Pokémon ChampIons is already annoying competitive players enough with its weird bugs and limitations, but as folks are looking through all its menus and rules, it’s now been discovered that one of the more annoying things in the game is baked into its ruleset. If you’re having a bad match and don’t want to lose rank, you can avoid doing so by just timing out your opponent.
If you go to the’ “Gameplay Guides” section in Champions’ submenu, you can find several guides on how to navigate the game, as well as more granular information about the dos and don’ts of Pokémon battles. In the “Basic Battling Know-How” section, there’s a rundown of the game’s time limits. When you’re choosing an attack or deciding what Pokémon to send out, Champions will give you a reasonably short window in which to make a decision so you’re not just holding things up for the other player. On top of this, the match itself will have an overall time that, if it runs out for whatever reason, will result in the match being declared a draw in both casual and ranked play. It doesn’t matter who has more Pokémon in fighting order, nor who has done more damage; the entire thing is labeled a tie, neither player receives rewards, and no one will lose any rank.
In-game tips specify that if you run out of total time in a casual or ranked battle, the battle is now a draw?!!?!? pic.twitter.com/bkSF9cc6y7
— Leonard Craft III (@DaWoblefet) April 8, 2026
Stalling your opponent out is a common tactic in competitive games, especially in fighting games where a timed-out match still crowns a winner at the end based on who has done more damage to their opponent, which also means someone is declared a loser. Champions instead punishes no one for waiting out the timer, and you can be sure someone is going to make a stall-based team made up of Pokémon with high survivability and good recovery options whose purpose will be to make sure the match lasts longer. This rule seems primed for people to take advantage of it in order to maintain their rank and troll other players into wasting their time.
What an odd, unforced error. Time limits exist to keep a game from running forever, but if they’re going to be enforced as a way of calling a competitive match, you can’t just default to saying “no one wins” when you’re playing a turn-based game in which you spend a lot of time waiting for your opponent to make a move. Maybe it will get updated in a future patch, though the list of things Champions needs to address is getting longer by the minute.
