Pokémon Scarlet and Violet players are sick of bots and griefers ruining online battles

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet players are growing increasingly frustrated with repeated instances of griefing, and the fact that these players are not being banned by the developer is only making things worse.

In a Reddit thread from Oct. 24, one player shared several screenshots of the same user ruining online battles by never selecting their team, leaving others to wait indefinitely in the lobby or until someone leaves.

When a player doesn’t select their team, players have no other option but to leave the battle before it even begins. This isn’t the first time the culprit has been named, as a thread on Oct. 1 criticized them for the behavior too.

“Why hasn’t this ‘PokeSVSucks’ bot been banned yet?” reads the title of another thread created earlier today, on Oct. 25.

Players have been speculating that this name and profile picture is actually used by multiple accounts to ruin the game experience for others because many of them reported experiencing the same thing.

It’s unlikely a single person would be able to ruin the games of that many users with only one account, or simply by themselves, even by using several of them simultaneously.

“They’re bots. Also, there’s about a thousand or so of these things so expect to run into those a lot,” wrote one top-voted comment in the thread.

Users wrote they were baffled to see that a Pokémon Scarlet and Violet user would go out of their way to create a bot whose sole purpose is to ruin the online battles of others. When a player leaves, the lobby will be dissolved and the battle won’t happen, so it’s not like the user would gain ranked points by doing this.

Players also showed frustration over the developer not banning those accounts. If there are indeed multiple accounts doing this though, they might actually be getting banned and players may not notice.

“I wish there was a block button,” read a comment. Other fans suggested the developer add an ignore list so that they can curb the issue themselves while waiting for a more global solution.

The developer has a zero-tolerance policy for players who alter data files of the game to get an unfair advantage in online battles, by strengthening their Pokémon, for example.

Griefing might be trickier to detect and prove, however, especially when they are just sitting in lobbies doing nothing. It’s still unclear what the developer is working on regarding this matter at the time of writing.