Blame Game and Serene Grace, I'm having a lot of trouble placing exactly what you would consider to be a competitive game of pokemon. It's clear that you feel we need to stay as true to the original game as possible to be 'competitive', but I feel that we're already so far away from it that we throw that argument completely out the window.
In Pokemon, there is a real time sink balancing the creation of a solid, competitive pokemon. First you have breeding for moves and stats (or soft resetting), and eventually 'settling' for less than ideal stats. Of course, if you're breeding, then breeding for ideal parents comes into play as well. Then you have to level your pokemon up as well - and pokemon are also balanced by ease of levelling. Many pokemon level up fast, but suck at max level, while dragons and some of the other very powerful pokemon level up very slowly. Then you have examples such as Breloom that need to level up a long way being extremely weak in order to reach full potential. Let's also not forget limited use of TMs and move tutors. We already take shortcuts to get around this sort of thing in wi-fi play when we accept cloning, but we go one step further with simulators. We have to realize that we're bypassing a huge part of the game by giving everyone a Salamence with max stats and whatever moves it wishes.
If you really want to, you can argue we're playing a different game already. Now we make concessions to make the game more dynamic, fun, and playable overall. We add a bunch of clauses. We realize that if we ban a small number of the most powerful pokemon from the 'standard' metagame, it makes an even larger pool become available for play (again, we're creating our own metagame here). Then, in the spirit of competition, we consider other suspected problems and their effect on the game.
Banning less is definitely preferable, but not because it makes us more competitive at the original game. We've already gone too far for that. Hell, the official tournaments go too far for that, and that's another reason I'm really having a hard time seeing your logic on this. I can understand wanting a static metagame to improve at, but I completely disagree at where we should place that standard. You say as close to the original game as possible, while I say it should be at an arbitrary point at which we compromise having a sizable pool of pokemon (so that teams are diverse and the game is fun enough to play) with focusing on skill-based play as much as possible. The fact is, smogon puts more emphasis on getting the metagame 'right' than it does on finding a metagame as fast as possible and sticking to it.
Honestly, whenever Colin and others argue over this here, their points seem mostly apologetic toward the original argument rather than holding real value. Somehow OHKOs and evasion moves will actually promote skill-based play, and somehow Garchomp, D-S, and Wobb don't actually overcentralize the game. It's intellectual dishonesty at it's finest. We disagree at the base of the argument, but instead we end up arguing over what exactly 'overcentralization' and 'skill-based' mean.
In reality, the word we don't agree on a definition for is 'competitive'.
In Pokemon, there is a real time sink balancing the creation of a solid, competitive pokemon. First you have breeding for moves and stats (or soft resetting), and eventually 'settling' for less than ideal stats. Of course, if you're breeding, then breeding for ideal parents comes into play as well. Then you have to level your pokemon up as well - and pokemon are also balanced by ease of levelling. Many pokemon level up fast, but suck at max level, while dragons and some of the other very powerful pokemon level up very slowly. Then you have examples such as Breloom that need to level up a long way being extremely weak in order to reach full potential. Let's also not forget limited use of TMs and move tutors. We already take shortcuts to get around this sort of thing in wi-fi play when we accept cloning, but we go one step further with simulators. We have to realize that we're bypassing a huge part of the game by giving everyone a Salamence with max stats and whatever moves it wishes.
If you really want to, you can argue we're playing a different game already. Now we make concessions to make the game more dynamic, fun, and playable overall. We add a bunch of clauses. We realize that if we ban a small number of the most powerful pokemon from the 'standard' metagame, it makes an even larger pool become available for play (again, we're creating our own metagame here). Then, in the spirit of competition, we consider other suspected problems and their effect on the game.
Banning less is definitely preferable, but not because it makes us more competitive at the original game. We've already gone too far for that. Hell, the official tournaments go too far for that, and that's another reason I'm really having a hard time seeing your logic on this. I can understand wanting a static metagame to improve at, but I completely disagree at where we should place that standard. You say as close to the original game as possible, while I say it should be at an arbitrary point at which we compromise having a sizable pool of pokemon (so that teams are diverse and the game is fun enough to play) with focusing on skill-based play as much as possible. The fact is, smogon puts more emphasis on getting the metagame 'right' than it does on finding a metagame as fast as possible and sticking to it.
Honestly, whenever Colin and others argue over this here, their points seem mostly apologetic toward the original argument rather than holding real value. Somehow OHKOs and evasion moves will actually promote skill-based play, and somehow Garchomp, D-S, and Wobb don't actually overcentralize the game. It's intellectual dishonesty at it's finest. We disagree at the base of the argument, but instead we end up arguing over what exactly 'overcentralization' and 'skill-based' mean.
In reality, the word we don't agree on a definition for is 'competitive'.
