would help with this, but it isn't like a bunch of English speaking (sometimes not even English speaking) players can directly communicate with the Japanese speaking staff that issues rulings... and since the ways the languages work are different, even dealing with bilingual representatives can cause oversights.

 

[ApachePrime]

The problem comes with a phrasing that normally doesn't need to be checked. It simply says "Shuffle", not shuffle your deck or shuffle the remaining cards. The translator went with the accepted use after revealing cards. This accepted use was not questioned the first time with Quick Ball, so they had no reason to question it now. The Japanese language uses a lot of context clues, some of which are subtle, almost to the point of invisibility.

 

[Aron Figaro]

Aron Figaro, could you link to the website for "Guild"? I tried to find them online and couldn't. I wouldn't even know where to pursue this magazine based on my failed Google search.

As we improve our sync with Japan in the rules, I think it's really unfortunate that the last two sets haven't upheld that sync (only shiny Ray, Ether). Honestly, I'm looking forward to a simultaneous release. I don't understand why almost 15 years later we aren't noticeably closer to it.

I'll see if I can. It's board and card game industry mag, and as of last year I'm pursuing other careers and it no longer shows up at my office in a robotics shop. I'm guessing the website would be through whoever the analysis firm is.