Their rules are arbitrary. Our rules have real reasoning. Thats why we dont care about them either.
This sums up the problem up nicely. The prevailing attitude at Smogon is basically, "We're smarter than GameFreak." There's this widespread belief that GameFreak cannot or will not balance the game and it's up to the online community to do it for them. Those silly GameFreak devs! It's like they just make all this stuff and then don't even test it. lulz, amiright? To Smogon's credit, this was certainly a valid complaint back in first gen. But as the generations have gone on, it's become less and less true. Now, more than 20 years later, it's an obsolete attitude. There are more changes to existing Pokémon, moves, and mechanics in 6th gen than there are
new Pokémon, moves, and mechanics. This gen was almost entirely about tweaking and balancing the game! And yet, somehow there's still this belief here on Smogon that GameFreak is incompetent. Why is that?
The answer is that the things GameFreak changed—and perhaps more importantly the things they
didn't change—
seem idiotic and arbitrary when applied to Smogon's 6v6 metagame. "Why wasn't Stealth Rock nerfed? GameFreak must be idiots!" No, it's just that Stealth Rock isn't omnipresent—or even
common—in a 3v3 format with team preview. This is really the root of the problem: Smogon plays a 6v6 format while GameFreak is working to balance a 3v3 format. One format is not intrinsically more "competitive" than the other. It would probably be way easier to balance the game that GameFreak's actually developing than to balance "Smogémon", but Smogon is
so invested in the 6v6 format that 3v3 seems anathema. We've got all these articles! All our discussion and critiques! Be a shame to just toss those out. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
It's really strange when you think about it. GameFreak puts so much work into creating this game, yet here we are at the start of a new generation of content, and rather than give it a chance as-is, the premier online battling community rails against it! They stubbornly plow ahead with their unsupported 6v6 format, carrying over all their rules from the previous generation and then needing ever more bans and rules in order to keep their heavily modified version of the game playable and interesting. It's bizarre. If you know the history, you can understand how it happened. But if you take a step back and think about it, it's really weird. When people talk about how Smogon "blindly follows tradition", I believe this is what they mean.
If you dont like smogon tiers, dont play here, simple.
This is the other half of the problem. Smogon "supports" Nintendo's formats. By "supports", I mean there are separate forums for them so that people who want to post about them don't clutter up the important Smogémon discussions. It's a bad joke. If Smogon really wants to be the go-to site for competitive Pokémon battling going forward, they're going to have to embrace Nintendo's formats. Now I'm not saying that 6v6 should be thrown out altogether, but it should be relegated to a secondary format, much like Little Cup, etc. As of right now, Smogon's mission statement is at best misleading. Let's read the first paragraph of Smogon's "About" page.
Smogon is the most comprehensive and accurate online resource for competitive Pokémon battling. We offer articles and advice via our community forums to help fans of the game compete at every level, while honing their skills in every aspect of competitive Pokémon from team building to battling tactics. Our over-150,000-member organization is growing at an ever increasing rate, constantly expanding our knowledge base and our ability to be at the cutting edge of the game.
The entire page completely fails to note that it's a resource not for Pokémon as it exists today, but for
Smogémon. Smogon has hundreds of pages of articles and advice that are almost useless to anyone actually playing Pokémon on a DS cartridge. How far we've strayed, and without even really realizing it.
PS:
Game Freak didn't even nerf Moody this generation, and Wi-Fi players had the power to make that happen.
Moody wasn't nerfed directly because it didn't need to be. It takes three things to
abuse Moody. You need Moody itself, Substitute, and Protect/Detect, and Substitute got nerfed
HARD this gen. All sound-based moves go through it. Anything with Infiltrator can bypass it with damaging moves. Roar and Whirlwind bypass Sub and can no longer miss. Even Pin Missile got a huge buff, for what that's worth; Mega Heracross certainly doesn't care much about Subs.