A Case For Warstories

Introduction

Warstories. Many people may remember them from generations past, where logs were the best way to recall a past battle, and making a warstory the main way to showcase one's work. But with the site's shift to Pokemon Showdown, which has the ability to make a replay of a battle in a matter of seconds, even copying and pasting a log of a battle seems like a waste of time, let alone making a whole thread to do so (a process which could take awhile). Knowing this, many might wonder why anyone would bother with making warstories anymore. However, there are plenty of important benefits to making warstories that are often overlooked.

The Benefits of Warstories

More Notable

If your idea of showcasing a battle is just sending a replay to a select few friends, then the idea of attracting more people to it probably doesn't matter much to you. However, if you want other people to also view your battle, you need to show your battle in a way that is more likely to attract a potential audience. One of the reasons warstories work for this is that as there are no other recent warstories, it's very easy to make your battle stand out by making one. Even the fact that you decided to make one shows that you thought the battle was worth the time and effort to write about. Think about it this way: if you went to a forum and saw someone you didn't know posted a very nice looking warstory, would you be more drawn to that or to a PS! replay link posted with nothing around it? Even without these things in mind, having a whole thread devoted solely to talking about your battle just makes it a lot more difficult for your battle to get lost in the shuffle than if you had buried your replay link among a million others or in a thread where there's already active discussion.

Better for Showcasing

This is a point that takes two forms. First off, warstories are superior to replays in terms of their ability to be made more appealing for a potential audience without a doubt. When you finish a battle on PS and click "Create Replay", you get a chance to use a slew of options to make your replay into the best-looking thing it can be. Oh wait, you don't. There are no customization abilities with replays (unless you put it through a seperate video editor or something) meaning that your replay will look just like everyone else's, for better or worse (usually worse). Compare that to a warstory, where there are tons of options for custom formatting, image use, et cetera, in addition to the words you type to help set you apart from others. This greatly enhanced customizability makes a warstory much better for showing off a cool battle than a simple replay.

In addition, warstories are also better for showcasing in that they give you the opportunity to showcase yourself as a player. Think about the qualities of a good player for a minute. While most people might say they are just people that win tournaments, there's really more to it than that. Good players sometimes have periods where they don't win many games, so what makes them good players still? The thing that marks someone as a good player is their thought process in playing, not necessarily the outcome. For example, if I'm a manager looking for someone to be on my team, do I want the guy who won because he clicked a random move, or the one who lost but who actually reasoned through his moves effectively? Obviously the second one. Because of this, warstories are a better way to showcase your skills than replays, as warstories give the reader insight into why you made the plays you did, which can tell them a lot more about you as a player than simply sending a replay of your battle.

This is even more helpful if you're a newer user or just have not been involved with a tier's competitive scene for very long. If you're competing for a spot on a team with someone who has been playing OU for a while, I've never heard of you, and you just send in a replay or two, I'll likely end up giving the spot to the person with more experience as I know where there ability to play is at, whereas with you I'd have zero idea regarding your thought process in choosing the moves you did. However, imagine you had sent me a warstory showing how great your ability to reason out moves in a game was as opposed to just a replay. Now you've put yourself in a much better position to be selected, as I have much more information with which to determine your skill level.

Better For Improvement

What typically happens to a replay once the owner has uploaded it? It is usually not revisited by that person afterwords, much less so with any eye towards reasoning out what happened in the game. For this reason, replays aren't that good for trying to find holes in your playing, since it's very easy to just watch a replay without taking time to actually sit down and think about why you made certain moves. Warstories, however, are excellent in that they force you to sit down and write out why you made the plays you did, so you could notice that the "great plays" you thought you were making actually weren't all that great given the circumstances. In addition, since other people who read your warstory have access to your thought process, they can give you feedback to help you improve in a way that goes beyond what they could do with a normal replay. While a play might have "worked" once, it could still be driven by poor reasoning that could cost you games in the future, so others can point that out to you before it becomes a major problem.

Conclusion

While warstories have gone the way of the dodo on Smogon, it doesn't have to be this way. Many people choose not to make the investment of time necessary to write a nice warstory without fully considering its many benefits. Thanks to its uniqueness, greater customisability than replays on a visual level, and greater depth than replays content-wise, there are many instances in which warstories are well worth the effort instead of just hitting the replay button. If you read this article and are considering making a warstory of your own, there's no need to wait. With the right set of tips, anyone can reap the benefits of this amazing storytelling medium.

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