Alright, I've delayed this enough. Posting this finally. Making this clear now: I am against altering counter payouts.
To start, I've read through everyone else's posts, and I understand your concerns and the various reasons people have for wanting to alter counter payouts. However, I think there are better ways to change the system than that.
1) Starting ASB
This is the time at which it would probably matter most. At least 2 new Pokemon and a wealth of ambition to get into ASB, as we all were at one point or another. Many arguments say that we need to accelerate the growth of a new player into the endgame. Coming from the perspective of a person who actually was on a so-called 'accelerated' growth pattern, it really was not worth it. Like, I very quickly grew a strong and usable team, but I attribute that to the fact that I chose good mons to start and all my purchases were decently based on observing the game and its metagame, that and the fact that I joined at the height of flash culture. The reality becomes that after you grow the team, there still is the matter of learning how to actually battle with the Pokemon. My first 2 serious battles in ASB are still matches I look at to this day because they remind me where I came from in ASB, and how bad I once was. The first was a practice match with Fort, in which we both made a lot of bad plays that we've reflected on at one point or another, and my second was in AOT R1 vs Frosty of all people. That match taught me something very important, which is that there is no amount of counter-farming that can supplant developing the actual skills in battle. For more context on that, there are plenty of good battlers in ASB that don't have absurdly well trained teams. My favorite example of this is FMD, who I still don't think I've seen a Pokemon with more than 50 moves from, but she battles very well with what she has. My point here being that you can accelerate the growth all you really want, but that isn't the barrier that is keeping people from being "able" to partake in the serious "endgame" of ASB, it's the actual lack of development of the skill. Sure we have a mentoring program for that, but the tutors hold back, and even then it only teaches the very basics, while the rest of the learning can only be experienced via partaking in your own battles.
However, battling is not the only part of ASB that you should be getting involved with when you join. ASB is a community that requires the effort of all those within it in order to survive. For most users, that usually translates into reffing. This brings me to my other major point about being a starting player. People who complain about not having enough counters from what I've seen often times do not ref very much at all, even though there is always stuff to ref. Everyone here keeps talking about the difficulties that comes with raising a Pokemon solely from a battling experience, and not whilst capitalizing on all the opportunity for growth that ASB has to offer. Reffing offers UC, which can be used as any of the counter types you may need, which helps to get items or fill in some gaps in a Pokemon's movepool. Not only that, the experience of reffing familiarizes you with so many of the things in ASB that you may never discover in your own battles. For example, a large part of my growth was reffing, and I attribute whatever skill I do have in this game to the amount of battles I have reffed. You get to witness first-hand the various mistakes that are made, the ways they are punished, the way mechanics interact with one another, being forced to understand them because it is your job as a ref to properly calculate the round, and it happens multiple times per match. Those alone are very valuable teaching moments. To further facilitate this, there is a reffing mentorship program that we use to move newer players into the higher echelons of refs, seeing that you only need to pass Reffing 101 in order to get access to reffing practically everything in ASB, including gym matches or tourney matches, so that you can witness the higher levels of play.
Stepping away from both regular batting and reffing, roleplays are a massive part of ASB as well. Sure, we joke that this Algebra Style Battling instead of Anime Style Battling, but we still do have the clones of various in-game facilities and such, almost all of which are fantastic sources of counter gain. The Battle Hall is a place where you chuck any mon you have in, make it face the types it can beat with its SE STAB moves, and claim the counters from, while gaining battling experience, which should be able to yield 4 CC/6 KO on average assuming that RNG isn't a cruel mistress to you, and its accessible to the LCs that you start with. The Battle Pike, no matter how cruel the RNG just may be, still yields great rewards — CC the whole time, and standard rewards for each battle you encounter in the Pike. Anime Style Simulator has plenty of scenarios ranging from only LCs to much more massive simulations such as the Legend Trainer or Pyramid King Brandon, which means even the newer players can take their Pokemon there. Even if you aren't successful on your first or second try, you still get the training for your Pokemon and the battling experience. I know for myself that it took me until what I want to guess was my 4th Simulator Challenge to finally actually win. Sure, you would like to succeed as often as possible, but you have to take the wins with the losses, accept the experience from it (and the counters), and just prepare for the next run.
2) "Mid-Game"
To start this section, I need to define what I'm talking about right now. This is probably the point at which you have about 6-9 Pokemon that are maybe around 35-45 moves at training, so maybe your 4th or 5th month of playing time. This is a conservative guesstimate, because I'm not exactly sure on how fast/slow everyone works on their teams, or when IRL comes knocking at the door. But more specifically, this is the time at which you begin to set your eyes on some of the bigger things ASB has to offer. Usually this first objective is marked as the Heart Scale, the glorified training item that really only yields 1 more MC at a time (or maybe EC/AC if you are working on evolution). Time to enter the gym league and finally begin knocking down some of gyms you keep hearing about. Hopefully you were taking time to interlace your training time with some practice matches and getting the full field experience to better understand ASB. While you are at this point in ASB, you've probably now set your eye on the higher ranks of the Battle Hall, finally clearing the Battle Pike, or taking on some of the harder Simulations from the Anime Style Simulator, such as Subway Boss Ingo, or maybe you were feeling gutsy and went for Pyramid King Brandon. You also might have finally started looking into the Raid Zone now that you have an established team, even though I believe you should have done so sooner since it's just fun at the start.
The big kicker about this phase of the game becomes what you have been training. Sometimes your team is optimal for what you want, other times it isn't, which might require 1 of 2 things: Adapting your team appropriately by training new mons or just changing your goal. For example, maybe you heard that one gym is easy to take down, but on the other hand, your team is more suited for one of the more challenging gyms: you should probably just change focuses. Sure, you run a higher risk of loss, but you should be prepared for that anyways if you plan to challenge a gym, and you shouldn't be shying away from a challenge, especially if it delays your progress.
3) "End-Game"
For the record, the only things in ASB I consider to be late-game are TLRs and non-rental tourneys. Oh, and I guess we can count the Legend Trainer Simulation due to its sheer difficulty.
TLRs: Yeah there is no work-around here, those are huge investments in the end. 33+ CC for a worthwhile legendary, not to mention months of time in-challenge, a good month or so of training out-of-challenge assuming you capitalize on the various sources of counters that are around ASB. But that's more due to the nature of how TLRs work given the need for a specialized team to deal with the challenges presented, and not so much a problem of our counter system.
Tourneys (Non-Rental): These are late game because they are hugely competitive where everyone comes to flex their overly trained Pokemon for 9+ months in hopes of snagging a powerful Legendary for themselves, but you should be prepared by now since you will have a strong team that is trained and you know how to use them.
-------------------------
TL;DR: I understand that the need for counters is prominent, but I truly do not think the members of ASB are actually taking advantage the variety of ways to get the counters, and are instead of asking for "an easy way out" with the proposal to change counter generation. I think the proper solution is for us to more wholly involve our members in ASB. Also, I failed to make this clearer in the above, but the whole "not taking advantage" thing applies to all members of ASB, not just the newer members, and the suggestions I gave in section 1 should be taken by all.
