Bring back full year VGC formats
I've never had a lot of time at my disposal to play Pokémon competitively. I do love playing and I want to play, but the last few years with quickly rotating formats has made it impossible for me to play competitively.
I've always been busy with a job and family. Despite this, when I first started competing in 2015, I was always able to show up to tournaments prepared with a battle ready team and practiced.
Back then for those of you that don't know, a ruleset would last and entire year without changing. This means that premier challenges, regionals, global challenges and worlds would all be played, using the same format.
In my opinion, this should never have changed. Figuring out a team, learning a meta, testing, tweaking, practicing and finally, actually building the team in game so you are battle ready is quite a process. For someone like myself, who doesn't have all the time in the world to play, it could take me 1-2 months.
Now, with the formats that keep changing every 3 months, I find that I spend more time team building than actually playing and competing. This is very disheartening because I don't want to have to be constantly team building. There have been formats I haven't been able to play properly because I wasn't able to prepare a team in time before before the next format had started.
Life gets busy you know!
At least with a full year format, if you didn't have time between tournaments to build a new team, you could just use one you had already built. Tweaking an existing team is much easier than having to learn a whole new format meta and build a new team from scratch in order to be competitive.
I get that rotating the formats more frequently is meant to provide variety and keep the game from getting stale. But there already was variety with a full year format. Once every couple of months there would be an optional online side event with a one off unique rule set to break up the main format. One I remember, that I did play was called the "Professor Oak Cup" or something similar. This was run like a global challenge but the format was singles 6v6 and you could only use Kanto Pokémon. Championship points were given for those that participated and there were many other unique side events such as this one. I remember another had similar rules to little cup.
Even if you didn't do the side events, the metagame was constantly evolving. Those that desired and had the time to build multiple different teams could and would. It was a format that suited everyone.
The problem with the new constantly changing formats is that time limited players such as myself are often unable to play on a competitive level which is what we want, because by the time the tournament comes, we haven't finished building a team yet. Sometimes we don't even get to ladder before the format changes. Sometimes we wont even bother trying to play because we know we will are too busy this month and most likely won't have a team ready before the format changes and have to start the whole team building process again from scratch before we have even had a chance to play.
Bring back full year formats!