>>19684185For a very long time Nintendo and GameFreak didn't really give a shit about competitive battling scene, so people had to create their own rules when they wanted to battle. Smogon was an attempt to produce one standardised ruleset for everyone in their own community. Because there weren't really any competitors available, people not affiliated with their site also started following their rules.
Then when GF/Nintendo finally started taking care of the competitive scene, they decided to use Doubles as the base format for all official competitions. Needless to say, people who were already used to playing by smogon rules didn't like it, so the site still exists to this day.
