I am an old player of NatDex AG, and I almost only (99%) play NatDex AG every day, hours per day.
It took me years to understand exactly why I was playing on Pokemon Showdown so much, and I finally understood. It is because of the creative aspect. Obviously building a new team is a creative act. But what I had not understood before is that the simple act of playing, choosing one move rather than another move, is like painting using one color rather than another color from the palette of colors.
And I suspect a lot of you play for the same reason without even knowing it. You play when you are bored. A netflix series would not do the job because you have no interaction, you do not act, you play no role in it. Food is just pleasure, and to be creative you would have to cook but there is no interaction with another human being, you would cook alone, no fun. So here you are... connecting to Showdown to play NatDex AG again.... because you want, you need, to create something beautiful, something meaningful that you can share, that someone else can witness. You want to create a beautiful game where your victory was a beauty, a piece of art (together with pumping your ego etc, everything that applies to other tiers apply here as well, I just focus on the particularities of that specific tier, why this tier rather than another tier).
I don't play NatDex AG in order to achieve some rank (I often play with random accounts)
I play for fun. For the creativity fun. Because I enjoy winning in new ways, finding new strategies, fun strategies, surprise my opponent, it's almost an art.
For example, I have a team based on putting the opponent asleep (sleeping clause not in AG).
Or for example I created some very strong "only level 1" FEAR team that I play once in a while. Clearly I do not play it to achieve any ranking, instead, I play it because it feels different. Playing with only level1 pokemons has a different taste. Every strategy has a different taste. And when I feel full of the same food (so to speak) I create new teams with new tastes. Or I pick some old team that I haven't tasted for a while. And hours and hours go by... every day.
(By the way that level 1 team has recently stopped working because "Berry Juice" has been banned. Why?)
Bottomline: keep Dynamax, keep all items, keep everything. NatDex AG is about creativity. The mother of all Anything Goes tiers.
In NatDex AG, any thing goes... any. There ought to be at least one tier like this. We need to preserve this. If you want you can rename it "The Wild", but honestly "Anything Goes" speaks for itself... and that is what players (those who actually play that tier) are looking for... looking for somewhere where anything goes..
(coding side, we could simply select in TeamBuilder which mimick is activated from a dropdown menu (similar to how we select which type for Tera). So far the list would be "Dynamax, Terastallize" and we would select one of those two. That would solve the in-game problem as this would only display one activation box in-game. And it is future-proof.)
If you are not convinced, you can always make a test. Create a new tier named "NatDex AG Wild" where everything is allowed (all items and Dynamax etc). Wait 2 months. Then at the end of the 2 months compare the number of live played games vs the other tier. You could even keep both tiers if the number of played games is high on both, or remove the less played one.
It's free to test. Nobody is forced to play anything they don't want. Nobody loses anything.
Please.. we ought to keep at least one tier where anything goes...
This post was in reply to the thread to which I have not sufficient privileges to reply: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/the-identity-of-national-dex-again.3711414/
It took me years to understand exactly why I was playing on Pokemon Showdown so much, and I finally understood. It is because of the creative aspect. Obviously building a new team is a creative act. But what I had not understood before is that the simple act of playing, choosing one move rather than another move, is like painting using one color rather than another color from the palette of colors.
And I suspect a lot of you play for the same reason without even knowing it. You play when you are bored. A netflix series would not do the job because you have no interaction, you do not act, you play no role in it. Food is just pleasure, and to be creative you would have to cook but there is no interaction with another human being, you would cook alone, no fun. So here you are... connecting to Showdown to play NatDex AG again.... because you want, you need, to create something beautiful, something meaningful that you can share, that someone else can witness. You want to create a beautiful game where your victory was a beauty, a piece of art (together with pumping your ego etc, everything that applies to other tiers apply here as well, I just focus on the particularities of that specific tier, why this tier rather than another tier).
I don't play NatDex AG in order to achieve some rank (I often play with random accounts)
I play for fun. For the creativity fun. Because I enjoy winning in new ways, finding new strategies, fun strategies, surprise my opponent, it's almost an art.
For example, I have a team based on putting the opponent asleep (sleeping clause not in AG).
Or for example I created some very strong "only level 1" FEAR team that I play once in a while. Clearly I do not play it to achieve any ranking, instead, I play it because it feels different. Playing with only level1 pokemons has a different taste. Every strategy has a different taste. And when I feel full of the same food (so to speak) I create new teams with new tastes. Or I pick some old team that I haven't tasted for a while. And hours and hours go by... every day.
(By the way that level 1 team has recently stopped working because "Berry Juice" has been banned. Why?)
Bottomline: keep Dynamax, keep all items, keep everything. NatDex AG is about creativity. The mother of all Anything Goes tiers.
In NatDex AG, any thing goes... any. There ought to be at least one tier like this. We need to preserve this. If you want you can rename it "The Wild", but honestly "Anything Goes" speaks for itself... and that is what players (those who actually play that tier) are looking for... looking for somewhere where anything goes..
(coding side, we could simply select in TeamBuilder which mimick is activated from a dropdown menu (similar to how we select which type for Tera). So far the list would be "Dynamax, Terastallize" and we would select one of those two. That would solve the in-game problem as this would only display one activation box in-game. And it is future-proof.)
If you are not convinced, you can always make a test. Create a new tier named "NatDex AG Wild" where everything is allowed (all items and Dynamax etc). Wait 2 months. Then at the end of the 2 months compare the number of live played games vs the other tier. You could even keep both tiers if the number of played games is high on both, or remove the less played one.
It's free to test. Nobody is forced to play anything they don't want. Nobody loses anything.
Please.. we ought to keep at least one tier where anything goes...
This post was in reply to the thread to which I have not sufficient privileges to reply: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/the-identity-of-national-dex-again.3711414/