Welcome to the 1v1 Room!
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Art by Breadboy.
Introduction
The premise of 1v1 can be explained through its name alone: pitting one chosen Pokémon against an opposing chosen Pokémon and seeing which one wins. This makes 1v1 both among the simplest tiers to pick up and the most comprehensive to teambuild for. 1v1 started out as a gimmick tournament format for Gen 4 Wi-Fi players that caught on in popularity to the point that it got its own metagame discussion thread and led to multiple Wi-Fi tournaments being held on IRC. At this point, the format was solely based on one Pokémon versus another Pokémon as opposed to the three Pokémon Team Preview that exists currently. With the popularity of the format, 1v1 got a ladder on Pokémon Online, which gave it a major kickstart towards gaining public interest and support. Unfortunately, much of the playerbase drifted away after the transition to Gen 5 and the then-new Pokémon Showdown! server, which left 1v1 without a ladder until a new playerbase formed towards the end of the Gen 5 era in 2013. A few months prior to the release of Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, 1v1's format was changed to include the three Pokémon Team Preview so that the metagame could have greater competitive longevity, and that format has stayed unchanged to this day. While 1v1's growth was more of a slow burn that was mostly contained within the Other Metagames community, it steadily came to overtake every Other Metagame over time, eventually even necessitating the creation of its own dedicated room on Pokémon Showdown!, as well as a separate subforum on Smogon, each leading to a greater concentration of resources and discussion for the tier. Its popularity even led to the recent addition of 1v1's own Contributions & Corrections subforum, separate from Other Metagames! As time goes by, especially after the transition to Gen 8, 1v1 has continued to gather waves of new users who keep the community thriving and ensure that 1v1 stays one of the most active tier-oriented rooms on Pokémon Showdown!
Room Culture
The 1v1 room often acts as a starting point for newer users to familiarize themselves with typical building trends and the resources we offer to help them with such. Very often, you'll see people asking for assistance or criticism on a particular team, linking replays or battles against one another, discussing or building teams with particular Pokémon, or talking about whatever significant 1v1 tournaments are ongoing. Alongside that, we have sporadic room tournaments as well as the scheduled official tournaments that happen every 6 hours. These official tournaments contribute to a monthly leaderboard, which determines how many Kyubits each person gets at the end of the month. Kyubits, a play on Kyurem-B and Bitcoin, are a currency within the 1v1 community that reward people for their engagement with the community, projects, and tournaments and can be spent at the 1v1 Shopfront. While not as common, the room also has people engaging in brainstorming potential new projects, with one such example that stuck around being the 1v1 Clash, a room-based miniature team tournament where players volunteer to be on a team and battle one another to determine a winning team.
Discord
For the most part, the Discord server has been a place where most of the 1v1 regulars partake in slower-paced, general conversation while still being able to stay updated with the ongoings within the 1v1 subforum. The server is divided up into multiple categories in order to keep things from getting too chaotic. The 1v1 category features channels that are solely focused on 1v1, be it viability, discussion of strategies, teambuilding, 1v1 Old Gens and other metagames, etc. The Tournaments category is where discussion of ongoing and future tournaments occurs; channels under this category are the place to go if you want to stay updated on everything regarding the tournament side of 1v1, or if you wanted to float around tournament ideas of your own. The Miscellaneous category is where off-topic conversations occur, featuring multiple channels that have been requested based on popularity, such as video games, music, and sports, as well as the broader general channel to cover everything else.
Ties to Smogon
As a tier-focused room, 1v1 naturally has a lot to offer when it comes to resources, projects, tournaments, and so forth that are all hosted on Smogon, and we do our best to make sure that everyone has access to everything we have to offer at all times. With tournaments being a main focus of 1v1, we keep them all listed and updated within the room's events, which is promptly linked in the roomintro for all to see. If you're looking to test your building prowess or see what other activities 1v1 has to offer, we have multiple projects that allow you to do just that. If you're new, we have several analyses that help to explain what each Pokémon does in the metagame. If you'd like to write an analysis yourself or are curious about the general writing process for 1v1 analyses, check out the 1v1 C&C subforum! For the tier-oriented aspects of 1v1, we have multiple FAQs that allow users to check out our resources pertaining to whatever they're looking for between the likes of current generation resources, usage statistics, and Old Gens and other metagames. Lastly, all of the major changes and announcements regarding 1v1 are posted on Smogon as well.
Getting Involved
If you ever have any questions, don't be afraid to pop into the room and ask! There's almost always multiple helpful people online who would gladly answer your questions at a moment's notice. Otherwise, if you yourself are looking to help out, there's also almost always going to be someone asking for it! If you're helpful enough, you could perhaps even find yourself earning the honorific room voice (+) rank as a token of your contributions to the 1v1 room and community! That said, though, earning voice isn't just a matter of helping people, but also your overall influence on the community. We expect our voices to be kind and respectful to others, including those who may not be quite as gifted of a player or teambuilder and frequently need help as a result. Doing this sets the desired standard of hospitality and accommodation for everyone that we want to maintain.
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