Veteran In Love: lol "23 users"....the irony is that comment, to show your superiority, shows just little history you do know. That's a huge insult to the community back then.
During those "tournaments" I went against some of the best players of all time
IN THEIR PRIMES like goofball, Hipmonlee, husk, Cloud9x, McGraw, gene/g80, chaos, Picollo, MrE, Jumpman, Celia, Giga Punch, MoP, Loki, imperfectluck.....players that you look up to like gods here. You had the old-school RBYers/GSCers that had been grinding for years on IRC. You had the aggro Germans popularize their explosion teams which is what 90% of newer players only know to use in GSC nowadays. You had IRC vs Netbattle, Smogon vs the rest of the world. Pokemon back then was no less competitive than it is now, maybe more because there were only 3 metagames in existence.
But conjecture isn't enough so how about some hard numbers on "playing with skill"....went 41-6 in ADV games during smogon tours 1-5, a That's back when ADV was actually
the newest metagame. Number of times I used in Baton Pass in those games: NONE. But of course you wouldn't know about that because you joined in 2012, right?
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/the-battlers-of-smogon-tours-updated-with-seasons-1-5.59886/