Enjoying all those new Pokemon Unite “bring a friend to ranked” quests? Well, you may want to be careful. There are now multiple reports across social media and Discord of a nasty exploit or bug that allows the losing side of a match to somehow win, mostly at Masters level of play. Many of the reports note that the alleged exploiting players frequently wander the map avoiding battles. While the battle looks one-sided and the game broadcasts that the dominant team wins, the final results screen will show the losing side as the winner, complete with loss penalties for the innocent team.
At the very least, it seems like there might be some synchronization issues at play. This could explain some of the reports, such as that from a player who saw a wanderer whose teammate showed his side of the results screen. As the game includes both Nintendo Switch and mobile users, and it comes on the heels of fixing two other major bugs, TiMi Studio Group seems to have their work cut out for them. Competitive players may wish to wait until the company issues a patch or we learn more about the nature of the exploit or the bug, whichever it turns out to be. As always, we’ll update this post should we learn more. 9/30: And we have an update!
We are aware of an issue where some players with unstable internet connections are being moved to matches with AI opponents. The original lobby results are shown, regardless of the AI match results.
We are currently investigating this issue. Thank you for your patience.
— Pokémon UNITE (@PokemonUnite) September 30, 2021
Apparently, the issue has to do with people who have unstable connections being moved to matches with AI, though it doesn’t explain the reports of loss of rank. Should we find any evidence that these players were perhaps mistaken, we’ll update the article, but for now, this may just be a visual, client-side bug.
