LogFAQs > #973896388

darkmaian23 posted...

How exactly does competitive Pokemon work? I thought they were single player games.

Ever since the game started there's a hidden points distributed from defeating different pokmon and this determines what stats your pokmon will gain when they level up.

The competitive scene has players play mind games against each other because people can choose to distribute the points how they like and you can make a pokmon bulky or very fast with high attack. Typing advantages means reading your opponent by for example switching into a water pokmon when you know they're going to use a fire move or predict a possible neutral move,.etc.

The pokmon games themselves are quite time-consuming to train a single pokmon (although they've made this easier as more games come out). Some people created a battle simulator online that Nintendo seems to be okay with and doesn't target. They was initially was another sim but the current one everybody uses is called Pokmon Showdown.

On Pokmon showdown training a Pokmon becomes as easy as selecting it from a drop-down list and moving some sliders to determine its stats. Fill in a few blanks to give it an item, choose it's ability and in the newest iteration, it's tera type. Tera type is a neat new mechanic where a Pokmon can change its primary typing so it can benefit both defensively and offensively.

PS lets you create as many teams as you like and compete against other players in different tiers based off the usage stats of the Pokmon on the teams (OverUsed, UnderUsed, RU, NU ZU). Ubers is where Pokmon banned from OU usually go. This tier consists of most of the box art legendaries and some overpowered standard Pokmon.

Playing on Pokmon showdown is a fun way to play the game as it restricts and balances the game in other ways besides Pokmon usage such as the sleep clause which keeps your opponent from just making your entire team go to sleep (only one at a time is allowed). Or strats like increasing evasion are banned because it's too heavily luck based and Pokmon with minimize would be painful to fight.

In any case I love showdown and you can play it even on your mobile device.