Quoted By:
I'd say the worst thing about Smogon (and Pokemon Showdown) is the community. Pokemon is popular with a younger audience so a lot of the mods and players are immature, power tripping 16 year olds. The elitism of some of the better players who think they're gods because they can predict an obvious play is pretty bad.
Something people seem to forget is that Smogon is also pretty different from other competitive game communities. For starters, Pokemon is an absolutely terrible game to play competitively because good competitive games put a lot of emphasis on skill and very little or none on RNG so that the better player should win. Despite Pokemon's heavy RNG, it is a popular game and Smogon appeared to try to minimize RNG for 6v6 singles.
Another difference is that many other competitive games centralize around a couple strategies/moves/setups that are considered to be the best. These strategies might get boring but it doesn't matter because they get wins. Smogon actually tries to avoid this by making tiers so that mediocre Pokemon that may not be any use against the top Pokemon can compete in lower tiers (kind of a shame lower tiers aren't very popular). People complain about seeing the same Pokemon on every team but there are like 40 something OU Pokemon and dozens from lower tiers with a useful niche in OU. That's actually a lot of choice before a battle begins compared to something like a fighting game with 20 characters where only a few are the best.
Basically Smogon has good intentions of trying to balance 6v6 singles and make it more skill, less RNG but fail because 1. Pokemon is an awful game with way too much RNG to ever be a good competitive game and 2. The attitude and mentality of the community is horrible
