RMT Guidelines

Introduction
Before Writing Your RMT
Formatting Your RMT
Critiquing RMTs



Hello, and welcome to Neoseeker’s Pokémon Heart Gold/Soul Silver RMT Guide, written by ThirteenOfTwo and The Lost Soul. This guide will attempt to cover all of the important details of how to write a quality RMT that will attract readers and get you the best possible feedback, as well as how to give constructive criticism that helps other battlers to improve their teams. Failure to follow these guidelines will not result in any sort of punishment, but an RMT following these guidelines will certainly see more helpful posts than one that doesn’t. This thread does not cover the rules of competitive battling on Neoseeker, which can be found here.

If you’re new to the competitive Pokémon community, you may be wondering what an RMT is. RMT stands for Rate My Team, and is the name given to forum posts that present a Pokémon team to the forum as a whole in the hopes of getting input on how good the team is and how it can be improved. Some teams presented are for ingame use only, some others are for the Battle Tower, and many are for use in competitive play. While this guide will mainly focus on writing and critiquing competitive RMTs, much of the advice contained in this guide still applies to Battle Tower RMTs. RMTs for ingame teams are generally not worthwhile, since practically any combination of Pokemon can beat the game. However, if you do feel a burning need to post an ingame RMT, please try to follow most of the formatting given below and provide all information about your Pokemon that you know. EVs and IVs are not necessary information for ingame RMTs, but they are absolutely necessary for competitive ones.

Enjoy!




The first thing that it is important to understand when writing an RMT for competitive play is in what metagame you intend to use the team. Believe it or not, there are a number of different Pokemon metagames, the two most popular of which are Shoddy Battle and the Wi-Fi metagame. The Shoddy Battle program is highly popular and easy to use, but battles there can be very different from those on Wi-Fi.

Since one of Shoddy Battle’s features is that any legitimate Pokemon can be generated easily, Hidden Power is a lot more common on Shoddy than in Wi-Fi battles. It’s also important to remember that Shoddy Battle has a lot less waiting time between moves than Wi-Fi battles, so teams that try to stall their opponents out with status and entry hazards like Toxic Spikes are far more common there. The Wi-Fi metagame is generally more offensively paced. Another major difference between the two metagames is that the Wi-Fi metagame tends to place more emphasis on creativity than the Shoddy metagame, users of which often see fit to “stick to what’s best”. Depending on which metagame you pan to use your team in, it could have different strengths or weaknesses, so be sure to make up your mind before you write an RMT.

The second thing you need to understand when writing an RMT is Smogon’s tier system. The basic premise of the tier system is that each Pokemon is assigned to a tier based mainly on its usage on Smogon’s Shoddy Battle ladder. People there use what they find to be effective, and therefore, it's fair to say that a Pokemon’s tier placement is based on how good it is. OU (or Over Used) is the tier in which most Pokemon in the main metagame reside, meant mainly for Pokemon such as Gengar, Scizor, Heatran and Breloom. These Pokemon are good, but do not make the metagame unfair, overcentralized, or unbalanced. UU (or Under Used) is meant for Pokemon that aren't quite good enough for OU, but aren't useless. Pokemon like Nidoking, Venusaur, Ludicolo and Kabutops thrive in UU. NU (Never Used) is the bottom of the barrel - the worst Pokemon that are still fully evolved. Luvdisc, Furret, Unown and Ledian are examples of the Pokemon in this tier. Not Fully Evolved (NFE) Pokemon can be used in any tier. Pokemon considered too good for the OU tier by users on the Smogon University website are consigned to Ubers, a tier that basically exists as a ban list. Salamence, Garchomp, Wobbuffet, and most legendaries are members of this tier. BL (BorderLine) is often referred to as “the Ubers of UU”, consisting of Pokemon deemed too strong for UU but not used enough to qualify for OU. Shaymin, Abomasnow, and Cresselia are members of this tier. Remember, your team can only be used in the tier that its highest-ranked Pokemon is a member of. If you have 5 Unowns and a Dialga, your team can only be used in Ubers. Wi-Fi Battlers are generally more lax about the tier system than those on Shoddy Battle. Remember that in Neoseeker tournaments all legendary Pokemon are banned, even those in OU or BL. Smogon’s official tier list can be found here.



The main goal of any RMT is to attract reviews for a team. As such, it has to be presentable, understandable, and detailed. The first thing you want to have is a nice title for your thread. The title of an RMT draws in viewers, and can make a surprising difference in terms of what gets looked at and what doesn’t. The title should ideally be in the format [insert name of tier in which the team is meant to be used here RMT] Creativity Here. The creative part of the title can really be whatever you want it to be, so long as it’s not explicit or offensive to anyone. However, it would be best if you used it to describe your team in some way, like “Sandstorm Team” or “Level 1 Team”. “[UU RMT] Gravity” is a great name. “RMT” is not. If you are using your team at the Battle Tower or ingame, please replace the tier name with “BT” or “IG” respectively.

Now, once the reader is in your thread they’ll need a little explanation of what your team tries to do and how you came up with it. The first thing that should be in your RMT is a short paragraph explaining how you came up with the idea for the team (and what that idea is). If the star of your team is Breloom, this is the place to say it.

Now we’re at the main body of the RMT. Each Pokemon should have its own little section, which should be formatted like the template below.

Pokemon (Gender) @ Item
Ability
Unusual IVs (If applicable)
EVs/EVs/EVs/EVs
Nature (+ stat, - stat)
- Attack 1
- Attack 2
- Attack 3
- Attack 4

Description of what this Pokemon does on your team and why it's there.

The above template should be used for each of your Pokemon. If you can find a picture to put in, like a sprite of each Pokemon, that makes your RMT infinitely more appealing. However, don’t make the picture too big or it’ll just be annoying. Standard IVs are 31s across the board, but this can often be incredibly difficult to breed. It’s important to let us know if your Starmie is cursed with a Special Attack IV of 0 and is likely not to kill Zapdos with Ice Beam even if Stealth Rock is up. Your “Discussion” paragraph should probably be more than on sentence. “This is standard Choice Scarf Heatran” doesn’t help a bit when someone’s trying to figure out why your team is built the way it is. Finally, having nicknames is great, but please have the name of the Pokemon’s species there too.

After all of your Pokemon have been listed and described, the final step is to include a threat list. Now, in order to actually have a threat list, you have to playtest your team a little bit. Once you know how to use your team in the best possible way, you can figure out what it’s weak to even when you’re playing well. Those Pokemon go in the threat list. Some people, who must be feeling incredibly ambitious and/or bored, list every major threat in the tier their team plays in and explain how their team deals with it. This is neither necessary nor expected, but it can help to forestall arguments of situations you already know how to get out of. A less ambitious threat list should follow the format below:

Threat Pokemon

Specific set(s) that cause problems:

Possible counters on your team:

Explanation of problem(s) when facing this Pokemon, in-depth.

Once everything’s written up, please check everything for spelling and grammar. It really sucks when an RMT has everything necessary to be great but the whole thing’s written in l33t5p33k. Part of being presentable is having good spelling and grammar. An occasional mistake is forgivable, but please don’t let it be absurd. Once you’ve run your last check, go ahead and post the RMT!



Even the best-written RMTs sometimes do not get good responses. This isn’t the fault of the RMT writer, but rather that of the critiquer. This (short) section of the guide will attempt to clear up some common misconceptions about how to give a good critique to an RMT post by a fellow Neoseeker.

First and most obviously: the same readability guidelines from the writing section apply to critiquing. Please make your critiques readable and understandable.

Now that we’re past the obvious, remember that the main goal of criticism is to be constructive, or to help the member who posted the RMT to fix their team. Some teams only need minor changes to movesets, while others may require switching out whole Pokemon. However, no matter how much fixing is needed, remember that your goal is to help the RMTer with their original goal--the one stated (hopefully) in the first paragraph of their RMT. If their goal was to build a team around Porygon-Z, don’t suggest swapping out Porygon-Z for something else. This would be akin to seeing a painting of a picture of a vase with flowers in it and saying “I love the wall, but lose the vase and the flowers.” Likewise, pay attention to the tier and metagame in which the team is meant to be used. Don’t say “you’re weak to Tyranitar” in a UU RMT, or “Rotom-H walls you” in an RMT for a legal-breeding Wi-Fi team. Furthermore, posting links to Smogon or other such sites for UU Pokemon being used on OU teams is often pointless, since their sets are usually designed for UU play.

An important rule to remember is “Don’t tear a team down without suggesting how to build it back up again”. If you suggest getting rid of a Pokemon or changing a moveset, suggest which Pokemon to replace it with or what move to substitute for the one that was deleted. Comments such as “Present is a terrible move, take it off of Clefable”, while true, are useless to the RMTer because they present no options for fixing the problem. Basically, don’t suggest deleting something without suggesting a replacement.

Keep in mind that specificity is key. Part of being “understandable” is not expecting your reader to leap to conclusions. It’s not good practice to say things like “you’re weak to Lucario” without explaining in further detail what makes the team weak to Lucario and which particular Lucario set is the problem. Likewise, posting a link to another Pokemon site such as Smogon without explaining what the link is for is useless. In the same way, if someone is looking for a sixth member to their team, saying just the name of a Pokemon is worthless because almost every Pokemon, with the obvious exceptions of things like Ditto and Weedle, have huge numbers of potentially effective sets. If you bring something up, please explain in detail what you mean.

Finally, remember that it’s all just a video game. Don’t be offended if your suggestions aren’t taken. Your job as a critiquer is to offer help to the writer of the RMT. If they don’t accept your offer, that’s their choice. They aren’t trying to insult you, they’re just trying to do what’s best for their team. Keep a cool head and try to be helpful and you may make some new friends or a reputation as a knowledgeable critiquer who people will seek out for advice.

Thanks for reading Neoseeker’s HeartGold/SoulSilver RMT Guide. We hope you learned a lot and are now better prepared to write and critique RMTs. If you have any suggestions for improvements, please send them to me. Good luck!