>>26642735>>26642805I started Pokemon with RBY. I'm 30 years old now. Netbattle was my first foray into internet Pokemon battling. I was a member of Smogon for years, and was a part of their "back room" during gen 4 and tried to help shape their rules and policies.
I can say without a doubt that I reject Smogon now as a waste of time.
Back in gen 4, they began to see that the old way the game somewhat balanced itself in gen 1, 2, and especially 3 (not perfect, but stable with minimal bans) no longer was working. Namely, stall no longer seemed to work like it used to, due to the physical/special split.
The anointed ones and the elites got together and tried to break Pokemon battles down to thier philosophical core. Efforts were made to try and find objective criteria for making bans, item policy, and what OU "should" look like, while staying truer to the source game than they had been up until that point. Pages and pages of essays were written and the whole thing was toiled over for months... and do you know what they discovered?
Nothing. The only semblance of objectivity would be to just copy whatever rules Gamefreak or Nintendo had in the various games, and they couldn't stomach that! So they admitted openly the only logical alternative: they would do whatever they wanted until OU looked like THEY wanted, stopping short of a full "secret club" dictatorship in order to implement "suspect tests" and voting (with requirements).
By the time the leaders of Smogon were getting tired of the tedious fairness of democracy, and had begun making endless voting rule changes to speed things up and get the results they wanted, gen 5 was underway and I gave up on them.
Now we have wifi battling of strangers on 3DS, ranked and unranked, in multiple flavors like Singles or Doubles. Now hatching 5IV Pokemon and getting them EV trained and to level 50 takes only a couple hours at most, instead of weeks. We don't need Smogon anymore.
