The State of Competitive Let's Go!

[mhykah]

Either I'm the first to post about LGPE's in-game formats, or I'm in the wrong place. (Surely, this counts a cartridge format?)

There are two formats which are supported in-game. The first is No Restriction which is what much of the preliminary competitive discussion has been revolving around. Pokemon are set to Lv 100 and are able to have max AVs (i.e. candy bonuses) in every stat. This makes for a very slow and bulky metagame.

There is however, a second format which seems to have been glanced over by many, and the format which I believe competitive LGPE should be based upon. This format is lablled as Normal Rules and has also been referred to as Candy-less. Pokemon are set to Lv 50 and all AVs are taken away, leaving only base stats, nature, and IVs. Here I'd like to discuss the viability of this second format in hopes that the community takes interest in this before players have too many bad impressions from No Restriction.

There are some reasons for why I believe Normal Rules is better:

1. No AVs mean that players won't have to grind for candies, making the game much more accessible:
2. The time limit for both No Restriction and Normal Rules is 20 minutes. A heavy-stall metagame may have games which exceed this limit.
3. Faraway battles use only Normal Rules, so this format would be in line with playing with random opponents. On the other hand, No Restriction battles can only be done with friends.

There are some interesting things which I have tested. Mewtwo and Mew are not banned in either rule, including Faraway battles. For this reason, the community might want to consider the over-centralisation of these two and Eevee if a "Normal OU" would be considered. This has already been recently implemented on the Nexus Showdown server which bans Mewtwo and Eevee.

Also, team preview is on. There is no species clause.

 

[DragonWhale]

Sadly, the online battle feature is so poorly implemented due to the lack of rulesets/clauses, poor timer, and no "random" matchmaking (and no hack checks, apparently), that it's not worth discussing it as a competitive "official cartridge format". It would probably serve more competitive merit if it's discussed as an "other metagame" where rules/clauses can be implemented.

You can find a thread discussing the candied format here (and perhaps a candyless format later): https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/pokemon-lets-go-candy-formats.3643931