First off, Bochum has been a major breakthrough for me and left me with a lot of new friends who I learned to rely on. I was able to prove myself big time and earned quite a bit of opportunities thanks to this.
Leading up to the Event
In October 2019, about 3 months before the event, I was contacted by the VGC Lead for Bochum, Baris, asking me to apply for Bochum Regional Champtionships.
At this point, we basically knew nothing about how the event was going to be run except that it was going to be the first big tournament in the world that would use the new game Pokémon SwSh on the Switch, which also would debut as a tournament console for TPCI.
The Challenges
Being the Nintendo 3DS’ successor, the switch had some real big shoes to fill. Not only did it not have the trusty infrared port, it was also notorious for having a relatively weak wireless function that would disconnect easily when there’d be 10+ switches close to each other. When Baris contacted me, the new Pokémon game wasnt released either, so we knew that we’d have to plan the event agile and flexible.
After the games were released in November, the built in LAN mode immediately piqued my interest. I was sure that GameFreak wouldn’t add this feature without a real intent to make use of it and for me it made perfect sense as well.
Furthermore, thanks to the myriad of Pokkén Tournament events I’ve run prior to this, I was basically an expert at working with LAN-mode switches, since thats the only tournament appropriate configuration for Pokkén.
I was aware though, that running tournaments in LAN mode would also come with a good number of problems.
The Specifics
The Switch has only a single USB-C port undocked, which is usually intended to charge the console, it also doesn’t have a LAN socket, not even if the console was docked, so you’d have to use a USB adapter in one of the USB ports.
But at the same time if you connect a USB-C to A bridge to an undocked switch and use a LAN adapter to connect to another console, the console will be connected in LAN but unable to charge power, which of course is unacceptable for a VGC tournament setting.
So assuming the console would run docked during the event was the only logical conclusion but that would lead to even more problems.
The Costs
Who would provide the neccessary equipment for LAN mode? The players? The organizer?
The setup was shaping up to amount to a considerable price per setup and it was still unclear whether we would use the original docks with montitors, which would cost so much more, or maybe even a different solution.
One thing was clear though, and I learned this with Pokkén already. Whatever the solution was, it wouldn’t come cheap.
The LAN mode itself
Unfortunately because of the way networks work, switches in LAN mode can’t just automatically connect to each other but need thier network setting set manually instead.
Setting up LAN mode for Pokkén events was easy though. You’d just pair two consoles and set them to a unique IP and generic network setting so they’d connect to each other. Then they stay with each other for the entire event.
For VGC this wouldn’t be as easy. First off the matching consoles wouldn’t be static, since everyone brings their own console and fights a different opponent each round.
This was a major concern that we needed to solve. We needed to come up with a way to set up network settings on hundreds of switches. My initial idea was to give each player a unique IP according to their round 1 table number, but refined that idea after realizing that players would need their network settings set even before round 1 pairing were posted. Eventually we came up with a concept that before the event, every player has to set a unique IP that would originate from their player-ID. We knew we had to communicate this unmistakably and clearly even to the not tech versed players.
The Tournament Mode
On the event that I held at Pokémon SwSh’s release, I learned that the tournament mode and thereby box locking requires all players to download tournament rules and details unique to that event from a host console. This process took about a full minute per console and the host console could only distribute rules to one console at a time.
For small events this wouldn’t be an issue, but we had to prepare for hundreds of players else this would majorly bottleneck our time. The fact that you had to connect to a host console via LAN in this circumstance was also the reason why we needed to have LAN mode set up before round 1 parirings were posted.