Let me tell you all something. I like forum tours a lot, they're by far my favourite context in which to play Pokemon. But I practically never partake in forum tours here on PO. The reason for this stems from what I want out of Pokemon- I greatly prefer to stick to a handful of metas I am comfortable with and become proficient at those (to varying degrees of success). If there were regular forum tours that stuck to standard ORAS/GSC/RBY OU (only one of them I'd consider myself above average at tho), you would find my appetite for them insatiable. This is one major reason I love Pokemon Perfect- their GSC/RBY seasons deliver plenty of activity, and go a long way in satisfying this desire (sorry for plugging another site btw, but I thought it relevant). As long as I'm feeling a sense of mastery and/or feel I'm improving, I will enjoy what I'm playing. This is at odds with your typical forum tour- the custom rulesets in most forum tours introduce many restrictions that create an altogether separate environment in my eyes, and since there's no regular playerbase for these new metas, I feel I never get to fully explore them. More to the point, I dislike adapting to something that is ultimately ephemeral. However I can see how they appeal to other people- the custom rulesets create fresh and interesting metas, which test not a person's proficiency in a specific tier, but generalised battling skills as well as adaptability and creativity. So I thought it would be interesting to get people's perspectives on this- do you prefer specialising in a specific tier(s) or do you like trying many different metas?
@The Forums Tours - I've noticed that a lot of the tours nowadays are like that and I somewhat agree with you. There's not much we can do about it though. The Tournaments forum is very user-driven; it's hard to make someone host something other than what they want to host which is why you don't see a lot of traditional tours here. Come July, there will be something that will be added to Forum Tours that will hopefully contribute to its activity and promote the running of traditional tours so stay tuned! Now onto the actual question - I usually specialize in one tier because I feel that it is too much to keep up on multiple tiers, especially because I'm not too avid of a player. I enjoy experiencing the developments of a tier rather than skipping between different tiers because I don't like one at a particular moment. For some reason though, I do tend to switch to entirely different tiers across generation shifts. For example, I started playing BW UU, and then I moved onto XY Ubers for some time and now I mostly play ORAS OU. Why? I'm not entirely sure myself.
jack of all trade master of none keep batlin and maybe u get good at one!!!! i think people usually try a bunch of tiers at first, especially if theyre just released or something and then they find an affinity for one of them like i didnt really like bw ou but bw uu was fun etc i just like to play tiers im ok at
I like variety. Maybe it's from playing in the Tournaments channel, but I have a tendency to try to play everything, and there's probably only a couple of tiers that I've played that I don't have any interest in playing again. One consequence of playing this way is that it can make it difficult to get really good at some of the newer tiers since most of them are constantly shifting, but there are several other tiers, like most of the old gen tiers, that for the most part stay the same (until crystal_ discovers something else :v). I think one advantage of playing a variety of tiers is that it helps you get a better perspective for the game as a whole, and there are a lot of strategies and concepts that are applicable to many tiers.
I honestly prefer variety. Sticking to a single tier (In my case, LU) for a very extended period of time became very monotonous for me, so I decided to try out other tiers and metas to see something different, to get out of the cycle. It is true that everyone eventually becomes very good at one thing but, I always love to try new things.
Variety, for sure. As @SkyPhoenix noted, sticking to one tier for an extended period of time can make things extremely boring, especially when the meta only really changes with the tier shifts or bans. Playing other tiers also gives me some ideas for other tiers. For example, seeing a certain strategy in UU may inspire me to try to create something similar in NU and see if it works. Best way to put it is like this: If you have a game system of any kind, do you just buy the one game for it or multiple? My thinking coincides with that.
I prefer specialising, because focusing on more than one or two tiers is annoying (though I do follow other tiers relatively decently to stay at least a little knowledgeable of them). Variety is also overrated and isn't necessarily a good thing.
As a Monotype player, I definitely prefer specialization. Like, I'll just make Monotype teams of about 3 or 4 different types but never experiment with the rest.
This sums up my perspective excellently (except maybe make it two or three tiers). I mean my favourite tier is RBY OU, and it's crazy how little variety there is compared to other generations- idk like, 80% of the time you can reasonably expect all 4 of Chansey/Tauros/Lax/Egg on the same team. But I still love playing it. I've always thought in terms of metagame knowledge it's extremely easy to learn (learning mechanics makes up for it lol), but because it's so different it's a little difficult to translate skills- when teambuilding in a newer gen you suddenly have to account for so many more threats, and it can make teambuilding extremely challenging- a common trap I fall into is getting overly concerned that I might be weak to a certain threat and worrying so much about it that I forget to cover something else that's significant, or my team just doesn't fit together well. There's other reasons why I don't think RBY is as readily translatable, but they're not important to the thread. How I pick a metagame to play is an interesting process in and of itself. If RBY had a bigger playerbase I don't think I'd actually play another tier, but as it stands there just aren't enough battles for my liking. I lurk old gen stuff a lot and have dabbled in all old gen OUs before so I have a rough idea what they're like, and I decided that based on my experience running slow-paced teams in other gens and the fact that I don't like EVs I decided to try GSC (and I started liking it as soon as I stopped trying to use explosion offense). Whereas ORAS OU is just "the main tier" and POT is a thing so I was like "oh well, might as well learn it". Idk, just random reasons like that are enough to prompt me to try out a tier. I've tried doing the whole "jack of all trades, maybe master of them too" thing but I just couldn't do it- I found it impossible to invest in several different tiers at once, especially since that places a hefty burden on teambuilding- you want a range of teams available in a given tier to make things interesting, multiply that by several tiers and well now I have to make a couple dozen teams- what's that? Tier X just banned something? There goes several of my teams. At least that's the way I see it. It doesn't help that I'm not good at whipping together teams at a moment's notice. Like I have no idea how you can keep on top of a volatile tier like NU and a whole bunch of other metagames as well
I usually take the lazier road which gets me many place. Skills applicable on multiple situations when specialised in. For example when it comes to Pokémon I like to be good at building.I don't necessarily need to have had played a tier before,as it merely takes a friend to point out the threats to the mon am building around in order to get my build right. That said, playing one single tier for a significant amount of time without switching to another gets extremely boring for me.(Bar Ubers. That s#!t is always boring.) Variety probably stands as something I like better I guess, but I try to be proficient in at least one thing I find genuinely interesting.