Unpopular opinions

While I agree that it's unfair to use hacks in official tournaments simply because not everybody has access to them, there's a gigantic difference between physical sports like baseball and pokemon or chess. You see, physical sports test and athlete's natural strength and endurance and skill, so use of performance enhancers creates an uneven playing field in addition to unnecessary health risks.

But in pokemon or chess, the quality being tested is just your own mind, tactics, and a little bit of luck. So your pokemon's stats and IV's are not the result of hard work but more a threshold bar that needs to be met just to have an even playing field. They are not the goal of the competition... so why create this "stat barrier" with them? It would be like playing chess with one pawn not being able to move two spaces on the opening turn just because you didn't grind for two weeks before the competition.

Plus it would be a bit hypocritical to be completely against hacking on a board on Smogon, since Pokemon Showdown is essentially a hack tool given to everybody for the sole purpose of unofficial casual battling.

Again, with hacking in VGC or anything official, it needs to be all or nothing: an even playing field. Either it's legal and everyone comes with perfect stat pokemon, or it's not and only the winners come with perfect stat pokemon.

...wait, that came out wrong.

I don't know if you watch sports but many athletes actually need a high intelligence to succeed at their sport. Like the NBA. Plenty of guys who have the talent & body (Michael Beasley, Jeff Green, Javale McGee) but are don't have a fundamental understanding of the game to succeed. "Unathletic" but smart players like Tim Duncan, Pau Gasol, Andre Iguodala, etc succeed because of their IQ.
 
I don't know if you watch sports but many athletes actually need a high intelligence to succeed at their sport. Like the NBA. Plenty of guys who have the talent & body (Michael Beasley, Jeff Green, Javale McGee) but are don't have a fundamental understanding of the game to succeed. "Unathletic" but smart players like Tim Duncan, Pau Gasol, Andre Iguodala, etc succeed because of their IQ.
Yes, but you are missing my point. Or rather, you inverted it. Intelligence and tactics do apply to most physical sports as well, and I was not trying to insinuate that athletes are dumb.

What I was trying to say is that in a Pokemon match there is zero physicality. Obviously. It's all about tactics, intelligence, and a little bit of luck. So to compare steroid use with hacking is fundamentally flawed. The only connection is that they both create an unfair advantage between the "haves" and "have-nots".
 
My opinion is that Pokemon battling comes down to two primary aspects: Team Building itself and in battle play.

Pokemon is not a test purely of IVs and such factors. In physical sports, physical enhancements like steroids are frowned upon because expecting everyone to be in the exact same Physical shape is absurd, so it's part of their preparation. Pokemon is not like that. Base stats, a level cap, and the outright base power of moves mean a Pokemon has a clear and utterly defined limit to what it will be capable of in the hands of even the absolute smartest trainer.

Despite having a literal franchise of such, the battle system in Pokemon is similar in nature to a card game: Not everyone is going to use the same build or pieces within that build, but it should be clear what a card is capable of once you actually identify what it is and what support it will have. For a comparison from my childhood, imagine if I bought a Yu-Gi-Oh Booster Pack with 3 Blue Eyes White Dragons in it, and they all had a variance in their numbers (so 2950, 2800, and 3000 ATK) for no particular reason. Well, what logical reason would I have to use any but the best numbered one? Yes, the others are still stronger than a typical monster tends to be, but anyone who is prepared for the Blue Eyes archetype is prepared for the 3000 ATK they optimally have, meaning that there's no situation where I want a piece that is just "good enough".

Similarly, in Pokemon, there is no value in a Pokemon with imperfect stats for what you're using it for (ergo any stat besides 31, 30 for an HP spread, or 0 for something like Foul Play or a Suicide Lead) since everyone prepares for an absolute optimal Pokemon. This is especially so with things like Tornadus-T, whose claim to fame is the Speed stat, which has an absolute function (compared to damage having a range) and thus needs to be fully optimal. There is a degree of randomness to battling with accuracy and Damage Rolls, but these should only come into play on a field made as even as possible.

The only reason hackers exist for this particular aspect is because the mechanic is so tedious to optimize and yet so integral to high level play that it cannot be ignored. It's not even like there's a particular benefit on Gamefreak's part. In the card game example, scummy as it would be, it would help to sell more booster packs, which equals more profit on the manufacturer's part. For Pokemon, they got your money the second you bought the Cartridge, and all they're wasting is your time with the need to perfect IV breeding at no gain to themselves. In fact, that arbitrary statistical barrier turns away people from the competitive scene and creates an artificial rift image of elitism amongst the "casual" crowd regarding the "competitive" one, where the former thinks the latter is obsessive for IV breeding for this game, when in reality most of us don't enjoy that step to competing (easy or not, NOBODY think mass IV breeding is actually fun). I mostly play on Showdown for that reason, and I can think of two other cases where it reared its ugly head.

- My University has a Pokemon club, and we tried starting a league in miniature last year. Thing is, participation was abyssmal because we kept fights on Cart but still used Smogon OU rules, meaning that most people with classes couldn't commit the time to breed teams to challenge each leader efficiently and adjust it to fit.

- I follow a commentary group on Youtube, and one member is a huge Pokemon nut. Despite this, he states he actively fell out of the competitive scene because IV breeding made entry borderline impossible when he was initially interested (Gen 3), and he's basically had no interest in it ever since despite it becoming more accessible.

IVs are a poor attempt at trying to make every Pokemon a special snowflake that instead made some outright superior than others. What was supposed to encourage a sense of uniqueness goes unnoticed by casual players and essentially leads to Eugenics amongst the competitive crowd. In fact, I feel like it makes it harder to get attached to the Pokemon for that reason: for an in-game run, a Pokemon becomes special to me for what it did or the nickname I gave it, the experience. In the Competitive scene, how can I get attached to my Charizard if I have to breed a new one once Meta Trends favor its other Mega or a different EV spread? The shifting of meta trends much faster than a Pokemon is capable of being adapted to them means I can't get attached to a particular Pokemon and stick with it: Perfect IVs make a Pokemon go from being a partner or team member to an impersonal trophy or game piece.

(Pardon my language for the following)

tl;dr IVs as they are now are antiquated, self-defeating, audience splitting, poorly implement, tedious, impersonal, and they're just plain fucking stupid!
 
Yes, but you are missing my point. Or rather, you inverted it. Intelligence and tactics do apply to most physical sports as well, and I was not trying to insinuate that athletes are dumb.

What I was trying to say is that in a Pokemon match there is zero physicality. Obviously. It's all about tactics, intelligence, and a little bit of luck. So to compare steroid use with hacking is fundamentally flawed. The only connection is that they both create an unfair advantage between the "haves" and "have-nots".
I don't care what side of this you are on but this is really flawed. Both are technically cheating it doesn't matter how steriods or hacking a pokemon is breaks a rule as far as VCGs/whateversportyouwant go they are both breaking the rules. Therefore it is a really good comparison.
 
Yes, but you are missing my point. Or rather, you inverted it. Intelligence and tactics do apply to most physical sports as well, and I was not trying to insinuate that athletes are dumb.

What I was trying to say is that in a Pokemon match there is zero physicality. Obviously. It's all about tactics, intelligence, and a little bit of luck. So to compare steroid use with hacking is fundamentally flawed. The only connection is that they both create an unfair advantage between the "haves" and "have-nots".
I think you missed flargananddingle's point because the bolded was his comparison. He wasn't saying anything about physicality.
 
I think you missed flargananddingle's point because the bolded was his comparison. He wasn't saying anything about physicality.
Yeah, I'll admit to that. Upon rereading it, I missed some key details of flargananddingle's post. Sorry about that.

And look, without any too many comparisons, metaphors, the point I was trying to make is this:

Competitive pokemon is a judge of skill, preparation, quick thinking, adaptation, prediction, strategy, and a tiny bit of luck. And competitions that judge only these qualities absolutely must have a fair playing field in order to work. It's about using a very complex set of premade tools against another set of premade tools.

When hacking is given to some players but not others, then yes, that is cheating. It's not fair, and therefore not right.

But take away that hacking, every winning player is expected to show up with "flawless" pokemon, the maximum statistical allowances afforded by the game. And it does indeed take hours to days to weeks of grinding to set these pokemon up, and some would argue that hacking "flawless" pokemon flies in the face of all their hard work. And they would be correct.

But I also argue that the "hard work" necessary to create said flawless pokemon isn't in the spirit of the competition. Having statistically maximum pokemon doesn't provide any trial or judging, as I outlined that's all based on intelligence and strategy. So "flawless" pokemon are nothing more than a "checkpoint" that players have to reach in order to compete, a price if you will. But instead of paid in money, it's paid in time. It's not the same as real athletic training, in Pokemon that would be having practice matches against other players to refine your strategy, the skill being judged. Getting 31 IV's is just a price you pay to play.

And some people feel that's bogus and don't want to pay it, so they hack. They aren't right, they aren't wrong, but they aren't legal as long as its a tool some may use but other can't. So a group of people came together to create a place where you could hack your EV's, IV's, and movesets on the fly so that the real qualities being tested can be measured and challenged. And those were the ones that created Pokemon Showdown and it's predecessors, online Battle Simulators.

And given how in this recent generation Gamefreak took pretty big strides to ease breeding and training, I think they believe that IV's are pretty bogus too.

Steroids are not like IV hacking or other "passably legal" hacking, because they give unfair advantages to the skills being judged (an athlete's strength, endurance, reaction time, etc.). Hacking your IV's to 31 doesn't do that since as I outlined I find that IV's are just type of paywall between you and competitive play and are not the skills being judged in competition. But hacking a move a pokemon can't learn would be an apt comparison, since it alters your strategy unfairly, the skill being judged.

Was that clearer? I mean, by all means feel free to disagree, this is just my opinion. But I do want my argument to be concise.
 
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stage7_4, I understand what you're saying and you make great points. Personally, just not a fan of hacking at all but I'm obviously biased. I'll admit to having negative experiences with hackers who stole pokemon I worked for and gave me hacks in return. That blows. I do like having to work hard for some of my pokemon because it makes them that much more special to me. If I just power saved their IVs it'd feel cheap. That's me though, I know other players don't really care about that stuff.

I'm all for people doing whatever they want with their games as long as they enjoy them. I don't want to come off strong, but this conversation mostly comes down to personal tastes and is sort of dominating the thread too much. Best if we leave it alone.
 
stage7_4, I understand what you're saying and you make great points. Personally, just not a fan of hacking at all but I'm obviously biased. I'll admit to having negative experiences with hackers who stole pokemon I worked for and gave me hacks in return. That blows. I do like having to work hard for some of my pokemon because it makes them that much more special to me. If I just power saved their IVs it'd feel cheap. That's me though, I know other players don't really care about that stuff.

I'm all for people doing whatever they want with their games as long as they enjoy them. I don't want to come off strong, but this conversation mostly comes down to personal tastes and is sort of dominating the thread too much. Best if we leave it alone.
Hey, no worries. And very sorry about your experiences with hackers. That wasn't honest of them, and wasn't fair for you.

But I agree, let's start a new conversation chain! How about those unloved quickly forgotten adolescents, the Middle Evolutions! Stuff like Charmeleon or Dewott or Pidgeotto. Anybody prefer a pokemon's teen years over their beginning or final stages?
 

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But I agree, let's start a new conversation chain! How about those unloved quickly forgotten adolescents, the Middle Evolutions! Stuff like Charmeleon or Dewott or Pidgeotto. Anybody prefer a pokemon's teen years over their beginning or adult stages?
Floette is fucking adorable while Florges is not. Honestly one of the best designs of Gen VI getting ruined by its evolution.
 
Floette is fucking adorable while Florges is not. Honestly one of the best designs of Gen VI getting ruined by its evolution.

The design is okay, but dear lord did they have to give it that pose! They broke the poor thing's back! Now it looks like a very infamous and cliched female comic book pose. Gross.
 
Middle stages are a bit hit and miss- some are pretty mediocre/generic/awkward/forgettable like Croconaw, Gurdurr, Servine, Luxio, Tranquill, Grotle, Staravia, Prinplup, Sealeo, Pignite and Quilladin (it bothers me how the last two don't have necks)

On the other hand, there are some awesome designs like Bayleef (my favourite of the line), Quilava, Charmeleon, Haunter, Dewott, Herdier, Pidgeotto, Fletchinder, Nuzleaf, Flaaffy, Vibrava, and Wartortle. Special mention to Gloom that oozes personality and is a big contrast to its other evolutionary relatives. Weepinbell is also the right amount of dopey but still cute. Poliwhirl is quite cute and popular as well, everything about it just fits. Graveler seems generic but I like how it has four arms which strangely disappear when it evolves. Nidorina/Nidorina are simple like most Gen 1 designs but I really like their anatomy and Nidorina has the right amount of sass/toughness for a once cute female Nidoran. Rhydon is now considered a middle evolution but its design is still so good as a final form like it originally was. Electabuzz is a great design as well.

Also Kakuna is the coolest cocoon design wise. Actually, I really like the cocoons- even Silcoon and Cascoon since I like how they fool you at first and you have to look closer. I like those silk strands they have in the original sprites, they look strange without them.
 
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Middle evolutions are tricky to me. As mcFlareon said, some tend to be rather awkward, or extremely forgettable. Some are a pain to raise, wheras others are just annoying *cough, tranquil, cough*. For some three stage 'mons, they'll be what you spend most of the game with, until you finally get the final form(most pseudo legends).
To me, it depends on design and stats.
 
While Weepinbell is adorable, I think GameGrumps captured the true feeling of it pretty well.



More on topic, I think a lot of middle evolutions are okay at best, at least with starters because at least those ones you can remember. Some have the problem of being under designed (Charmeleon.) and some have TOO MUCH design like Quilladin who is just so ugly it is one of the reasons I almost never choose Chespin. Frogadier I think is one of the best middle evolutions because it has Froakie's bubble trait, but it's starting to become a ninja like how Greninja will be when it evolves.
 
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Not sure if this is too controversial since this is Smogon, but Generation 6 is my favorite gen because it started to lower the barrier to getting into competitive Pokemon, thanks to breeding becoming more reasonable and the excellent ladders. Yeah I know, XY's postgame is terrible, and it has a very small dex of new mons, but I still can't help but love gamefreak getting more self aware about playing on cart. Let's hope they keep improving in Sun and Moon :D.

On a totally different topic: I love Hey You Pikachu, because I think that game is so bad its good. As far as I'm concerned, Pikachu is actually a rat that eats swords, makes soups out of magnemite corpses he finds in caves, and can only fish effectively when one yells "HARDER, HARDER!"
 
On the topic of the Squirtle family's designs, their art designs are the main reason why they're my least favorite of the Kanto starters. Don't get me wrong: on their own, Squirtle, Wartortle, and Blastoise are great designs. But... I don't understand how Wartortle becomes Blastoise. I mean, look at them.

Other than both of them being blue turtles, what about these designs tells you these two Pokemon are related? They're following two radically different themes. Wartortle's finlike ears and cascading suggest a mythical inspiration, like this creature is some kind of river spirit from Japanese folklore. Then, Blastoise comes along with none of that lore attached and instead packing water nozzles in his shell, like some kind of robot. You know how people started claiming in 4th-gen how Pokemon were starting to look like Digimon? Well, here you go, ten years prior, a turtle who wants to be Machinedramon / Mugendramon. Individually, nice designs, but it throws me how my little river demon transforms into the latest bio-experiment for the fire department.

Compare the Squirtle family to the Bulbasaur family designwise. Bulbasaur's line is, IMO, the standard for how evolutions make sense. It's an obvious development: dinosaur grows bigger, and plant grows with it from a seed to a bud, then blossoming into a giant flower one the dinosaur is fully grown. It just makes sense. I think the secret to why the family is designed that way is its middle stage: Ivysaur. I don't know for sure if Ivysaur was the first of its family designed, but it does have by far the lowest index number of its family, which suggests Ivysaur was probably created first. From here, it seems like you could sensibly craft a "before" and "after" phase to this creature and have it work well, and they did.

IIRC, Blastoise was a design they had since the earliest drafts for Pocket Monster, right? Obviously, they would want to use that design for the finished product. However, due to its size and power, the artists must have decided Blastoise would be a final stage once they conceived the idea of Pokemon evolving into new forms, so they had to make additional creatures which could become Blastoise. I just wonder how the themes between forms changed so drastically. Unless [puts on monocle and speaks hoity-toity] the Squirtle family is supposed to represent the duality of Japanese culture: the struggle to keep your ancient traditions giving way to the embrace of new technology. [/hoity-toity] But I'm not going any farther into that MatPat bullcrap.
 

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... Wartortle's finlike ears and cascading suggest a mythical inspiration, like this creature is some kind of river spirit from Japanese folklore.
Wartortle is actually based on a Japanese mythical creature, the minogame (a turtle which lived 10,000 years and grew a tail of seaweed, similar to Wartortle's Pokedex description).
 
On the topic of the Squirtle family's designs, their art designs are the main reason why they're my least favorite of the Kanto starters. Don't get me wrong: on their own, Squirtle, Wartortle, and Blastoise are great designs. But... I don't understand how Wartortle becomes Blastoise. I mean, look at them.

Other than both of them being blue turtles, what about these designs tells you these two Pokemon are related? They're following two radically different themes. Wartortle's finlike ears and cascading suggest a mythical inspiration, like this creature is some kind of river spirit from Japanese folklore. Then, Blastoise comes along with none of that lore attached and instead packing water nozzles in his shell, like some kind of robot. You know how people started claiming in 4th-gen how Pokemon were starting to look like Digimon? Well, here you go, ten years prior, a turtle who wants to be Machinedramon / Mugendramon. Individually, nice designs, but it throws me how my little river demon transforms into the latest bio-experiment for the fire department.

Compare the Squirtle family to the Bulbasaur family designwise. Bulbasaur's line is, IMO, the standard for how evolutions make sense. It's an obvious development: dinosaur grows bigger, and plant grows with it from a seed to a bud, then blossoming into a giant flower one the dinosaur is fully grown. It just makes sense. I think the secret to why the family is designed that way is its middle stage: Ivysaur. I don't know for sure if Ivysaur was the first of its family designed, but it does have by far the lowest index number of its family, which suggests Ivysaur was probably created first. From here, it seems like you could sensibly craft a "before" and "after" phase to this creature and have it work well, and they did.

IIRC, Blastoise was a design they had since the earliest drafts for Pocket Monster, right? Obviously, they would want to use that design for the finished product. However, due to its size and power, the artists must have decided Blastoise would be a final stage once they conceived the idea of Pokemon evolving into new forms, so they had to make additional creatures which could become Blastoise. I just wonder how the themes between forms changed so drastically. Unless [puts on monocle and speaks hoity-toity] the Squirtle family is supposed to represent the duality of Japanese culture: the struggle to keep your ancient traditions giving way to the embrace of new technology. [/hoity-toity] But I'm not going any farther into that MatPat bullcrap.
Same could also be said for Charmeleon > Charizard. You have this unassuming weird lizard thing then BAM, randomly becomes a long-necked dragon with wings and a completely different shade of orange. I guess that's why we loved them so much; they're both cool little guys that randomly become something FRIGGIN' AWESOME
Good call GF.
 
Dragonair will always be the best in the Dratini family. Dragonite on its own is adorable and I really like it, but I can't stand how overweight and sunburned Dragonair becomes when it evolves.
 
Dragonair will always be the best in the Dratini family. Dragonite on its own is adorable and I really like it, but I can't stand how overweight and sunburned Dragonair becomes when it evolves.
That's the exact reason why my shiny Dragonair will never evolve. From a beautiful pink to a horrible green isn't a nice transition at all. Wow now that I think about I really don't like Dragonite. It's not a bad Pokemon in terms of stat/design, but in my eyes it will never be as good as it's pre-evolved form.
 
WHAT?

I love Dragonite. I love it more than Dragonair. It's cute. It's orange. It looks like something that will hang out with you and let you fly on its back. It's friendly. And it will END YOU AND THE PATHETIC EXCUSES THAT YOU CALL A TEAM.
I'm certainly not saying that Dragonite is a bad designed pokemon. But the transition from majestic snake dragon to this orange, clumsy looking dragon is just too much. If, as said earlier, it had been part of another evolution line, its design would have worked so much better. I do not hate Dragonite, I just think it is waisted potential.
 

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