How sure can we be with using Showdown as sources?

Question

Many people (including myself) consider Pokemon Showdown as valid sources. I'm not saying it's flawed, it's a very accurate battle simulator but even Showdown has glitches right? What if these 'features' we confirm on Showdown are actually glitches or placeholders not found in the actual games? How do we know which parts are in the game or not, since of course, Showdown isn't an official website. I'm not hating, Showdown is the only way I can competetively battle, but i'm worried for when they are used as sources.

Comments

Showdown has admins working all the time to fix glitches. You'd be surprised at how rare significant glitches actually are. Also I'm pretty sure that every interaction between moves, pokemon, abilities and items are almost exact simulations of what happens. When a new game is released masses of smogoners go into researching game these sorts of things, meaning there are hundreds of combined testing hours into showdown per game.

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That's all I needed to hear

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Can I post that as an answer then or do you want something more substantial?

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I could use something  more substantial.

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...and you could've answered that :P

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If you're happy with that I can change it into an answer :p

Answer 1

Essentially what Prof said is correct. Because the PS staff don't have access to the game codes they require a huge amount of research in-game to accurately simulate battles. This is done in collaboration with Smogon, which has an enormous collective of users who research the game and is followed up by the PS staff coding the servers to simulate correctly. Things such as EVs, damage calculator, stats, are all accurately simulated, but there are some things that are more difficult to code properly.

As PS is officially based off of smogon, here are some smogon forum quotes which explain PS. While they don't explicit state anything about the research (as that is in a separate forum) you can read that it is

"designed to simulate the conditions of WiFi Pokemon games in a more stable environment" (1)

and

"Smogon is the most comprehensive and accurate online resource for competitive Pokemon battling" (2)

1. Introduction and Background
2. Tiering

Comments

Mr. K  :O (filler)