Thread originally written by Stratos; slightly altered for posting by me.
Losing a match to the wonderful Landorus-T and his Scarf Rock Slides sucks a lot of ass. We've all been there. It is possibly the most infuriating way to lose a match. But we should pride ourselves on playing the game of Pokemon as best as we can. The way we treat Rock Slide is a glaring inconsistency here. Rock Slide's flinch chance seems stupidly, ridiculously high, but that means that a lot of the time it is going to be your best chance to win. But when someone tries to play to their outs by using the move to fish for flinches, we jump down their throats. I won't name him, but there was a user who was about to win a seasonal match thanks to Rock Slide, and the chat was being so vicious to him about it that he chose to throw the set rather than deal with their verbal abuse. I will name names here because it's no secret: Tricking is a really nice guy and a legitimately good player, but because he lucked his way through some matches, people shunned him for a long time. Fortunately that's in the past now, and I think people are being better about luck than they used to be, but we want to just say it publicly: if your opponent won through luck, it's not his fault. We need to stop hating the player for playing the game.
On the flipside of the coin, there's also a tendency to rip into people for playing poorly, or for using "typical ladder" teams. This too needs to stop. Stratos has never admitted this before, but in 2011 he played on the SkarmBliss VGC server with Belly Drum Darmanitan and Heal Pulse Alomomola. I started competitive double battling around the same time with the Autumn (Un)Friendly and tried to use Telepathy Musharna and DD Mold Breaker Haxorus together. We all start somewhere, and the way to help people get better is not by mocking them and calling them shit.
I'm not saying we have a bad community or a major toxicity problem. There's a lot of nice helpful people and the PS doubles room is a pleasant place to hang out. But these are issues we can work on together.
Losing a match to the wonderful Landorus-T and his Scarf Rock Slides sucks a lot of ass. We've all been there. It is possibly the most infuriating way to lose a match. But we should pride ourselves on playing the game of Pokemon as best as we can. The way we treat Rock Slide is a glaring inconsistency here. Rock Slide's flinch chance seems stupidly, ridiculously high, but that means that a lot of the time it is going to be your best chance to win. But when someone tries to play to their outs by using the move to fish for flinches, we jump down their throats. I won't name him, but there was a user who was about to win a seasonal match thanks to Rock Slide, and the chat was being so vicious to him about it that he chose to throw the set rather than deal with their verbal abuse. I will name names here because it's no secret: Tricking is a really nice guy and a legitimately good player, but because he lucked his way through some matches, people shunned him for a long time. Fortunately that's in the past now, and I think people are being better about luck than they used to be, but we want to just say it publicly: if your opponent won through luck, it's not his fault. We need to stop hating the player for playing the game.
On the flipside of the coin, there's also a tendency to rip into people for playing poorly, or for using "typical ladder" teams. This too needs to stop. Stratos has never admitted this before, but in 2011 he played on the SkarmBliss VGC server with Belly Drum Darmanitan and Heal Pulse Alomomola. I started competitive double battling around the same time with the Autumn (Un)Friendly and tried to use Telepathy Musharna and DD Mold Breaker Haxorus together. We all start somewhere, and the way to help people get better is not by mocking them and calling them shit.
I'm not saying we have a bad community or a major toxicity problem. There's a lot of nice helpful people and the PS doubles room is a pleasant place to hang out. But these are issues we can work on together.
