The Growth of Competitive Pokemon

[lilyhollow]

There are no real advantages to playing Pokemon in real life as opposed to online. You get to socialize more or whatever, but other than that you have to deal with all sorts of exciting handicaps, such as: much slower gameplay, ridiculous time-wasting grinding, cheaters cheaters cheaters. Terrible, and all of these things are totally unnecessary to your end goal of legitimizing Pokemon as a competitive game. That can be done online by improving tournament rulesets (everything should be Best of 3 at least) and introducing prize money. This is like a thousand times more viable than going out and scrounging up a handful of willing players, hoping and praying that they don't try to cheat everyone else out of their money after several painful hours of slooooow link play (or whatever it's called) nonsense.

Of course, no one really talks about the thousand-times-more-viable solutions, because they're "not viable enough."

Maybe it's a familiarity thing. Like, people go to the VGC events and see how fun they are, so they come here and think about how great it would be if the community were more like that as a whole. Maybe if some of you went off and played some other online game with actual payouts and actually decent tournament rules, that would incite you to come back here and tell everyone how excited you are that, surprise surprise, good tournament rules and prizes are good things for the community, and that the "cumbersome issues" that go along with them are insignificant by comparison.

 

[Ulevo]

I think many reasons have been cited already by previous posters as to why Pokemon in a VGC setting on a local level wouldn't fly in many regions, but I can't stress the emphasis of team building enough; I personally spend a lot of time just thinking about strategies that are out of the box, original from the cookie cutter mould, ready to break out and reshape the metagame. Players looking to compete have to run through strategies that are going to guarantee them that they're separated from the pack, that they have that extra edge. With the amount of time it takes to construct a team, how are you going to test these ideas efficiently? You can't.

The moment you create a team you feel is tournament worthy and it fails to meet your expectations, you're back to the drawing board, tossing out all your hard work. While this may have costed you a little contemplation time on Shoddy, in game you're throwing away all the time you spent breeding, grinding, EV training, meeting specific in game requirements to make the processes easier, et cetera. And for what? Just so you can go through the process to do it all again?

Shoddy allows players to effectively test teams through efficient trial and error, so they can advance as players more quickly and become established. Sure, you could do this via Shoddy and then implement your team in offline tournaments, but even the metagames between the two settings would be vastly different. There's no guarantee it would work.

 

[Expert Evan]

Based on past experience, we've actually had pokemon tournaments over at Gaming Etc. located in Stratford, CT for awhile but then other competitors stopped showing up and it's been a struggle just to organize them. Hopefully with the popularity of VGC it might happen again, but the place is more popular for TCG, yugioh and other board games it seems, and for awhile brawl on the wii.

 

[PI-Dimension]

Well, it's a lot harder to hide that you're going to play in a real life pokemon tourney, than one on the computer. I'm sure some people here, and everyone, don't really want everyone knowing that they play competitive pokemon

 

[Olliert]

When i asked myself this question, i immediately thought that it was because of the lag, people in the ssbb community hate playing in lag and the amount of bullshit over wifi etc. on shoddy we are able toplay on a simulator that alreadyhas all the rules and winning conditions built in etc. whereas many smash players feel they have to play in offline tournaments as the only way to show their real skill, plus there's the draw of already established tournaments with cash prixes, but then again there are loads of people who go to ssbb tournaments just for the community and so in that aspect i don't know why there are so little irl tournaments as the community aspect would be just the same.

 

[Ulevo]

Well, it's a lot harder to hide that you're going to play in a real life pokemon tourney, than one on the computer. I'm sure some people here, and everyone, don't really want everyone knowing that they play competitive pokemon

This admittedly would be the case for some, but for others it is a non-issue. I myself am not embarrassed or feel the need to hide that I enjoy competitive Pokemon, but I get away with that fact because I leave it out in the open and display confidence in it. While not everyone is that way, it comes with the territory of being a competitive player. Many people look at competitive Yu-Gi-Oh or even Smash players like they're alien at first glance until they actually see what's involved, and the age and player base.

That said, I don't think the need to hide competitive Pokemon from the rest of the worlds peering eyes is the driving force behind the lack of competitive offline Pokemon's success.

 

[jolteon-vaporeon]

Could they auto- IV, just like how they auto-level you? that would cut some slack in a lot of breeding stuff. Then there's Hidden Power... but for the pure accessibility as you guys mentioned, it might be a neat idea despite how it changes the metagame--and mind you, unless they're related to smogon, not only they be oblivious to the metagame, but be new to hidden power--they (as in little kids) won't be so happy when they realize that celebi could simply OHKO their Scizor despite massive type-ical advantage. Just an idea^^