If someone is wondering why the ADV OU ladder won its award, don't hesitate to give it a try! Sure, it's an old generation ladder so a bit less active than what you may be used to, but it has a lot of characteristics rare those days: you can meet pretty much all the ADV top players under an alt or another, making it
very competitive; there are unique storylines taking place around there with legendary villains, famous teams spammers, Mr.Factory and many others!
Old generations are not the easiest to get into either. Many mechanics have changed over the years, many new Pokémon, moves and items are not present in ADV. However, there is no lack of resources for ADV newbies:
How to get started into competitive ADV OU by BKC covers the basics, while a lot of great players regularly publish their teams in
linear's Team Dump. The
Viability Rankings are among the most accurate you will find on-site for a reason, and there is no lack of
written or
video guides,
amazing Youtube channels by experienced players and more for whoever is interested. Also worth noting that all the
OverUsed analysis in the Smogon Dex were recently revamped by a bunch of great guys, so far from being outdated they standard at the cutting edge of the metagame.
ok stopping here because I could go on for ages
Oh and congratulations to Aeonic for the best Leader award, PS adminship tends to be a pretty thankless thing for whats meant to be a hobby but the scope of his contributions behind the scenes in both quality and quantity has had me genuinely impressed ever since I joined in. There are many great people who don't do big announcements and such in public but spend a crazy amount of time contributing to improve the community in more private environments, and recognition only finds its way too rarely to them. I'm glad those Awards exist so we have the opportunity to praise & thanks them for taking on their free time to make others' experiences as enjoyable as possible around there.