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My problem with smogon is not that they have a soft tier system or illogical bans. What I dislike about smogon is that they consider themselves the elite of the battling community, when in actuality they simply are not.
As you are aware, winning a pokemon battle requires you to predict your opponents moves, and to stay one step ahead of them to gain an advantage, which you must then try to push into increasing advantage. The problem here is that smogon actually dumbs down battling by creating a meta focused on a few pokemon in the tier.
Let's look at OU, where roughly 3 dozen pokemon hold together the core of the metagame. Now, lets say that of those 3 dozen, there are currently 5 that are seen in particularly high regard at the moment. Since this is pokemon, all of those 5 pokemon have some sort of weakness that must be covered to create a successfull team. From that, we can extrapolate 2-3 likely teamates (which will likely include another member from our favored 5, mind you) to complement that pokemon. After a little bit of thinking, you now know with startling accuracy what pokemon your opponents will be running in most cases.
Now, knowing what pokemon you are likely to encounter wouldnt be inherently bad, right? That would be the case if those pokemon didnt run identical or near identical movesets. So now you what youre fighting, and what they will be doing.
But lets say that you arent *gasp* using cookie cutter team #7. Now you know exactly what your opponent will do, and he has no idea what you will do. Congratulations, youve just beaten the entire metagame.
This is why I dislike smogon rules, because it simply fails as a competetive format if you disregard their dogma. It doesnt make people great trainers, all that it does is create a fun place for people to battle so long as they arent wise enough to look beyond the curtain. That isnt a healthy format, its a training ground.
TL;DR?: Smogon is flawed as a competitive format because of its dogma.
