Smogon 2013 in a Nutshell

Vader defies the rule of birthday threads and posts a birthday thread for himself. He then proceeds to draw comics for his own amusement. For some reason, every year seems to start like this.

A user claiming to be GGFan makes a return thread, but the sad part is that nobody remembers who GGFan is. As per standard procedure, random trolls like him are immediately locked and banned. DM totally quits Smogon when he finds out it was the real GGFan; he has not posted or been on his account since.

Zracknel makes logos so nice that he becomes a Super Moderator; the actual revealing of him becoming a Super Moderator is spoiled when the admins ask him to make a logo celebrating his promotion to Super Moderator.

kokoloko becomes a Super Moderator as well, because all of the admins felt the Super Moderator position was feeling a bit underused.

Create-A-Pokémon ends its post-mortem discussion on Aurumoth that began late in 2012 regarding which step they failed at. Unfortunately, the step they failed at looks to be every step.

Antar introduces weighted statistics for PS to combat bad players affecting the tier lists. So now you actually need to prove Magikarp is good in RU if you want to alter its tier placement. Suddenly the Metang@s wanting to be in RU required items to do so.

The Smog issue #24 is released, which features the 10th Judge-A-Pokémon panel. In their analysis of everything in the metagame, Ginku and McMeghan discuss the many different versions of 'gg.'

Smogon detective WaterBomb realizes that user Xephyr is in fact an alt of the infamous user Bryne. After some more detective work, he is quickly banned, making the sports and League of Legends threads safe once again.

Smogon corrects an injustice, resulting in the most infamous smiley for months (´･ω･`).

The great pixel war begins, where Policy Review users discussed if Pokémon Showdown! should implement pixel HP or stick to the displayed percentages. The percentage side won out, but even if you were counting using pixel totals, you'd be able to calculate a majority.

Deoxys-D is banned from the BW OU metagame. The then-Smogon President Ronaldaron Reagan is heard shouting "Mr. Game Freak, tear down this wall."

The Smog Issue #25 celebrates the many avatars for Pokémon Biology made by resident artist Bummer, while Tobes tells everyone how to not piss off the simulator mods (seriously go read that article again, read it every month, no every day, no every time you go on Pokémon Showdown!, this is important).

Cathy becomes an admin again; users celebrate the return of a level-headed and responsible programmer.

The Smogon Mentorship program is launched as a way to introduce new users to the site. Because of them, the always-helpful introduction thread makes its grand return so at least new users have no excuse to make introduction threads in the wrong forum.

The Other Metagames examines how they plan to move forward with player-bases in what is already a very niche community. Philip7086 gets a scrolling badgeset to display all those greyt badges that he has acquired over the years.

The absolute worst Smogon Tour finals occur. Because DestinyUnknown accidentally loads the wrong team, gr8astard wins. Everyone struggles to imagine how there could be a worse OST.

chaos gives Rodan, shade, and Faint a forum mods because Rodan made an inforumal request to have them to improve the forum of the forums. When he got it, everyone celebrated with a semi-forumal. Rodan infracts mattj for 'being named mattj.'

After a forumal request by every sane Super Moderator, Rodan, shade, and Faint lose a forum mods.

Smogon IRC forum is created to coordinate IRC channels and activity. It's not the place where you can spam as much as you do in #pokemon, though. See here.

shade is an a forum mod, again. You could say these recent events in a forum are... shady.

The Wifi Wolfpack win the Smogon Premier League in spite of the bans and auto-losses they suffered throughout the tournament. Some still believe they shouldn't have stood a ghost of a chance.

Pokémon Showdown! is taken over by hordes of fan-drawn sprites. The effort involved two months of hard work, and was billed as our XY art preparations. A full list of all sprites can be seen here.

Issue #26 of The Smog explores how to tell which Arceus your opponent is using in Ubers. Jukain examines which Pokémon are most annoying when playing in-game. In addition this issue marked the changed from featured tier articles to spotlight articles, which give writers greater freedom on what they would like to write about.

To combat the endless bickering and combativeness of the Smogon elite, site owner chaos makes a thread to thank everyone for their hard work, scrapping the initial plan to fly to everyone's house and give them a big bear hug.

Theorymon gets his own private subforum so he can discuss with other badgeholders how to handle the new implementation of the XY metagame across the site. Nobody pays attention for months until it's too late.

The fifth CAP of Gen V, Malaconda, is completed. The Grass / Dark snake with an apple on its tail is immediately added to the myth of how Arceus created the world of Pokémon.

The Smog debuts Issue #27, with an interview involving Jellicent and Vader: two of Smogon's most curious (and drug-abusing) personalities.

The first live Smogcast is created, but somehow a mysterious user pretended to be Lavos Spawn during the recording. While the perpetrator is not behind bars, we did get a good film adaptation on it.

Smogon is hit by on-and-off attacks that bring the site to unpredictable chaos. Speaking of chaos, he actually realized the site was down because he could no longer pay for his weekly luxury beard trims (they are really expensive and his beard grows incredibly quickly). Once the site was fixed, he was able to get his beard trimmed in peace.

Great Sage attempts to split off from the site and make his own community. Instead of him splitting from us, we decide to split from him. We aren't trying to cast any judgement here, but perhaps he isn't as great of a sage as he says he is.

Issue #28 of The Smog involves cookie sneaking in his own satire magazine, The Oddish, while PDC discusses Aldaron's proposal on the rain complex ban and if that proposal was the one to rain supreme.

The Great Library is introduced to a forum to discuss media from TV to video games. It was called the second great Internet Renaissance.

Smogon, along with many other popular Pokémon fan-sites, is attacked by a mysterious defacing hacker. If your site wasn't attacked by a hacker during this time, it only means it wasn't a top-tier Pokémon website.

The Smogon boards switch to XenForo, and Joim evolves from Moderator to Administrator faster than any Bug-type Pokémon could ever evolve.

Site leader chaos doesn't like seeing signatures that are fatter than he is. He makes it his personal mission to destroy fat signatures.

An overall graphic redesign of the badges turns the alumni badges fully grey, mostly because the simulator mod badge and its alumnus version could never be properly differentiated.

Team USA East win the World Cup of Pokémon. Their 6-2 win against Team Asia proved which East was the real beast.

Because giant and blurry 3D pictures are not ideal for simulator play, the Smogon XY Sprite Project begins to get front and back sprites for every new Pokémon. To date, over 35 spriters and animators have contributed to making sprites in the style of the BW DS games. Aldaron becomes an Administrator, and we can all blame affirmative action for that.

Cathy ends her short tenure as an admin. Smogon leadership reconsiders its policy of linking to shock sites in IRC channels.

Raseri becomes the new head of the NU tier because former NU head Zebraiken had been using Smogon even less than some of the NU Pokémon.

Mega Evolutions are revealed to the world, some fans scream betrayal because Game Freak once said they would never go past 3 stages of evolution. Digimon comparisons are made immediately. We finally have an answer to the question of why Ampharos no have wool.

The 2013 VGC world championship finals occur. Notable was the revealing of Mega Kangaskhan ("what a lame Mega the baby just pops out can't wait for it to suck") and Cybertron losing to the dreaded Thunder Wave + Swagger combination. Three-time champion BlueCookies actually watches a masters worlds finals, something he has never done, as he is normally playing them.

The RU tier bans Snow Warning from the tier because it is just an ice ability. This was backed by tons of discussion, so it's not like there was snow warning it was going to happen.

UU bans Froslass due to her ability to set Spikes on the entire tier. Some suspect the tier leaders of banning all Ice-types because of the summer heat.

After countless delays, Issue #29 of The Smog is released. It features a cool Konami Code ability and details the very true story of the SMOGDOON that seems to occur so often.

Rodan finally gets the Moderator badge he has longed for all this time.

Doubles becomes the next official Smogon metagame and prepares for full adaption to official status in time for XY. Doubles distinguishes itself from the VGC format by keeping more standard Smogon practices such as no Item Clause, 6v6, and allowing event legends.

Issue #30 of The Smog features Rodan discussing how to survive Smogon whilst badgeless, just as he gets his own badge. Plus raps his way into an article when he was supposed to be discussing laddering theory.

a forum is officially a goner and is replaced with the old forums, Congregation of the Masses and Firebot Development Lab. No longer are serious discussions plagued with trolls attempting to be funny and no longer do trolls have to worry about people trying to take the discussion seriously.

Pokémon X and Y officially launch after a long period of leaks. Not to be outdone, Zarel launches the Pokémon Showdown! Gen VI beta with constant updates to data, bug fixes, and sprites, courtesy of all the contributors who assisted with gathering all the necessary assets.

The new OU council is formed, comprising of Aldaron, Haunter, McMeghan, M Dragon, and Nachos. So when something is banned in OU, it's because one of these guys couldn't handle it while laddering, and not because they recognized those Pokémon are unhealthy for the tier or over-centralizing. It's certainly that other thing because all of them are completely ban-happy players.

Discussions begin on if Smogon should adapt to level 50 as the standard level for competitive battles. The community elects to keep level 100, as everyone agrees that level 100 is just a more bad-ass number. Not even Wi-Fi players care we didn't make the change.

The Create-A-Pokémon Contributor badge is created to award the players who assisted in the competitive process of CAP. They chose the Glacier Badge because every CAP is unique like a snowflake, and like the glacier the badge is named for, the process to making a CAP is slow and meandering.

Pokémon Showdown! Forums are now moved back to the Smogon Forums for matters such as room suggestions, and general news is posted on the Smogon Forums. Discipline Appeals are still a part of PS! Forums because accounts are linked. Now there is no excuse for anyone to post discussions on the PS! Forums nobody cares nor reads about anything posted there.

The final CAP of Gen V: Cawmodore, a giant seafaring bird that specializes in Belly Drum sweeps and unleashing giant Falcon Punches.

The OU council quick-bans Blaziken and Deoxys due to their powerful and centralizing nature within the tier. Despite the posting of well-thought-out explanations, many outsiders who lack any experience with competitive battling decry these bans because these Pokémon 'are their favorites' and feel it is unfair.

The official start of the dark saga of SPL drama where everyone bickers and nobody is happy about any change. Everyone demands one thing, only for it to happen, then demands the exact opposite. Everyone is forced to argue on things they have long stopped caring about. With the tournament now gearing up to round one, everyone is starting to actually enjoy themselves again.

The Smogon Facebook page hits 100,000 likes thanks to exponential growth since the launch of X and Y. Half of the people commenting on the page, however, don't even seem to comprehend what competitive battling even is.

The OU council quick-bans Gengarite, and thus Mega Gengar, due to its powerful and centralizing nature within the tier. Despite the posting of well-thought-out explanations, many outsiders who lack any experience with competitive battling decry the ban because this Pokémon 'is their favorite' and feel it is unfair.

Smogon site leader chaos begins to ask the most attractive users to model the upcoming T-shirts. Unfortunately the T-shirts still haven't come in, but I'm sure the spring fashion show will have all the hottest T-shirts.

The Battle Spot forum is made official for Smogon members to play the Wi-Fi 3v3 battles as played on the 3DS games. No we didn't ban anything why would you even think that slap yourself for me if you thought that.

With the delays of the Smogon Premier League, THE_IRON_KENYAN starts the Random Battle Smogon Premier League, which manages to be more predictable and less drama-free than most normal SPLs.

After four months, the Smogon XY Sprite Project completes the front and back sprites for every newly released Pokémon. They continue to rework, revamp, and animate every Pokémon sprited thus far.

Rodan combines the two most popular threads (that of the Album and Quote Database) into one super thread.

The OU council quick-bans Kangaskhanite and thus Mega Kangaskhan due to its powerful and centralizing nature within the tier. Despite the posting of well-thought-out explanations, many outsiders who lack any experience with competitive battling decry these bans because these Pokémon 'are their favorites' and feel it is unfair.

Because Pokémon Bank crashed the Japan servers after only ten minutes, the application is pulled and delayed worldwide. We still have no idea when this bank will vault open.