I have long considered the ADV ladder to be close to the best on PS (its main competitor being the current generation Random Battle one in my eyes). It is fairly active, see more overlap between tournaments legends and ladder heroes than in anywhere else, and has developped its own quirks, memes and culture to a remarkable extent by Pokémon's standards for an old format. See why I wanted to make something to celebrate it? Ladder achievements threads are nothing new, but looking at the usual format (which you can see here for the CG OU thread), I did not feel like I wanted to keep track of gimmicks like
B1 Too Much Choice: Use a team with 6 Pokemon having a Choice item. (!showteam required)
(no jab here - it's just about confessing that this thread's format was made out of my own convenience). Instead, I thought about making it a bit more RPish with the Emerald Battle Frontier Symbols, which limited it to 7 categories with gradual scales to allow players at all levels to have a chance at getting their achievements recorded. After a bit of discussion with fellow ADVers, everything was figured out and the thread went up.
It has seen its bit of success so far. Witnessing M Dragon's crazy ladder performance which set a record for the ages in elo, Mead shooting down the 4 Lucks achievements in a single battle, more Monotype teams being seen on the ladder than ever before, and a stellar win streak by W3K who came out of nowhere to conquer the Tactics achievement with a huge margin before being one-upped by johnnyg2, but commendable regardless. Ever better, this format was adapted across
all classic generations (
plus ORAS!) by other contributors, with sixfold the number of great ladder performances alongside. I'm really glad, and perhaps even a bit proud it took off so well.