i have a bad team

Here is an explanation of how the user named "i have a bad team", henceforth ihabt, trolled Smogon in December 2012.

First, to understand how the trolling worked, it's important to understand Smogon's tiering system. Smogon's tiers are purely usage-based. If at the end of 3 months a Pokemon is used in more than a certain percentage of teams within a certain tier, it is formally considered to be in that tier, and is then disallowed from lower tier play. The order is OU > UU > RU > NU. To give an example, Empoleon is considered UU, meaning it is legal in OU and UU play, but not in RU or NU play. If enough players in OU use it over a three-month span, it would be considered OU and then no longer legal in UU. The upshot of this is that absolutely anyone can affect tiering, by simply using the Pokemon in battles. With me so far? Seeing the flaw in these tiers? Don't worry, ihabt will show you exactly where it is before you're done reading this.

When ihabt saw this, she decided to intentionally get selected Pokemon out of NU. Naturally, this means making a team in RU with the selected mons, and using it on the ladder frequently. But "frequently" here means ridiculously frequently. There are over 25,000 RU battles a month, and the #1 player on the ladder typically has fewer than 100 games. Seems like a miniscule impact to make, no matter how good a player ihabt is. Until you realize one key thing: the tiering system never actually says anything about WINNING.

So ihabt's team consists of the six Pokemon she wants out of NU...all set at their lowest possible legal levels, with utterly horrible movesets and terrible items, made intentionally as terrible as possible. It takes a lot of thought and careful strategy to win a game, but losing on purpose takes essentially no time at all. This means ihabt can increase her impact on the usage stats by a ridiculous amount, gaining more uses for her mons in one or two hours than most players can do in a month - and she does this every single day.

The end results speak for themselves. On January 1st, 2013, five Pokemon rose from NU to RU. Four of them were on ihabt's team. When looking at the formal moveset statistics, it becomes very obvious exactly how much of an impact ihabt had. Let's take Amoonguss, one of the Pokemon on ihabt's team, as an example. In December, the exact percentage of Amoonguss' usage attributed to ihabt was 41.381%. Reread that until the implications sink in. Stated another way, ihabt managed to increase Amoonguss' usage by over SEVENTY PERCENT of what it would have been without her, SINGLE-HANDEDLY.

As a result of all of this, Smogon has revamped its tiering system specifically for the purpose of preventing this from happening again. From this writer's perspective, it looks like they have more or less succeeded; the method ihabt used will not work again. Still, the tiers must remain objective, and as a result, the four Pokemon that ihabt got out of NU are still in RU to this day, much to the chagrin of many NU players.

So, what sort of trolling have YOU done lately?