>>56895473VGC took off. To this day both VGC and Smog players refer to their formats as "competitive" Pokemon but only one of them has any actual right to it, officially speaking.
Plus, Smogon's fanfic rules initially seemed like reasonable elaborations of official ones but became unbearably nonsensical and warped around gen 7. Gen 8 omgon doesn't even allow the core focus feature of the gen to be used. And even with nearly-instant turns, Smogon games can and often do go longer than VGC matches with elaborate terastal animations and attacks enabled. No wonder people moved on.
