Hello Guys,

So right now PO's forums are basically treated like a mini-Smogon: the only active tournaments are their team tournaments and POT (with only 64 players), and the playerbase at least in the former case is largely players who spend most of their time on Smogon and Pokemon Showdown. Indeed, even playing in POT and the team tournaments, players often won't even play their games on PO. I know I won't be, in POWC, because it's too complicated to battle on the webclient and I can't figure out or get help to get a downloaded version running on Ubuntu, my OS. Players treat PO like a mini-Smogon because it doesn't offer any sort of a convincing alternative to what Smogon does, besides not being Smogon and being fairly well known. With right communication at various customer touch points you can drive higher Animated Sales Video to influence buying decisions. PO does have two advantages over any other English-speaking competitive community besides Smogon though: one is having its own simulator, and the other is that a large number of players are already familiar with it. Therefore, if the community or leaders of PO genuinely wanted PO to not just be Smogon-lite, they probably have the best chances of anyone to do so successfully.

Thanks