Issue #11 Released!

[Stallion]

I'm sorry to hear you didn't like this issue of The Smog. Maybe you should write the entirety of Issue 12 so that it meets your specifications. Obviously we understand there is a need for tournament coverage and it has already been worked upon for quite some time. Considering it's a volunteer project though I wish people wouldn't run their mouths about the lack of people willing or able to carry out a specific task. Sorry if I sound irritable but a lot of people seem to fail to realise that for a feature to run, someone has to write it. And sometimes that isn't feasible.

P.S. A general notice that Mekkah and I are working on more opportunities for user feedback to be expressed. Although this particular complaint irritates me for reasons I have expressed, feedback is really important to us and we want to hear what you have to say.

Sorry for sounding ungrateful Pluff, as I said I really do appreciate the amount of effort you guys put into the magazine. I've read most of the articles and the fact that you guys find the hours to write at such a high standard is very impressive to me, and to top it off you all come up with new, relevant material issue after issue. However, I can't help agree with locopoke when he said:

Smogon claims to be a competitive site, so tournaments should be our #1 priority

I think I speak for a few others when I say that tournaments are arguably the most important aspect of smogon, and definitely top 3. I may be a little biased, but I think its an absolute tragedy that nobody wrote about the Pokemon World Cup in particular (as well as a few other key tournaments starting like the Smogon Tour) after the excellent initial article in an earlier edition. As a result, I was thinking that for the next Smog, if someone in the know with a flair for writing volunteers to write for tournaments they could be permanently in charge of the Tournament Section, to avoid this happening again? There are people with the time and the skillset to do this and I think it would be a great idea. Sorry for beating a dead horse Pluff , it's just an idea that I think would work very well!!

 

[Fatecrashers]

From the Want to write for The Smog thread:

We have a tourney writer, they were just unavailable last time, but thanks for the offer.

So hopefully that clears things up somewhat?

Also, good work on the issue guys! Can't wait for the premier B/W issue!

 

[Stallion]

Ahh in that case disregard my post!

 

[monkfish]

idk if this is the right place to post but the breadcrumb at the top of the page says
Smogon >> The Smog >> Section 11
instead of Issue 11 like it should!

 

[Rising_Dusk]

Yeah chaos made the section with the wrong name. :P

 

[Jimbo]

A note on tournaments: Not many people (ever) comment on the tournament articles. The smog adapts to user feedback. I know the tournament writers were unavailable this issue, but that doesn't change the fact that the Smog staff would have very little idea at how much people enjoy the tournament articles since we don't get many "loved the tournament article!" type posts. We get dozens of posts about other articles like underrated movesets and featured pokemon, so we continue pumping those out.

That said, you've obviously made it clear you guys like the tournaments articles, so look forward to them in the future.

 

[JabbaTheGriffin]

I think it's due to a lack of interesting tournament articles. People do want to see tournament articles but when it's things like "tournament predictions" or "power rankings (unless they're specifically mentioned)" people don't care. An interesting, fun format has to be developed for tournament coverage. Maybe a kind of ESPN highlight approach? Users could send in the most interesting parts of their tournament logs maybe or maybe they could just highlight the interesting matches that happened. With that it'd probably be cool if some of the tournament writers watched tourney matches and then jotted down some notes and wrote about it like that. I dunno just tossing ideas out that could potentially be more interesting that past tournament articles have been.

 

[undisputed]

I don't want to force myself into a place I don't belong, but if users wanted to PM me Tournament Logs, I can write about them and the strategies each player used. I can talk about the highlights of the battles, and what I see as the main threats for whatever round. I think that could be a totally cool article if anyone is up for saving logs and giving them to me. If you want, I can preserve anonymity too. So don't worry about your team being revealed if its a long term tournament with the same rules throughout.

 

[Leningrad]

A very successful issue overall. I especially enjoyed the evolution of the 4th gem metagame article (and of course the Shoddy mods).