Dec 10, 2016, 05:15 AM
I'm not going to lie, I knew nothing about competitive play until I got curious as to how passerbys kept beating me with "strong" Pokemon so I YouTubed it. I watched a lot of Shofu, @Justin, Verlisify then got to watching more competitive battlers like PokeaimMD, 3MV33, MrJamvad and Thunderblunder777 for Smogon and Aaron Zheng for VGC content. This community in its early stages contributed greatly to my competitive growth thanks to @"MudkipLegend" @AbruptFury @Black117 @trafalgarlaw @MARSxVenom @GiMYz and our very own Justin Flynn
I play competitive Pokemon because it's relaxing. I don't really play hardcore in the way that most people do where they would join major tournaments and such. The most I'd do is join a stream tournament or a draft league but that's about it
Teambuilding is still tricky even for someone like me. Most of the methods I use for teambuilding come under trial and error methods, the use of the main three cores archetypes, knowledge of the metagame and the teambuilding formula for each playstyle. To this day it is still hard to make a team that makes my favourite Pokemon all viable. Prediction is hit or miss because it really depends on the opponent's playstyle. RNG will forever be the death of every Pokemon player so there's that too.
The biggest issue with Competitive Pokemon from my point of view is the lack of sample teams to test out a metagame meaning a huge amount of hours have to be spent theorymoning which is tedious and that since a lot of people who own the games don't play competitive, there isn't much "competition" to play against
Back to my point in paragraph 4, providing sample teams for every metagame is an easy way to break the ice. Perhaps organizing more minor tournaments to attract more people and post more accessible content in the form of videos for people to become more interested. From what I can tell, not a lot of people like to read in comparison to just watching a video about the same thing so its possible to look into having an active YouTube channel for the community as well
Competitive Pokemon for Gen 7 is going to be hella exciting! Honestly I look more towards VGC this year than Smogon due to how the format has a VGC14 feel where the dex is more restricted and the metagame feels more balanced. It's nice to see that VGC17 hasn't been centralized by one team (like CHALK and Big Six did for 15/16) which is a good sign for more diverse teambuilding. Smogon is going to feel the same way and most of these new Pokemon will be ending up in lower tiers in my opinion
I play competitive Pokemon because it's relaxing. I don't really play hardcore in the way that most people do where they would join major tournaments and such. The most I'd do is join a stream tournament or a draft league but that's about it
Teambuilding is still tricky even for someone like me. Most of the methods I use for teambuilding come under trial and error methods, the use of the main three cores archetypes, knowledge of the metagame and the teambuilding formula for each playstyle. To this day it is still hard to make a team that makes my favourite Pokemon all viable. Prediction is hit or miss because it really depends on the opponent's playstyle. RNG will forever be the death of every Pokemon player so there's that too.
The biggest issue with Competitive Pokemon from my point of view is the lack of sample teams to test out a metagame meaning a huge amount of hours have to be spent theorymoning which is tedious and that since a lot of people who own the games don't play competitive, there isn't much "competition" to play against
Back to my point in paragraph 4, providing sample teams for every metagame is an easy way to break the ice. Perhaps organizing more minor tournaments to attract more people and post more accessible content in the form of videos for people to become more interested. From what I can tell, not a lot of people like to read in comparison to just watching a video about the same thing so its possible to look into having an active YouTube channel for the community as well
Competitive Pokemon for Gen 7 is going to be hella exciting! Honestly I look more towards VGC this year than Smogon due to how the format has a VGC14 feel where the dex is more restricted and the metagame feels more balanced. It's nice to see that VGC17 hasn't been centralized by one team (like CHALK and Big Six did for 15/16) which is a good sign for more diverse teambuilding. Smogon is going to feel the same way and most of these new Pokemon will be ending up in lower tiers in my opinion
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