@sumwun "Still, sometimes it is the inclination of players to rebel against the "accepted standard", for a multitude of reasons. Players find flaws, whether perceived or real, in the state of the OU metagame, and attempt to forge their own path, and develop their own designs based on their current knowledge. […] many times it results in an inferior design, an artifact of ignorance and poor planning. […] It is not the intent of the author to teach openmindedness and diplomacy"
- Smogon's Philosophy (I encourage you to read the full article; much like the community itself, the entire article is not like this, but this part does raise some eyebrows for me)
I'm personally somewhat neutral on Smogon, although I do think their presence in the Pokémon community as a whole is a net positive, since Smogon has developed a lot of very useful tools like Showdown (most obviously), and their standardized sets are quite useful, especially for newer players, but they do sometimes conduct themselves in a way that comes off as very elitist ("the wisdom of the accepted standard" is also a phrase used in that article), so I can certainly see how they alienate a lot of people.
To keep this thread from being derailed, it might be better to continue discussion of Smogon on user walls instead of here.
