After a month of playing Pokemon Unite, I’m finally ready to admit it: I hate Cinderace. Well, maybe I don’t hate it – when our own Stacey Henley argued it was one of the best starter evos of all time, I mostly agreed with her. Cinderace is cool!
Allow me to rephrase: Pokemon Unite has made me hate Cinderace because of how incessantly infuriating it is to come up against someone who rabonas Zapdos with roguish fireballs from ten metres away and goes on to dunk 100 points in four seconds flat. What’s more, this person is actually on your team. Hooray! We win. Except it wasn’t fun because, actually, Cinderace players are fiendishly selfish. Please entertain me for a moment, I’ve had a rough morning in Unite Stadium.
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I play a lot of different ‘mons in Pokemon Unite, although I’d say Absol is probably my favourite. As a speedster, Absol’s job is to farm mid and level up as quickly as possible, at which point it becomes Unite’s equivalent of a typical MOBA jungler. When I am allowed to do this, I tend to play quite well. I’ve embedded a clip of me playing Absol below – not to brag, but I scored 257 points and got 27 solo kills. This is the only Unite character I am genuinely good at.
Last night, at around 1am – yes, I regularly stay up too late playing Unite because I have zero control over my own actions – I was matched with what I thought was a decent team. We had a Wigglytuff, which was nice. Snorlax was nerfed a while back, but hey, at least we got a defender. And we had a Charizard – I’d have preferred Machamp or Lucario, but I wasn’t going to complain. I locked Absol and the fifth player rolled out as Scorbunny, which, like… hey, we needed an attacker, right? Wrong. Despite having excellent team synergy, this lone wolf made sure we lost the game in the most spectacular fashion possible. Honestly, there was a point in time where I reckoned they were being paid off by the opposition, although I soon learned that they were, in fact, just stupid.
Cinderace players have the most magnificent sense of sheer, unbridled, misguided self-confidence. Not all Cinderace players, obviously – I know a few people who main Gen 8’s fiery rabbit and do a great job with it. The issue is they all want to be the star player, the MVP, the Pelé or Maradona of the burgeoning Unite scene. As always, I made my way into the jungle and started farming mid – Absol can hit either top or bottom lane at level five with Pursuit before the enemy team even hit level four. This means you can clear a lane single-handedly, drop at least 30 points, and steal the enemy minions in that lane to ensure the leveling economy remains in your favour. I like doing this in bot because it means we’ve got a level advantage when it comes to Drednaw, which, obviously, widens the level gap even further. You basically win the match in the first three minutes – even if they steal Zapdos, how are they getting past a level 15 Absol with Pursuit+ and a level 20 Scope Lens? Answer: they are not.
I’m not trying to be like, “Oh, I’m great at Pokemon Unite.” I play at Veteran tier right now, so I am arguably decent, and Absol is my best character. What I mean is, I and almost everyone I have played with understand how this game works. Cinderace players, for the most part, do not. Consider the example I gave above: last night, a Scorbunny came into mid with me (why?), didn’t attack Bouffalant or Ludicolo (okay…), and sneakily landed the last hit on both of them (WTF???). This means it got the experience for landing the final blow while I got the experience for dealing initial damage, meaning both of us left the jungle at level three and the other team’s Talonflame – at a respectable level five – steamrolled us. Why, Scorbunny? Why did you say “I’m going to the top lane” prior to the match, only to instantly become overcome with greed and a chaotic urge to doom us?
It’s always Cinderace players, too. It’s fast, hits like a truck, and scores well – there’s a reason so many good Cinderace mains get MVP. The problem is that for every good Cinderace player, there are 100 woeful ones. I think the same logic applies to Zeraora, Greninja, Charizard, and Pikachu – you know, the hard-hitting kill-hoarders who have the capacity to top the scoreboard, but only if you’re, you know, actually good.
I know this is a bit ranty and long-winded, but I asked you to entertain me at the beginning of this piece. Pokemon Unite clearly needs a ban system a la League of Legends. Prior to the match, each team is allowed to ban certain characters – if you choose to ban Cinderace, nobody can play it for that match. Bye bye, Cinderace. Sure, the Cinderace player is almost certainly going to lock Zeraora and refuse to change… but at least Zeraora actually belongs in mid. If that’s the case, I’ll gladly go off Absol and lane. We have a jungler, we don’t need two. I’m not that selfish – the problem is so many people are.
I mean, in an ideal world, the players themselves would be banned for refusing to play as a team. I wrote about how Pokemon Unite has a serious idling problem not so long ago – funny enough, as soon as the other team got Zapdos, the Cinderace I’ve spent the last 30 minutes writing about just sat in the spawn. We only lost by 30 points in the end, so if we even managed to score 16 points over the course of a minute and a half – remember, dunks are worth double in the final two minutes of a match – we could have won. Nah. Cinderace is fed up because it can’t bask in the glory of being the match’s Zapdos killer. Spam surrender, stay in spawn, consign your team to an inevitable loss.
Ban it, I say. Ban them all. Pokemon Unite needs a proper ban system, if only to make sure Galar’s top striker spends more time on the bench.
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