Smogon and Gamefreak...?

Quataaaa

As you can tell by my post count, I'm a bit new here, so my apologies if this has been asked before, but these question have been weighing on my mind for a bit:

Does Gamefreak care about smogon, shoddy, and more generally the online competitive pokemon metagame? Due to how fast battles happen online, how many battles happen online, and how easy it is to customize teams, the metagame is able to evolve exponentially faster on smogon/shoddy than it can in the wifi community. So to what extent does Gamefreak look at what is going on here to gauge overall quality of the battling environment in whatever particular generation is current, and then use that information to help make the next generation better?

For example, would they use the information from shoddy to realize that Garchomp is a cut above all of the non legendaries (and even many legendaries), then look at why he is too good, and then use that information to make things more balanced in generation 5?

In my opinion, the metagame has gotten more balanced progressively from gsc to rse to dpp. The ou, uu, and uber metagames have also gotten more interesting... and more strategic. And it really makes me think.... to what extent are they 'trying' to make the metagame more balanced and interesting? The quality of the competitive metagame is probably one of the smaller determinants of pokemons overall sales. Or maybe not... it's hard to say. But I'm sure that Gamefreak acknowledges and appreciates Smogon's existence, because at the end of the day Smogon probably helps Gamefreak's sales. By getting people into pokemon in general, and thus influencing them to go buy a DS and platinum, that is.

So yea. Just some food for thought. If anyone has any answers (or even guesses) to these questions... I'd love to hear your input and discuss!
 
Nope. They have a market of millions of young children, a few thousand competitive players aren't exactly as important. They ocassionally throw in things that might help, but it's coincidental.
 
They certainly care about competetive battling (at least the VGC) because they have a lot of moves that only work in Doubles and there are very few Doubles matches in-game. There's also the Battle Fronteir.

I don't think they even know about Smogon because they don't even think that anyone in America knows about Gen 5, which means that they don't pay attention to sites like this.
 
You never know, there might be someone, paid by gamefreak, to go on Smogon everyday, and report, what Smogon, competitive people like.
What a cool job, if it pays good!!
 
They might put a select few that they make sure will contribute to the competetive metagame (like lucario), but they rest I'm pretty sure they do not worry much because they will mostly go to NU or UU anyway
 
It's almost a guarantee that some rep from Gamefreak or at least Nintendo keeps regular tabs on all the most populous Pokemon fansites. I don't think they really make new things with balance in mind, but they absolutely do pay more attention to the competitive aspects of Pokemon now (i.e. the early game Pokemon go from being useless, like Pidgeot and Furret, to having cool niches and actually being competitive viable, like Staraptor and Swellow).
 
Losa said:
So they don't have internet access... Good to know.
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Do you go on Japanese sites? It's the same way for Gamefreak. Truthfully, they must know that Americans know about Gen 5, because they anounced the names for the games and the legendaries on an English website, but when someone asked one of the people at Gamefreak about Pokemon Platinum (when it was first annouced in Japan), they were surprised that an American even knew about Platinum.
 
BidoofTheWise said:
They might put a select few that they make sure will contribute to the competetive metagame (like lucario), but they rest I'm pretty sure they do not worry much because they will mostly go to NU or UU anyway
Click to expand...

Well they obviously aren't trying to make every pokemon ou quality. Every generation they have created a range of quality, and thus a range of metagames. Venusaur is not OU quality but nonetheless has contributed well to the uu metagame...
 
DDRMaster said:
Do you go on Japanese sites? It's the same way for Gamefreak. Truthfully, they must know that Americans know about Gen 5, because they anounced the names for the games and the legendaries on an English website, but when someone asked one of the people at Gamefreak about Pokemon Platinum (when it was first annouced in Japan), they were surprised that an American even knew about Platinum.
Click to expand...
Not surprising. The VGC is mostly managed by The Pokemon Company. Game Freak has minimal involvement with setting it up and running it. Same with the English Website--that's TCPi's area, and it's really up to them how to handle promotions for upcoming games and such on it. Although, with Platinum, the Rotom Silhouettes had only just started showing up in Japan when someone at the VGC asked about them, and they hadn't been shown at all on the English site or anything. Since Reshiram and Zekrom have actually showed up on the English website, it wouldn't be surprising if they did expect English fans to have seen them by now... but then again, I also wouldn't be surprised if someone from Game Freak would be surprised to learn that the fans know about them already, since the site is TPCi's area, and not there's. Either way though, distinguishing between TPC and Game Freak helps to make stuff like this make a bit more sense.
 
FlareBlitz said:
I don't think they really make new things with balance in mind, .
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A bunch of you have this - so you guys think that it is pure coincidence that each generation is more balanced, strategic, and interesting than the last? You guys think that the base stats, abilities, and movepools are just shots in the dark and aren't attempts to create something of a balanced environment?

If that were the case, then gen 5 has just as good a chance at being an improvement on gen 4 as it does as being worse than gen 4. So I guess time will tell. If gen 5 has say 4 garchomp quality (non-legendary) pokemon that all need to be booted out of ou because they absolute dominate the new metagame, and say somehow grossly overpowers the steel type (beyond its current dominance), and adds a broken ability, then I guess yea they do not care about the metagame and it was pure luck that it steadily got better from gen 1 -4.
 
Nonetheless, I do think that stealth rock was a gigantic mistake - it is by far the most centralizing aspect of the metagame, and really the metagame would just be so much better and more enjoyable without it. To me, this is evidence that they care about the metagame (it was clearly added to dis-incentivize switch wars), but don't test things well enough to really know what's best and what's not.
 
DDRMaster said:
Do you go on Japanese sites? It's the same way for Gamefreak. Truthfully, they must know that Americans know about Gen 5, because they anounced the names for the games and the legendaries on an English website, but when someone asked one of the people at Gamefreak about Pokemon Platinum (when it was first annouced in Japan), they were surprised that an American even knew about Platinum.
Click to expand...

maybe there figuring out we learn about it when they do...
 
I think I heard from some blog that there's only like 1 or 2 people in charge of balancing things competitively =\

obviously that guy had a hard on for garchomp
 
Sy123 said:
You never know, there might be someone, paid by gamefreak, to go on Smogon everyday, and report, what Smogon, competitive people like.
What a cool job, if it pays good!!
Click to expand...
I was about to post this. lol

Celtic5 said:
My uncle works for gamefreak :)
Click to expand...

I want to. T_T

I'm sure Game Freak cares or at least knows about Smogon. They probably find this tier and all as a good way of organization. If they didn't like this they would've copyrighted Smogon long time ago!
 
of course gamefreak pays attention to competitive pokemon battling, why else would they add the "random match" function for 5th gen to have live battles with random people across the world via wifi.
 
I don't think it will be as tight as paying someone to look at Smogon every day, but I absolutely guarantee that every major corporation in the world goes onto the internet to see what people are saying about their product. Game Freak is no different. They will absolutely be aware of this website.
 
I'm sure Game Freak cares or at least knows about Smogon. They probably find this tier and all as a good way of organization. If they didn't like this they would've copyrighted Smogon long time ago!
Click to expand...

I always wondered about that myself. Does smogon/shoddy battle really break any copyright laws?
 
If GameFreak really cared about Smogon, it wouldn't have doubles as the main format. Yeah, GameFreak probably does watch Smogon, but I don't think it cares that much.
 
well maybe they know that doubles matches are around 50x faster then the stall fests that would happen if the tourneys were 6v6 like smogon.

The doubles matches are better for real life tournaments as they dont take an hour for a match
 
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