Pokébase and its community represents the naïve innocence of childhood. No, children are not innocent little angels. They are hell-spawned demons. But the naïveté of a child oft mislabeled as innocence is, I believe, essential to this website’s charm and consequently its success.
You see it every time. They sign up between ages 8-14 and make an absolute fool of themselves. They post in inappropriate sections, answer questions they don’t know the answer to. They get downvotes. They feel targeted. They lash out, they spam. But slowly start to understand the structure of the site and you actually see them grow up. I have watched so many grow up, and grown up with them. But when they’re older, they become more distant. Join other groups. Find new interests. Develop personal responsibilities. They seem to have less and less time or indeed even interest in returning home.
Is that not a perfect analogy of life's development? Born totally ignorant and naive, stumbling on oneself with gentle guidance through the world, learning the dos and don'ts of a functioning society.
Where else can you find this on the internet? Certainly not on social media. But what’s so unique about this site’s design is the Q&A structure that is inherently immune to the bloat you see on traditional forums. And since it natively hosts a collection of useful data relating to Pokémon, it’s easy to find and fun to stick around. Earning points is fun. Asking questions is fun. Answering questions is fun. Because the Pokémon games are equal parts simple and complex, there's no barrier to entry but there's plenty of room for growth. You fall into a healthy loop of playing, conversing, learning, and answering questions. And ideally you should fall back into it as each new game alters the recipe just enough.
I’ve tried numerous times to write about this, but the balance is delicate and hard to emote in appreciable terms. Unfinished drafts exist on my hard drive about what makes this site and its community so captivating to different types of people.
Because that sort of analysis still lies a bit beyond myself, I will instead focus just on my subjective experience.
I will focus on the piece of the site that is objectively missing from the “good ol’ days”. The Pokémon Showdown server. And I believe it is the piece of the puzzle which makes this site whole, and serves to fill the void between each new game’s release as well as entice older and experienced users.
The community’s need for a dedicated PS server, like an infant’s cries for its mother, seems trivial and silly. Why not just go to any other server for battle? Does it really matter?
Sincerely, it does. It matters a lot.
The Pokémon Showdown server was a degree of separation away from the juvenile happenings of the Chat Room. It was like where the big kids would hang out. Without it, the big kids have to find the Pokémon Showdown equivalent of a city café. A crowded café with lots of distractions and people you don’t want to be around.
So the little kids have their safe haven, the chat room. And the big kids have their safe haven. You could even be banned from one without being banned from the other. Although this loophole apparently does not transfer over to tournaments cough.
Having a close community of friends to battle with and discuss competitive Pokémon, which goes largely ignored by the casual fans who tend to sit in the Chat Room, was a key element and without it I would have never gotten into the game.
PokémonDB introduced me to competitive Pokémon. And, I’m willing to bet, plenty of others.
The PS server solidified the community and legitimized it as a competitive outlet. It satisfied participation in engaging and accessible breaks from the site’s tedium with succinct purpose. Due to the strict focus on mainline Pokémon games and the site's general approachability, you were enabled seamless introduction to an aspect of Pokémon many would otherwise find daunting or miss entirely. The more you learn about the game, the better you get at competitive, the more technical questions you're inclined to answer on the site. This is just one tiny sliver of perspective, of course. But I happen to know for a fact this is highly addicting for kids especially. Checking activity between PokéBase, Meta, Chat, and Showdown was a loop you could perform endlessly on repeat for an entire day if you wanted to. Anyone with an internet connection could play for free. This is increasingly important now as the current games are more expensive and require NSO subscriptions.
The server was a gateway to competitive play for our users, and a gateway to our community for anyone stumbling upon it. And I'm not entirely sure another site like this exists for competitive Pokémon. Other communities are barely communities at all. It's just not as quaint.
Even if we brought back tournaments now I’m not sure it would be successful without a dedicated server.
Without a Showdown server to act as our central hub, the competitive sect of our community died. And without a club for the big kids to hang out in, they migrated to Discord, where they stayed. I wish very badly I could write about this site without an inevitable mention of Discord. I think Discord in many ways supplanted this site and (persuading) PM (into) creating a Discord server for it sealed our fate. All that remains is bitter nostalgia and the satisfaction of answering questions. While it lasts.
Pretty soon, you’ll be able to upload your leaked copy of a Pokémon game’s source code to your favorite AI assistant and ask it anything you want.
Perhaps it’s just destiny.
I jest (slightly). But I do think, in addition to reinstating the Showdown server, we must offer something else to contend with the competing accessibility of Discord. I find it necessary to maintain an attentive userbase. I do genuinely fear the ramifications of AI though.
Pokemaster's original intentions notwithstanding, I believe this website's functional purpose is acting as a fun and safe atmosphere for kids or otherwise communally homeless Pokémon fans to play, indulging their interest by way of enriching their love of Pokémon and deepening their understanding of the game. A role it has dutifully fulfilled.
Many people feel they've been raised by this community. I do too. I grew up with six siblings 10+ years my senior. They all left by 2012. I was homeschooled and had no friends. I was lonely until I found you.
I apologize for the insufferability you had to endure from me.
I don't pretend to summate the entire essence of this site or arrogate everyone's experience to just these descriptions. As stated, I've contemplated many angles. But I think I adequately expressed, in fresh taste, a legitimate perspective worth reflection. I was inspired by nebbyy's plea to detail just why the PS server means so much to us, and why I believe its absence contributes to the ghost town we see.
