Thursday, December 5, 2013

Pokemon Battles: Why Smogon is Stupid

I get it, yes I do, you like the little offbeat challenged like all level one, all underused, etc. But for open matches, arbitrary restrictions on a ton of things is simply not of interest to the vast majority of the players. Let's catch up to the modern age already.

Originally the game system for Pokemon was broken, for lack of a better descriptive, when applied to competitive gaming. What do you expect? There was no wifi, there was barely a functional internet, and you were limited to about 10 feet from any possible opponent. Competitive play was simply a possibility .... for the future.

Fast forward ahead, we are finally here, in the future, when players from around the globe can finally battle in epic tournaments. Did you think Game Freak was just sitting around twiddling their thumbs this whole time as well? No, they tweaked, tested, and made changes to the battle system, correcting errors and filling in holes. They were balancing it out for competitive play. Is it perfect? Well, not yet, but it is actually balanced.

Let's take the big restriction I hear so much about, the sleep restriction. Yeah, can you believe Smogon players are so bad at the game, they have no idea or viable tactic to counter sleep? There's an ability, it's pretty common, insomnia. Why don't you have one of the pokemon with insomnia? Oh, that's right, because they can't do a ton of damage to the opponent. Well duh, that's what balances it.

Those who depend on non-damaging tactics like sleep are not powerful pokemon, they're all pretty easy to knock out with the right strike. Every time they are considering a pokemon, the only thing they ever look at are how high the stats are. This is because all they are playing is a brawl battle, no strategy, no tactics, no underhanded plays. Just a plain, straight up, who can do as much damage as everyone else.

Which is not bad, it's actually perfectly okay, and not my gripe. What is my gripe is how stupid these people are, how extremely shortsighted and naive they are. To make the claim that "pokemon is just broken in competitive play" is truly outdated, much worse, to assume that an elite few are better at making that call than the creators of the actual game is arrogant. It would be the same as a human saying that honey from bees is made wrong.

Another good example is the evasion boosting, double team being the most common move. Use it on a heavy hitter and it's a waste of a turn, and move slot. With all the combinations of types, not to mention double type pokemon, you need those heavy hitters to have as many different move types as possible, and keep at least one of each STAB available.

Then your status inflicters are the ones you need double team on, so they have a chance to do something. Good status inflicting pokemon are all low in stats, most cannot take a hit, few can do any damage, their role is to disrupt the tanks, walls, and stallers. How can they do that job, if they are knocked out by a single blow from one of them? Double team becomes the balancing move, you have an escape hatch, a reason to use a variety of pokemon.

Another thing about Smogon fans, they don't use bugs. Bug pokemon are awesome, most of them are have move pools that can frustrate any opponent, force them to think outside the box. But most bugs are easy to knock out, which is fine considering what they can do for your team. Poison, sleep, stun, draining, everything in on kind of pokemon. But their stats are lower than most of the others, of course, they'd be capable of sweeping if they had a total of 600 like the dragons.

There it is, the one thing that Game Freak really needed to fix, the most broken thing in the series, the dragon. Dragons are so cool looking, I love them, but their typing was broken in the game for so long, and they were never really that rare. The thing is, it's not because of their abilities that they were broken, it's because of their stat totals. With ice and themselves as the only real threats, players suddenly had teams of nothing but dragons, which was possible and still never have any of the same pokemon.

But instead of offering some arbitrary ban, Game Freak put their heads together and decided that their new type, the fairy, will be the bane of dragons. Fairy are not just the bane of dragons, they are the bane of almost all tanks. A team of fairies and bugs, with mostly status moves, can wreck a team of dragons, as long as you don't follow arbitrary rules formulated by a popular opinion of some few elite jerks who think they're the best of the world at something.

So I put out this challenge, all you snooty Smogon fools, battle players who don't follow your idiotic rules, while still following your own idiotic rules. If you can defeat all of us, without ever losing, then you can claim to be something. Until then, you are just too weak and too stupid to play real Pokemon.

6 comments:

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  2. I corrected the errors. My bad.
    Finally! I found someone I can agree with. I've recently been trying to get my opinions out there, but, and I expected this, defenders of Smogon's Rules always rebuttal against me and try to make me sound like I don't know what I'm talking about. The first time I said something, I said that Smogon's rules are hypocritical. For my example, I said that it's okay to Paraflinch with Togekiss, but not okay to use Double Team. A person replied saying that paraflinch is restricted to two pokemon (there's actually four that I know of) and that there are checks to them, where as Double Team can be learned by almost any pokemon. This person also said that Double Team reduces the battle to flipping a coin and that Smogon's rules try to create a balanced and non-luck based metagame for "skilled" trainers.

    Today, I called out the MegaKhan ban. This conversation stemmed from something else but started out when I said, "I am well aware that Smogon players were incapable of dealing with MegaKhan and banned it." A little rude on my part, but I was mad. He replied with a Smogon link that explained why Smogon felt MKhan was broken. They basically said that it's so strong physically and defensively due to the boost in stats, good move pool, and ability that it's impossible to take it out normally. So like you can't revenge kill it because it get's Sucker Punch. It breaks through Focus Sashes/Sturdy/Sub. It 2HKOs even the bulkiest of walls. Crippling isn't really that effective. Basically, they were saying it's near impossible to kill. I don't have any problem with this thing. Ever. I'll admit that it is a little on the Uber side, but I'll still take it on any day. I'll say this: Will-o-wisp and a physical wall (especially one with Intimidate) holding the Rocky Helmet will go a long way. Actually, having those on my team has helped me out in a number of different situations. Anyway, I'm glad to have found at least one person who agrees with me. I really liked what you had to say about how the game is balanced, and that there's more to the game then just pure power.

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  3. To begin with, the sleep clause is fine as is. Essentialy, it prevents any decently fast/hella fast pokemon with access to a sleep-inducing move, such as gengar, alakazam, darkrai, and breloom, from shutting down a whole team and then setting up at leisure. You say it can be countered easily by insomnia which is "pretty common". To be honest, that isn't the case at all, very few pokemon ACTUALLY WORTH USING (honchkrow, Ariados, Eviolite murkrow) have access to Insomnia, and two out of these three have better abilities in moxie and prankster. Sure, there's also vital spirit, which has gone unmentioned, but it's not like they're better off either, seeing the best users are rather average themselves, the only notable ones being Magmortar, Electivire, and primeape. You also have left out the commonly carried Mold breaker ability, used on beasts like Haxorus, mega Gyarados and Excadrill to name a few.
    Smogon fans don't use bugs? What? It seems you haven't played enough OU to say that, because Smogon fans use the hell out of Scizor, forretress, Galvantula, Scolipede, Pinsir, Heracross, etc. Scizor was actually no.1 in usage at many points of DPP and BW.
    Double team tho. On the contrary, double team becomes painful when run on
    bulky pokemon such as skarmory and blissey. Granted, it's a waste of a turn, but these pokemon are so bulky there probably isn't much that can OHKO them. Status inflicters such as whimsicott and sableye don't need them, they can abuse their ability to shoot off priority status moves like leech seed and WoW. Most heavy hitters don't run evasion boosting moves, infact, they run sand veil in conjunction to Sandstorm induced by Hippowdon/Ttar, which, when used with brightpowder, can essentialy give you a semi-invincible fairly fast heavy hitter, such as garchomp. To be honest I've never really played VGC, and correct me if I'm wrong, but nintendo themselves have placed restrictions on the usage of evasion moves in some tourneys.
    I also dislike how you have generalised the entire smogon community as snooty, idiotic, stupid and elitist. Most of the people I know are rather nice, it probably seems you have met up with a rather bad side of the internet lol.
    You're allowed to have an opinion, and that's fine. However, there are a few points in this article where I am inclined to believe you haven't played enough of Smogon competitive battling to comment so, yet this is what I feel, and I may be wrong.
    Lastly, if you don't like smogon's bans and stuff, DON'T PLAY IT. These rules are not enforced in any way unless you choose to play on an online simulator like PS or PO. Otherwise, there really is no reason to have a problem with smogon's rules. These rules are just generally accepted by the community, and if they call you a noob for using non-mega charizard or Mega Momma, it's not smogon's fault, it's just the fault of the pokemon community.
    Either way, this is my opinion ^~^ Sorry if I missed out anything.

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    2. Oh, I forgot to mention, Permanent sandstorm does not exist anymore, nerfing sand veil/sand force users. Excadrill is unbanned and I use it a lot these days. Sand veil is probably going to get a suspect test in the near future.
      Also, please forgive me if I have gotten any facts wrong, I'm relatively new to competitive battling .-.

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