Trivia / Smogon

• Blooper: Delphox' analysis pages for Generations VI and VII showed Shiny Delphox in place of normal-color Delphox. This was initially left in because Shiny Delphox "looks cooler", only to be changed back to normal-color.
• Development Hell: The Generation V analyses took a really long time to get put up on the main site—most of them were complete and ready for submission several months before the main site was ready and did it. In fact, with new changes happening even years after Gen V ended, some articles are still currently outdated today as of this writing. Ditto for Generation VI, since the analysis section of the site was being redesigned.
  • Generation VIII analyses suffered this hard^note and still are today as of this writing; Expect to see even OU articles slapped with 'These are sample sets before we work on new analyses for the Isle Of Armor/Crown Tundra meta. Stay tuned!' as a result of the new way Pokemon returned in the DLC expansions, which caused tons of rises, bans and drops in tiering not once but twice, to say nothing of adding to the workload with new analyses to write, meaning what information that was written up was rendered obsolete. This overwhelmed the writers, and many of them lost motivation as a result. In order to avoid this for the ninth generation, analyses reservations became for individual sets rather than the entire Pokémon, reducing the overall workload for analysis writers.
• Fan Community Nicknames: People who play by their rule sets are known as "Smogonites". The site's official Facebook and Twitter will occasionally use the term.
• He Also Did: One of the artists that has worked on several issues of The Smog, Bummer, is also the creator of the web comic Rare Candy Treatment.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: A number of staff members and prominent players have been let go due to serious offenses, both on- and off-site:
  • One of the earliest major examples was the case of former tournament director Bloo. Following the breakout success of a player named Style in the eleventh Official Smogon Tournament (OST), chat logs were leaked of Bloo giving advice to Style's opponents prior to her matches with them, which she won handily. This raised suspicions that Style was Bloo's alt, and as a result she was disqualified right before the finals of the tournament. Shortly afterwards, Style and Bloo were banned from Smogon. Bloo admitted in a Pastebin that she and Style were one in the same and that she rigged the tournament in order to face opponents she had already given advice to. She also revealed that she had intended to shed her tournament director position in favor of being a prominent player, with OST 11 being intended to catapult her to relevance.
  • Goddess Briyella was a moderator that specialized in the Little Cup format. It was discovered that he was masquerading as a lesbian in order to get close to and sexually message women, including those who were underage, which resulted in him being permanently banned from the site.
  • Shortly after Goddess Briyella was exposed, Haunter, the former head of staff, was also discovered to have send manipulative and sexual messages to women, including one who was underage. This resulted in him getting banned and, along with the aforementioned Briyella, becoming Unpersoned on the site, with messages discussing them being removed from the forums.
  • During the eighth annual Smogon Premier League (SPL VIII), the Circus Maximus Tigers team saw incredible success in the Ubers tier thanks largely in part to a user named Mazar, who curb-stomped his opponents with unconventional sets seemingly tailor-made to beat them. This raised some eyebrows among opponents and spectators alike, who suspected some form of ghosting^*A form of cheating in which a player chats with other players, whom assist and guide the battling player, during important games was occurring, but nothing initially came from these suspicions and the Tigers would go on to win that year's League. However, six months later, it was discovered that Mazar, in addition to being ghosted, was using a specialized bot (nicknamed the "Mazarbot") to scan all of his opponents private games and join during the brief window in which the game was public (due to games needing to be manually set to private) on an unregistered account in order to feed Mazar his opponent's teams^note The reason Mazar began playing Ubers was because Overused simply had too many games to parse in order for the bot to do its job. This resulted in Mazar getting banned, SPL VIII being retroactively cancelled, the Tigers having all of their trophies stripped, and Ubers being excluded from all future SPL tournaments due to the incident. Additionally, Pokémon Showdown implemented a feature that allowed players to preemptively set their games to private, preventing the bot from functioning ever again.
  • Several forum staff were either banned or stripped of their positions in August of 2020 after it was discovered that they hosted a private Discord server dedicated to posting hateful comments about and doxxing certain members of the community. Because this included the vast majority of the staff of Firebot^*Smogon's designated off-topic/shitposting forum, the forum was shuttered before being replaced with Smogoff roughly a month later, which had stricter rules compared to Firebot.
  • pokemonisfun, a prominent Underused player and host of the UU sub-community pokemonisawesome, was banned in 2023 following the revelation that he sent unwanted sexual private messages to other users.
  • Lord Emvee was a fairly popular competitive Pokémon Youtuber and Smogon user who specialized in utilizing unconventional EV investments he dubbed "Chinese spreads", after the Chinese playerbase's tendency to use odd and highly-specific spreads. In April of 2024, it was discovered that he was in a sexual relationship with another user who was 16 while Emvee was 22 at the time, a fact that he was aware of. As a result, he was banned from Smogon, his former collaborators (including pokeaimMD) distanced themselves from him, and he locked his Twitter account, with his remaining social media accounts going radio silent.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things:
  • Tier rises at the tail-end of generations have always been controversial, with some infamous examples including Azelf in Gen 6 and Mesprit in Gen 7. However, the tipping point came when a bunch of players thought it would be funny to get Hitmontop, a Pokémon with no viability outside of PU, to rise through the tiers. They managed to force the Handstand Pokémon to rise to NU and it saw decent usage in RU as well. Ultimately, this forced Smogon to bar tier rises near the end of Gen 8 in order to prevent further tier manipulation, an unprecedented move for the website.
  • When Generation IX content was added to Showdown, Revival Blessing was coded to be selectable by Assist in National Dex tiers, as logically, the move is not coded to be inelligable for Assist, a move that doesn't exist in the game. This led to the discovery of a National Dex AG strategy involving Prankster Liepard using priority Assist to select Revival Blessing. Since Assist has much more PP than Revival Blessing, this allowed for the move to be used far more often, and at priority so that nothing short of better priority could put a stop to the strategy. As a result, Natdex AG became a wasteland of teams consisting solely of five Liepards using this strategy and one Pawmot or Rabsca with Revival Blessing to create a battle that would take ages and would likely result in a forfeit from the opponent just so they can move on with their life. This strat, called Revivecats, was so omnipresent that many demands to disallow this strategy, or change Revival Blessing to be inelligable for Assist, were made by people just trying to enjoy the tier, but unfortunately, this could not be done due to the nature of both National Dex and Anything Goes. In the end, the Natdex AG ladder was cut entirely, making it only selectable in private matches, and was replaced with National Dex Ubers.
  • Following several incidents in which OU tiering surveys were flooded with responses from spambots, the surveys were changed to be forum-based instead of via Google Forms, requiring a forum account in order to prevent spam.

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