The fact is, the competitive community is there and though IVs and EVs and breeding all make the pokemon game fascinating, deep and wonderfully challenging to perfect, it can be hard on some people to know if they want to transition to the competitive side they pretty much have to throw away their old team and start from scratch and follow all these crazy rules in order to keep up.
I do agree with you and your points. I do not disagree with you, but between the general tone of OP's text and the signature, it does come off as yet another whiny rant against the competitive community. Perhaps not to you, but I've seen a LOT of shit similar in sentiment. I've played Pokemon for over 16 years and I've experienced a lot of the community and it seems like a thinly veiled "gosh you competitive guys never have fun" garbage rant.
I don't think competitive play and emotional attachment should always be completely divorced from one another. I have my first hexflawless Pokemon in X, a female Gogoat, by my side as much as I possibly can. I started caring more about my good competitive breeds because they will ALWAYS be good and relevant. Yeah, in-game teams are nice but they become irrelevant as soon as the next game in the series comes out. I can trade my competitive breeds over and they'll still be good to use. Maybe I'm different in that aspect, idk.
I did mention that Gamefreak has made many questionable and/or bad design decisions, pretty much the phenomena that SnoopingGil describes: the majority of Pokemon are useless for battling other players. However, casual players misdirect their blame on the competitive community for "having to start over" or "making everything worthless". That's the main point I was trying to make: it's not our fault that people "pretty much have to throw away their whole team and start from scratch".
OP blames Smogon specifically (or more broadly competitive players), as does many other misguided and ignorant people. The competitive player wants to make the best of the boundaries Gamefreak has placed us in, but in the end, it's not our fault that the in-game team won't do well.
Instead, the frustration should be directed at the makers of the game, the people who actually make the rules. Gamefreak has done a lot to improve this generation but there are still the bitter memories of past generations where it's a) a giant timesink, b) hack, or c) go to unofficial simulators just to stand a fighting chance. Fuck, with the whole Battle Analyzer fiasco and now Pokebank's terrible hackcheck, simulators were/are the platform of choice for competitive battling because Gamefreak can't be assed to care.
Here's the difference between pokemon and most, if not all other RPGs: the pokemon themselves. When I am on World of Warcraft I have a main character and, say I want to become part of the competitive raiding or PvP scene... I can use the SAME character and gear up, which is completely different from taking your core pokes that got you through all your RPG and put them in a box, never to be used much again. My main character on WoW has gotten me through thick and thin, and though her armor and weaponry and even her spells are different, it's still the same old Druid I have always had with the same name. I never needed to delete her... and never will. Same goes for most player-characters in RPGs. You can improve them and make them as perfect as any other player character in the game because it's the items you give them that change your stats.
I actually recently unsubbed from WoW because that may not always be the case. What if you chose a server that wasn't one of the dozen or so extremely overpopulated ones (or guild that falls apart a few months after you join) and you don't want to fork over the $25 to xfer? It's unfortunately pretty difficult to do much of anything besides World of Queuecraft if you're not on one of those dozen or so "chosen" servers that crash on patch day and are full of douchebags. If you're doing high-end raiding or PvP, what if your class/spec isn't FOTM? I don't think you understand this especially as a druid where you can literally play any role and almost always have a good spec. I quit playing because a) the difficulty of finding a guild that fits my needs and is looking for melee DPS, everyone wants healers and locks, and b) being sick and tired of paying fees to play on servers that don't make me want to lose faith in humanity just to prevent myself from starting over. I agree with the rest of your points, but I wanted to present a rebuttal to your WoW example because it runs contrary to the experiences of many players, including myself.
while there are good points brought up here, i think the main reason a lot of people don't like competitive battling is because even though IVs and stuff are easier to get now, people don't like the fact that a lot of teams need perfect ivs. And im not saying like if you have 28 or so in attack you can't win, it just seems like thats the mindset. I know my buddy Chris doesnt like competitive battling for that reason. I know at first I didn't like Smogon for that reason when I first found out about it, because that's the mindset I perceived. But once I actually started battling people online, I realized that for everyone, it is different, and I competitive battle for fun. I just think more people wouldn't perceive competitive battling as some kind of no-fun nonsense if we got to the point where IVs weren't ever considered to be bad or something. IDK, i rambled on at the end lol.
People need to realize:
it's not Smogon's fault, it's Gamefreak's. You know, the people who actually made the rules, specifically the IV system. Smogon did not dictate that 31 is better than 5 for instance, Gamefreak made it so. The blame is misdirected. I don't understand why it's shameful and provokes such a hostile reaction to want to play with the best that is possible under a defined set of rules.
tl;dr: I don't understand the dichotomy of the casual player blaming other players who have no say in game design decisions for said decisions in such a bitter and hostile manner.
