Has Smogon been a net good in the Pokemon Community?

You should be complaining that monotype only allows you to use Pokemon that share one type!!!! Technically everything can be banned!

I don't know what Smogon does, do they have any influence on the actual game or it's just for 'fun'?

>acupressure gives a random stat a two-stage boost
why is that better than nasty plot or rock polish? Or are those banned too?

>why is that better than nasty plot or rock polish?
because it can boost evasion

Snipsbros...

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Smogon is gay lol gottem

Smogon has outlived it's usefulness, it used to be a good site to learn Pokemon and had good house rules for playing against other people but now that competitive play is easily accessible and Smogon is becoming increasingly divorced from the actual game it's creating a schism in the community.

Smogon is probably the only thing keeping competitive alive after the dexcut, forced paywalls, and GF's lack of interest in keeping their games compatible between each other.
Although whether that's a good thing given the bloated and archaic battle system from the fucking Game Boy era is debatable.

this, the fanfic meta joke used to be that, a joke, now it has strayed so far from the actual games, it actually is a fanfic meta now

>Back in gen 4 Smogon had a mission statement on their website that basically said something to the effect of "We try to keep out game as close to the cart as possible because we want to play pokemon, not smogonmon. We aren't going to fix bugs or rebalance things, and we're going to try to keep the rules as simple as possible so you could have a smogon battle with someone who didn't know about us just by telling them a handful of rules like 'no cover legendaries, no evasion, no OHKO moves, no two of the same pokemon, no putting two pokemon to sleep'."

>Somewhere along the way they fell away from that mentality, possibly because the advent of smart phones meant everyone could now look up smogon rules, so they could have increasingly complex bans. The point is, though, that smogon isn't "as close to the cart as possible" anymore. The biggest point is that the cart is balanced around doubles now. There are a lot of broken strategies and Pokemon in singles that, in doubles, are fine.

>Trying to force singles using increasingly complex and contrived bans will only make their community more insular and repelling to newcomers. Who, getting into competitive Pokemon, is going to go to Smogon and try to learn their system, when the rules for doubles are already built into the game in the Battle Stadium?

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This, it used to be a lot of fun but it feels like they would reather try to artificially balance something to an oppressive degree rather than let a non-competitive game be non-competitive.

>The "somewhere" you're referring to is the Gen 4 Garchomp ban. Prior to that, the only subjective ban they'd ever made was Wobbuffet, which was largely uncontroversial.

>Garchomp was the turning point where they had to start considering additional bans to make their format viable. SD/Yache Chomp was so good that it was guaranteed at least 1, if not 2 KO's per match, and every match essentially boiled down to which player's Garchomp put it in the most work. This was still a controversial ban however, as it was totally outside the ethos that you mentioned in your post, and there was a legitimate argument to be made that Garchomp was still just a tool, and even if he was the best tool in the game then so what, both players can use him so its not "unfair". Even when the first ever Suspect Test confirmed that a Chomp-less metagame was way more fun, variable and decentralised, it still wasn't a slam-dunk verdict because the game they were playing was no longer "Pokemon" and people were worried about setting that precedent.

>Although I agree with the Chomp ban itself, people were right to be worried, as it opened the floodgates for subjective decision making based on what people like to play, under the guise of creating a "healthy metagame" aka a metagame entirely pandering to the whims of its top players / smogon admins. Watching them continually walk back on their own philosophies over the years (ie. how "no complex bans" got thrown by the wayside as soon as a dominant playstyle emerged that people didn't like) has been truly hilarious, and seeing the site's rulemaking devolve to the point of "we ran a secret poll in a hidden forum and everyone agreed we should ban this thing that has been in the game since Gen 2 and never caused a problem" is just the icing on the shit cake that is modern-day Smogon.

>Play VGC instead.

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