Smogon 2014 in a Nutshell

v, aka vader, defies the rule of birthday threads and posts a birthday thread for himself. He then proceeds to act like a comic for his own amusement. For some reason, every year seems to start like this.

The Smog Issue #32 is released, featuring a detailed explanation on what checks and counters are because so many people don't understand these terms (read this), how you should use Assault Vest since so many people use it incorrectly (also read this), and Smogon 2013 in a Nutshell (not to toot my own horn, but it was good and also should be read).

An established collection of smo koans is created to pass wisdom down to the next generation.

To thwart users being huge jerks, Endless Battle Clause gets an additional ban of Leppa Berry + Harvest/Recycle.

Mega Kangaskhan is elected to remain in Doubles after the first XY Doubles suspect test. Just because she can hit double the amount of times doesn't mean the two opponents aren't going to try and do the same.

TheMantyke becomes the VGC leader of Smogon, and in return, he swears that he will get as many people in Smogon T-shirts as possible at every VGC event.

LonelyNess ends up spending a week in jail for not paying a $50 fine, thus proving the cops in Missouri are not horsing around.

Pokémon Showdown! adds the XY model renders to the simulator in order to add more of a 3D feel to the game. Unfortunately, you still cannot use your 3D glasses you stole from the movies to play in actual 3D.

Ace Emerald becomes the first new Super Moderator of 2014, and he elects not to change his name to Ace Diamond in response.

In the smoggy depths of Smogon, the elite few of the community gathered for the first time, to create what would be the most powerful, secret, and civil discussion community that the world has ever seen. They were... the Smogmoginati.

Rodan flaunts his status as best Firebot, Cong, and Circus member in the Smog Awards. I don't even think he played a Circus game in 2014, let alone a good one; please have mercy and don't allow this to happen again. The Smog Issue #33 is released with the 2013 Smog Awards, a detailed, entertaining guide from the Aron Chef, and a pair of articles about fitting in on PS!.

Joim allows for PS! replays to be embedded on the forums. Bummer becomes a Super Moderator to help lead the general art community, and he is actually very happy about this and not at all bummed out at the higher level of responsibility.

The Victory Road subforum is created for the OverUsed forum. This special forum allows discussion between top level players without the flooding of incessant chatter from people who think beating the Elite 4 and playing a few Wi-Fi battles makes them top players. Just because the subforum allows discussion doesn't always means it happens.

Smogon Doubles elects to remove Sleep Clause from the metagame. This actually makes the game more interesting and doesn't mean the players will fall asleep in battle at all.

The Stark Sharks win Smogon Premier League 5 against the Cryonicles. With an impressive 7-5 finals victory, all this blood in the water only meant one thing...

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For April Fools Day, Smogon updates the infamous April Fools Day sprites with XY and CAP renditions, along with full shinies for every sprite. The Smog staff (aka skylight) start rumors that now only badged members can write articles, and Google starts a very dedicated map challenge.

Haunter announces that the Tiering Contributor badge will now require a subjective element of forum presence and discussion of the suspect tests, thus ensuring that robots will never again get a badge.

After much careful deliberation, Swagger is banned from OU to Ubers. This is a result of the numerous cases where SwagPlay makes the game just plain annoying to play. Primary reasons include Prankster + Swagger + Thunder Wave-based teams that allow sweepers like Mega Gyarados and Ditto to easily sweep crippled teams and the removal of player autonomy. Players who really want to play with this strategy are free to hit their head upon a wall repeatedly to get the same effect.

Murkrow, Meditite, and Swagger are all banned from Little Cup. Those who said Murkrow would never get banned finally get to eat crow.

The release of The Smog Issue #34 allows kokoloko to explain his UU tiering methodology and features an article on what Pokémon got buffed the most in XY OU.

Smogon Wi-Fi forums implements a Blacklisted custom title to mark out users that have cheated out other users. This is not the custom title that you want to have as a member.

Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire are announced. Now, I cannot wait for "Sinnoh confirmed" to be a knowyourmeme page.

The Water / Fire cephalopod Volkraken is brought from the sea to our CAP metagame. The deep sea squid was built around creating an offensive or defensive core with lesser used OU Pokémon.

Goddess Briyella begins posting cries for the Create-A-Pokémon whose cries have so far been suspiciously mute. They are soon added to the server to the squeals of many.

tennisace creates the Smogon Name and Profile Changes thread in the Mentorship forum (now Smogon Starters). While you can only get one name change for each account, he is glad to remove any obnoxiousnumbernames4234s or ~*~weird_flairs~*~.

Smogon's Facebook page grows so big that there are more Smogon Facebook likes than Smogon Forum members. You all out there can join our forums if you'd like; it's not as if we bite or anything.

In an effort to beat the full Baton Pass chains that could dominate the top of the ladder, OU implemented a ban which imposed a limit of three users of BP per team. For those of you who never played against a real BP team and would like to think they have enough experience in doing so, just imagine an un-phazable and un-killable wall slowly pushing in on you with no chance of you ever breaking through unless you get six critical hits in a row.

The badgeholder forum Inside Scoop is closed permanently, then just as quickly reopened. Senior staff threaten to start using their judge gavel as an actual hammer to keep a certain level of discourse.

The new Strategy Dex is released to great fanfare and celebration.

Site leader chaos requests that everyone cools it with the 12-year-old levels of profanity; in reaction to this event, a filter was created to allow mods to know who the real (BAN ME PLEASE)s are.

Hollywood becomes the leader of the Other Metagames, thus making the OM forum 200% sassier. They needed some reason for him to stay on as a Super Moderator.

The OU council decides to nerf Baton Pass to just one user of the move per team. Now, if you want the experience of being strangled by a chain, you have to have it done in real life by an actual metal chain (trust me; the pain is similar).

The Smogon community agrees to ban Deoxys-D and Deoxy-S from OU. It seems keeping in a forme-changing monster isn't part of OU's DNA.

After a long period of contemplation, Birkal steps down as leader of Mentorship so he can concentrate on berating new users again. However, you should still direct all your questions towards him.

The Smog has a staff vacancy, so Vacate is brought on board to be a resident HTML guru and provide vision to this lovely e-publication.

The Smog Issue #35 is released and covers the lost art of warstories, how to safely meet other Smogon members in real life, and what Oglemi learned from changing his avatar every day.

To expand the world of Pokémon-themed e-zines, The Player is released, with an exclusive focus on Pokémon Showdown! and the people who make it a reality.

Team Brazil beats Team US East in the World Cup of Pokémon with a score of 5-3. A link to a livestream that occurred on the streets of São Paulo, Brazil can be found here.

Rodan gets a medical condition most common in pregnant woman, among other #justrodanthings.

Another slash to the broken Pokémon of OU results in Aegislash being banned from OU to Ubers. Community testers determined its two powerful formes and slow Speed make it an over-centralizing force in the OU tier no matter what way you cut it.

The tier below NU is brought to XY. PU is introduced as an Other Metagame. PU doesn't actually stand for anything, but it does sound like how much this tier is filled with stinky Pokémon.

Misdreavus gets the axe in Little Cup, while Fletchling survives in their latest suspect test. Poor MissyD's time has come anyway, as when you get an extra evolution tacked on, you don't stand a ghost of a chance in LC.

BW sprites are added as an option to Pokémon Showdown!, ideal for users who are fans of pixel art or just don't like giant 3D renders eating their bandwidth.

Se Jun Park wins the 2014 Pokémon VGC Championships in the Masters division, with his novel use of Follow Me Pachirisu in a format where not all the best Follow Me/Rage Powder users were readily available. I'm not sure why people thought this strategy with Pachirisu would suddenly work in singles, though.

With a 78% majority, Mega Mawile is banned from OU to Ubers. Possessing a great typing, Intimidate, Swords Dance, and Sucker Punch, it could easily ruin teams with a minimal effort. Even if you didn't get the Intimidate drop, it was still intimidating.

All the forum badges are given a shiny new coat of paint, but they still don't allow you to use HMs outside of battle.

The Social Media badge is released, allowing for a greater rainbow of colours in badge sets, and also to recognize all the tweets our forum members send out to their 60 followers.

Site leader chaos brags about how Smogon has a confirmed Facebook account, which not even the official Pokémon account has. We join the ranks of the official Nintendo account, Jay-Z, and Fox News commentators in the social media world.

With an influx of ever crappier names for CAP 19, Dogfish44 submits "Ohmagod" with the legendary reasoning of "A combination of "Ohm", the unit of electrical resistance, "Manta", the design, and "God", because have you seen the size of it?". The name is voted for en masse before the CAP mods invoke their true dictator powers. While we cannot actually confirm that power abuse occurred, it does seem more fixed than anything involving Aurumoth.

Setsuna retires as head editor of The Smog at the release of Issue #36. In his place, Toast++ gets the position and the PayPal account along with it. This issue introduced the first puzzle page and also features a look at XY OU Metagame trends and how Aegislash's absence has improved the metagame. The next Smeargle's Studio Update article appears after a year-long hiatus.

As if smelly Other Metagame PU wasn't bad enough, FU becomes the latest OM reality. I don't even want to explain what those initials stand for.

CAP 19 results in the creation of Ohmagod, more commonly referred to as Plasmanta. The concept of this manta was it would dissuade the opponent from fainting it or have some presence on the game even after it has fainted.

With the release of the Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire demo, Smogon and Project Pokémon members such as Bond697, Kaphotics, Slashmolder, SciresM, KazoWAR, and ΩDonut begin the great dump of demo data. Apparently, the developers left just about everything we needed to know in the demo. Competitive ORAS begins on Pokémon Showdown! a month before the actual games are released.

Smogon launches a special limited time T-shirt sale to the general public, for which Smogon users are recruited to model the shirts. The sales goal to print is broken in an hour, hundreds are sold, and it is considered a massive success for a fake university shirt brand. We also sent all those lewd comments about skylight wearing the shirt to the police.

Layell shows Smogon a declaration of love.

Mekkah shows Smogon a true declaration of love.

Smogon puts to rest an infamous Smogon Hate Thread and creates a Smogon Love Thread. Unfortunately, TM45 is still not seen as a viable move.

After much heartbreak, site owner chaos decides to close the PS! Room Suggestions forum because nobody was actually suggesting rooms of any value. No longer will people be able to suggest Shrek is Love rooms, Drug Dealing rooms, or Sex Ed rooms. Truly a sad day for Smogon culture. The Smog Issue #37 is released and covers weather in Doubles, along with a look at the Mega Evolutions in ORAS.

Shadow Tag is declared to be banned from Ubers due to some controversial vote-discarding, which is immediately overturned by site owner, chaos. Shadow Tag is henceforth not banned from Ubers as the community voted. Thus chaos makes a thread to clear up the events and makes it clear that the recent PS! server malfunctions have nothing to do with this suspect test. Through this, chaos vows to still find some way he can ban admin Haunter.

Smogon Mentorship forums gets a paint job and a new name as Smogon Starters. If you are starting out on Smogon, you can post here to establish yourself in the community. The only fear you should have is how nice our mentors will be to you!

User PROBLEMS puts forth a proposal to ban or nerf Mega Rayquaza from Ubers, as it is the first Pokémon with a near-800 BST that has not only a good ability but also the capacity to Mega Evolve without holding a Mega Stone. Despite the recent events of Ubers doing weird stuff with bans, all see the validity in ousting a Pokémon that will have close to 100% usage in the tier. The same week, the Anything Goes tier is created, and Ubers becomes an official competitive tier.

Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire are released, and because players on Pokémon Showdown! were already playing with everything new, we just play the game at our own pace to enjoy it for once. The OU council immediately quickbans Mega Salamence because it really, really did not need a Mega Evolution to begin with.

Oglemi deletes Firebot, but only for a day. This results in the greatest tale of our time.

Tesung wins the coveted pink trophy of Smogon Tour 18, going with the dang Clefable spam we saw out of his first finals match.

Molk molts his previous form and becomes the Super Moderator that RU needed him to be.

Smogon celebrates ten years on the Internet. "Nil Sine Pokémon" rings throughout the ears of all users everywhere. Here is to another great decade of competitive battling! The Smog Issue #38 is also released, featuring interviews with McMeghan and reyscarface as well as details on the new status of Mentorship.

A request for badgeholders to not minimod by tagging mods results in more mod-tagging to close the thread. However the moderators finally stand up for themselves and do not close said thread.

In order to start giving Smogon likes an actual meaning, v decides to give prizes in exchange for likes. Finally, Smogon gives an incentive for you to be liked. Crystal_ also discovers RBY game mechanics that no simulator has ever properly incorporated, including the slamming discovery that Body Slam doesn't paralyze Normal-types.

Old generation sprites are now the default option for old generation battles on Pokémon Showdown!. That retro pixel feel has returned for all players to enjoy!