I'm not naming any names here.
It's not so much that gimmicks tend to be bad (in fact for many people something has to be bad to be called a gimmick), or that trolling the ladder with "gimmick teams" is annoying. It's simply the sheer attitude that comes with using gimmicks. It's bad enough on Shoddy chat where people think they're the best trainer in the world because they beat some noob's OU team with NUs. But when it happens in this forum it just irks me a little. I'm certain that I'm not alone in thinking this.
People seem to view the use of an uncommon Pokémon to beat the ladder as some kind of ridiculously high achievement. People seem to think that just because they have unorthodox measures against the top Pokémon their voices matter that much more. (Actually, this happened in Garchomp and Salamence threads too... look at what happened to that.) People grind up the ladder, post an RMT, and then watch as their teams get copied and spammed, and they use this to justify acting like a big shot, a rebel against the "competitive" mindset of other players. It's fine that people post uncommon sets to try out from time to time to beat common cores, but then there are some people who seem to have some kind of contempt against the state of the metagame, and who somehow feel that mentioning the Pokémon they like to abuse the most every chance they get is somehow an improvement to this.
Guess what? No one cares! I sure don't. It's come to the point where each avatar is just an indication of what flavour of elitism is going to be presented in the post. But at the end of the day I look at every single person who's had this "my gimmicks are best yo" attitude - in this forum as well as in others - and not a single one has had any sort of significant presence on Smogon, tournament or otherwise, other than maybe C&C. All you guys are doing is squelching the spirit of simply playing the game to learn and improve. I got tired of the predominant culture of this thread a long time ago. Indeed, the Dunning-Kruger effect is alive and well here.
The recent Magcargo charade and WhiteQueen's rise to the top of the ladder serve merely to accentuate my point and parody the state of this community. The people arguing about Magcargo typically don't post much here, but what they do post is usually much more profound than most of the rest of the thread. They're much more commonly seen on IRC, planning matches against each other on the CAP server because the ladder isn't good or fun enough. We laugh at the Magcargo argument now, but honestly the rest of the thread hasn't been much better. Then there's WhiteQueen's hail team. From what I've gathered from conversations on IRC, WQ was just gaming the ladder with a team that she probably wouldn't take to a tournament. "Whatever." Not that it's a bad team - if you spam Ice moves enough you'll freeze your counter, end of story - but you get the idea. It's not exactly a tremendous feat to do well on the ladder with a flawed team, even a mono-team.
I haven't been on Shoddy ladders much recently because Shoddy 2 is apparently in the home stretch and I'm basically going on Shoddy and PO to participate in testing projects (currently the Arceus test the only thing, followed by CAP 11 testing and more UU testing in the future I guess). I was never a prolific pole-dancer like some of you guys are anyway :P So I can only imagine what UU is like at this very moment, or what WhiteQueen's team is like. However - I know I've said this many times before but - some things just don't change about UU. People never have to bend over backwards with gimmicks or near-gimmicks to beat the fad of the day. A team I've barely changed for a year and still only changed in response to CroakDoom still works, and indeed CroakDoom is the only consistent combo in my memory that's ever given it severe trouble, other than maybe Life Orb Magmortar and Honchkrow. It's just a simple team of a redundant offense backed up by a tried-and-true defensive core, nothing fancy. Of course I try out suspects and NUs - most half-decent people do - but in the end I tend to fall back on the timeless classics.
So what I'm basically saying is, let's just play this game instead of nitpicking at each other's flaws to boost our own egos.
