Smogon

Smogon is the premier website in competitive Pokémon battling. It offers detailed, well-written guides on battling strategies for both beginners and pros alike. The website was founded by chaos (one of the developers of NetBattle) and is considered by many to be one of the best competitive Pokémon battling websites.

The term 'competitive battling' within Pokémon refers to battling against other human players using either Wifi Battling via the Nintendo DS, the downloadable program NetBattle [1] or any of a number of battle simulating bots, usually found on IRC. Both of these are online simulations of the Pokémon games, where one may build a team of Pokémon with relative ease. Experienced players, 24-hour servers, diverse communities and an opportunity to test out strategies are just a few advantages of online battling, but perhaps the most vital advantage is battling against sentient players rather than AI - which requires a significant amount more intelligence and strategy to succeed.

Smogon has three primary faces through which it operates: the Smogon website and forums, #smogon on dejatoons.net, and the Smogon NetBattle server.

Smogon has attracted a great deal of negative attention due to their position as being one of the fastest, and certainly the most popular NetBattle server on the registry: many lesser entities have taken to "Smogon-hating" due to Smogon's apparently monolithic dominance over smaller servers. Many of these Smogon-haters have taken to trolling or spamming the Smogon server and forums, often by use of floodbots and other scripts.

Being the most populated server, Smogon is also disliked for its inevitably high population of newbies which have occasionally repelled users and made them look for solace on smaller servers with far stricter moderation. Others simply believe the Smogon population to be immature, such as Serebii.net, although their claims are questionable.

Residents of the Smogon forums are referred to as "Smogoneers" or "Smogonites" and have at one point been rumored to be Nazi sympathizers due to an avatar fad involving swastikas. The Smogon motto is "Pokémon on the Internet: Let's make it happen" and their mascot is the ever-smiling Pokémon Koffing, the name Smogon itself being the German moniker for this Pokémon.

Smogon's moderators are very strict, and constantly troll the message boards for posts that they deem unworthy, and often post themselves when they think they're opinion might be appreciated. Posts can be removed because of bad spelling/grammar, false information, criticizing smogon or it's policies, or simply because the moderators feel it should be removed/edited. Moderators reserve the right to remove or edit any posts, without reason and without permission from the poster in order to preserve Smogon's tradition of being the most intelligent competitive battling community. Because users cannot view deleted posts or even know that a post has been deleted, Smogon is able to effectively control what opinions it's users have access to while using their boards.

Smogon's main website has been down indefinitely since the American release of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, though many of the features that were part of the main site have been integrated into the message boards. Smogon is affiliated with NetBattle and many, if not most, serious competitive battlers are now part of Smogon.

Administrators

• chaos
• skarm
• Vineon
• Articuno64
• Jumpman16

External Links

• Smogon
• NetBattle

This article was based on this Wikipedia article: Smogon As such, this article and all further modifications are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License only.