Competitive Pokémon refers to the player vs. player battles that take place when playing Pokémon. I wasn't saying that Game Freak was competitive Pokémon. I meant that, when playing Pokémon competitively, lore doesn't matter. Lore only matters when playing through the story of Pokémon games because lore is a feature of the story and has nothing to do with battle mechanics. Competitive Pokémon is all about battle mechanics.
Sure, but decisions regarding certain things aren't made in a vacuum, especially in the context of the retail games, where the battles are at least nominally part of the universe.
Case in point, the only reason we're having this discussion is because of lore: Regigigas is a legendary and doesn't match your expectation. If it wasn't a legendary, but was a random Pokémon like Slaking or Archeops that just happened to be rare / one of a kind (as is the case with something like Lapras or Volcarona) we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Being a legendary is a lore reason, and that created the expectation for some, including you, that Regigigas should be stronger. It very well could raise the expectation to whoever responsible in Game Freak that certain Pokemon should be banned, especially because the Battle Tower exists within the universe of Pokemon and even if you do extend some level of suspension of disbelief, there are some things that you can't really do without creating plotholes.
This entire thread is just making my point that you cannot meaningfully remove lore from game mechanics when you're discussing something like "Pokemon X should be stronger."
They announced two days ago that mythical Pokémon would be allowed in competitive play for the first time ever, which is long overdue. As I mentioned before, mythical Pokémon are much easier to get nowadays. Many of them can be obtained through save data from other games or DLC nowadays. Even if players missed an event to obtain a mythical Pokémon, they can easily trade for it. Many people on this site and places such as Discord are often more than happy to trade their mythical Pokémon. I was able to easily obtain most of my mythicals over the years through trading.
Cool, but now isn't the past. Historically they didn't allow them, ostensibly due to the rarity event.
Maybe they'll rethink some things now, but that doesn't change what their previous reasoning likely was (a question of rarity and not power).
Mega Metagross was indeed used in Doubles, very much so in the previous generations. If Mega Evolution ever returned to Pokémon, Metagross would be used much more often in all aspects of competitive play because of its great stats, ability in Tough Claws that makes it hit even harder, and its ability to serve as an excellent answer to Fairy-types. Ever since Pokémon moved to the Nintendo Switch, the dynamic of competitive Pokémon changed drastically because many different gimmicks, Pokémon, and moves were left out, which changed the usage rates of many Pokémon. That doesn't mean that such Pokémon still aren't good to use, however. Either way, my previous point still stands, as Doubles is not the only way to play Pokémon competitively and Singles play is still the most popular way to play Pokémon. With that, it doesn't make sense for Game Freak to care only about Doubles. Also, Game Freak rarely cares about what's "broken." In Doubles, support Pokémon with the ability Prankster are broken, as are Pokémon such as Kyorgre, Groudon, and Landorus-T, but they're still running strong in Doubles. If Game Freak cares so much about what's broken, especially for Doubles, why haven't they nerfed Landorus or the Prankster ability?
Regarding being broken:
You were the one that brought up Pokemon being broken. I said that pseudo legends (for the most part) had some form of massive disadvantage that made them more balanced on paper, and even agreed that some (like Dragapult) were broken.
I then said that with the exception of Dragapult, they were more or less nonentities in Doubles, and so GameFreak / people playing on that meta wouldn't consider them broken.
I never said that GameFreak cared about things being broken, I said that those particular Pokemon weren't broken and so your counterpoint of "Those other strong Pokemon are also good" wasn't exactly the greatest.
Regarding Singles:
It's hard to find hard and reliable numbers, but according to this source tracking down the number of Master Ball rank players we can say that around the first season of competitive Pokemon in SwSh, there was around 6 times more Master Ball Singles players than there were Doubles and at the last tracked season (Season 17) there was about 3 times more Master Ball Singles than there were Double.
I actually did go to the source of the data, and did the API Call to Pokemon Home battle data. The earliest it showed was "Season 1" from Nov 2019 to Jan 2020, and according to the data there's more or less the same amount of players for singles and doubles, slightly more for Singles but they're around the same numbers.
I couldn't quite figure out how to get the number of Master Ball Trainers but it appears that from a cartridge perspective they're more or less equal around now. The numbers very much get smaller as time passes but it appears that despite Doubles having a smaller initial amount of players, it keeps players better than singles.
So it appears that in the long run there isn't much difference in popularity between Singles and Doubles.
(EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that the data I got from the API was slightly inconsistent, so either I made a mistake or the guy from Reddit made a mistake. I probably missed a step in the call or misread the Japanese tutorial or something.
I decided not to delete the previous part because I thought the API info was interesting enough to share in case anyone wanted to do a proper analysis, but in any case the major point I was trying to make here is below:)
Combine that with the fact that Singles isn't really suitable for tournament play (hence the reason why VGC is all doubles), and as such, isn't really marketable, it's not surprising that Game Freak would care more about Doubles.
GameFreak is a major company, so if something doesn't meaningfully contribute to making money, it's not a sound business decision.
The games in general aren't really TPC's main moneymaker anymore (that'd be licensed merch), Pokemon's target audience doesn't really care about competitive and outside of Japan (which is admittedly their main market) the competitive meta is much more focused on simulators like Smogon, which aren't directly monetizable.
All of that adds up to Singles just not being that important to Game Freak.
It's not plausible at all. It's not difficult to allow a Pokémon to compete in ranked in its much weaker base form. Even if it does find a way to become broken, like I said many times, it's not like Game Freak cares. If that's the case, then they would ban Landorus-T because of how ridiculously overpowered it is in literally every single format possible.
It's more difficult than to just copy and paste whatever is already in place. Especially if it happened to be the decision of a higher up for whatever reason.
Plus, it's not the kind of decision that people care about, so it's the kind of change that will never get done.
If that's true, then that's not a good thing. Being lazy is never a good thing. The developers should always put in the extra effort to do what is the best for the game.
(EDIT: After thinking about I decided to change this section a little bit, since it didn't have the best wording I could have used:)
That's not quite right. Developers should put in the exact effort they're compensated to put in to do what is best for the
company. That often coincides with that's best for the game, but not always; sometimes what's best for the company is do something functional and move on to solve another problem.
Plus, the call of "they should always put in the extra effort" is quite frankly a bit toxic (and given the lack of demand for the requests at hand, a bit entitled) considering the fact that the video game industry traditionally has terrible worker protections, mandatory overtime just to ship the actual game, Pokemon in particular has shorter dev cycles than normal for a AAA game and all of that is happening in Japan which traditionally has an even worse history of overtime.
Game Developers will often put in extra effort because companies exploit their love for games and because they don't want to let players down - and in the case of Pokemon especifically, we're probably starting to get the people who grew up on Pokemon into the market, so they'll be even more exploitable by Game Freak - but that's not a requirement and is more often than not the symptom of an unhealthy work market abusing its employers.
Maybe I'd agree with you if Game Freak got their shit together, hired more staff and gave them more time to do their projects, but as it is, I'm firmly in the side of the devs who are most likely already overworked.
As a sidenote, we're also talking about the fandom that sent death threats and (what I believe to be) false rape allegations because of a badly rendered tree. For that reason alone if I were working in that team I wouldn't want to touch stuff I didn't absolutely have to.
The problem with Regigigas is that, as a Pokémon with a base stat total of 670, great stat range, and wide range of coverage, Regigigas should be used more often than it is. However, considering that Regigigas can only be used effectively in Doubles with Weezing, which is very easy to deal with, (or with Baton Pass in Singles, which is very easy to counter before you get the chance to do it), people only use it more often simply to try out the combo. That is as niche as niche gets. Regigigas would never dominate the meta like a Kyorge or Groudon because it serves no purpose on teams other than players using it to see how it performs without Slow Start for a small portion of time. Literally as soon as Weezing faints, you are left with a Pokémon that contributes nothing at all until it gets double teamed and knocked out before Slow Start could even wear off. For a Pokémon to truly be useable and not niche, it must be useful for almost every team it's placed in. Regigigas with Slow Start fails heavily at that.
I don't disagree that Regigigas could be a lot better. I disagree that it's a smart move for Game Freak to buff it and the fact that it has a niche strategy is already pretty good considering that.
Singles never fell to the wayside. As I said before, Singles is still the most popular way to play Pokémon in every possible format, official or unofficial. The only reason the VGC isn't centered around Singles is because they chose to make it that way. If they actually did choose to have championships for both Singles and Doubles, it could definitely be a money maker because it could attract a variety of different players and bigger audiences. Giving players the chance to win a championship in the most popular played format is definitely the way to go. Since they allowed mythicals in competitive, maybe we might see Singles championships one of these days too. Who knows?
VGC is most likely not centered around Singles because Singles allows Stall as a viable strategy and Stall is terrible for views and general enthusiasm for the game. Yet, they can't very well say "No stall teams" in the rules because there is no set definition of what is a Stall team or a stall like strategy.
Of course they could buff him. There is no question that they could. If they can give weak Pokémon that people never use such as Beedrill and Pidgeot Mega Evolutions for example, they can definitely give a major legendary with a 670 base stat total a better ability or even a hidden ability. It shouldn't take them that much work to make a new ability. The developers make new abilities all the time, which is nothing for them. Like I mentioned before, a good ability for Regigigas could be to boost the (super-effective) damage output for moves that it uses based on the types of the Regis that it created, which are Rock, Steel, Ice, Electric, and Dragon. This could correct Regigigas' problem of not being able to hit anything super effectively with STAB due to being pure Normal-type. Super effective STAB is very important in competitive play, which explains why Normal-types are barely used. Even if it did require more "work," then that's what they should do. Laziness should never be encouraged by any means.
When I said "They could probably buff it", I wasn't talking about whether they could actually physically code the changes, of course they can. I was talking about whether it would make sense as a business decision.
Pokemon is the biggest media franchise in the world, they could probably stomach the loss (or perceived loss when compared to money they could be making) and the same applies to a lot of other changes fan proposes, many of which are more popular (like bring back Battle Frontier, bring back megas, bring back National Dex, etc.)
But they're making enough profits as is and doing changes are more likely only going to make a difference with the fanbase that's already captive. If you care enough about competitive play to be talking about how Regigigas could be great if it had a different ability, you'll most likely buy the games regardless of whether they change that or not. And if you weren't going to buy the game, it's because of another, different design decision they made.
Game Freak isn't an indie company powered by love and touch with their community like something like Stardew Valley is. It's a major corporation behaving under capitalism's normal rules: prioritize what makes money and preferrably don't even do things that don't.
Either way, there's your Doylist explanation of the most probable reason of why Regigigas isn't buffed and why Slow Start got imported into Legends Arceus:
Someone made an oopsie in Generation IV, it wasn't important enough to be rethought, and when Legends Arceus came around the team probably just copied the changes because reworking Regigigas just wasn't important enough to the overall polish of the final game - in fact, I only discovered that Slow Start got imported because of your thread, it wasn't discussed in any kind of media I saw talking about the game.
That's all I have to say on the matter, so I won't be responding to this thread anymore.
