The Steel Ninja said:
Valiance, I'm not saying it's "wrong" to have that mentality, and I could not give a rat's ass about the hardcore PvP addicts or their community.
Then don't make threads about them.
Pokemon is basically an RPG version of Mega Man. Isn't that all that really matters? The fun, to me, is in figuring out the weaknesses and what attacks work best, not how to create a loophole the player can't normally break out of (such as the FEAR method that used to be so widely used). That's not fun to me, that's forcing someone else to lose because you're exploiting moves in ways the developers probably never meant to happen. I think that once you view games as "I HAVE TO BEAT THE OTHER PERSON NO MATTER WHAT BECAUSE I MUST BE PERFECT" rather than "Yay I'm having fun", a part of your gamer's soul has died forever.
Some attacks that work best aren't really attacks at all. Why would stat-increasing moves be in the game if they weren't intended to be used? Why would damage-over-time (well, turns) moves be in the game if you weren't supposed to have the option to leech-tank until the Pokemon dies?
Why would a focus sash be in the game aside from the exact purpose it's being used for?
Why would there happen to be a move that makes you do damage to the enemy pokemon to bring him down equal to your own health, and there ALSO just so happens to be an item that allows you to survive an attack with 1 hp?
It's programmed into the game for a reason. Players are going to come up with clever solutions to better themselves in a competitive arena. Dunking didn't always exist in basketball.
And a lot of people who play competitively don't view the game as "I have to beat the person no matter what." They view it as "Why hinder myself by doing something I know is less than the best possible?"
edit: Oh, yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the F.E.A.R. strategy has counters because if it didn't the game would be pretty broken. I'm sure it does, and if you haven't thought of one, I'm sure someone else has by now, and just as the game is "water beats fire which beats grass," there's "strategy X beats strategy Y which beats strategy Z."
