Raichuforyou

Try the GTL, people sell their extra ones. Other than that, no.

I'm a firm believer that if your matches are going over sixty minutes and you want more time to potentially make a comeback, you are engaging more in stall than you probably think you are.

I think the other items have been considered more egregiously bad especially because one deals with evasion and seems to go hand in hand with violating the evasion clause.

The breeding mechanics have changed compared to the vanilla games. You no longer leave two Pokemon in with the woman inside to eventually get a random egg. In every daycare center, you have to leave two pokemon with the man outside for them to get 'consumed' and create one single Pokemon.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong since I literally started PVPing since the update, but for the case of Garchomp in OU, it seemed like he had incredibly niche and limited checks and counters to do well against him. Umbreon/Mandibuzz seemed to do okay at best against him as a whole, but it seems that a lot of the metagame has outright problems with killing him. People have mentioned scarfed dragons, but this forgets the fact that they cannot make a switch in versus Garchomp as well, and someone confidently sending out their dragon to fight Garchomp is just a sign that they're scarfed (and that point completely forgets the fact that if scarfed dragons were common enough to start countering Chomp, Garchomp would just start running scarf himself). I introduced him to my team halfway through last month and I was just surprised at how much stuff I was getting away with even in a Jolly Life Orb/Swords dance set.

ELO in most competitive games you play is weighted on a system to where it predicts how likely you are to beat your opponent. In most cases, if you lose to someone better than you, you won't lose a ton of points, but if you lose to someone worse than you, you will lose quite a few points. And visa-versa for wins as well. There are luck elements present within the game, but any good team should have a fallback plan if they get hit by a crit, miss their move, etc. The top of the leaderboard for any tier is certainly not random.

I generally think nowadays for your time to yen (heck even BP ratio), doing most other activities is better to build up money than rematching the Elite 4 over and over again. I'd sooner do a gym run than attempt to fight the Elite 4.

Guts+ Flame Orb + Facade, Sucker Punch goes nicely on that set too.

It comes harsh to view it as 'forced', but honestly most decisions involving AI buffs, moveset changes, level caps, and more, are meant to streamline players to be readily equipped for endgame content that usually comes in the form of PVP, or dungeons in the future. Many of these design changes in the story serve as a litmus test to get you onto the next bit of content. It is very easy currently to find some level 60+ pokemon on the GTL selling for under 10K each that could easily steamroll you throughout an entire region. I advise you to maybe balance out your team a bit and just not focus on leveling up your starter if you are doing that. Have a full party of six, avoid HM slaves, maybe learn about things like the Sp. Attack/Attack split. Heck, you don't even need to be too concerned about IV's or EV's either.

I'll just correct you on this. This game has an in-game economy to where the time to obtain money, encounter pokemon, finish a battle factor into the pricing of various things that are sold, and the dev team very much so values that they have created such a balanced marketplace. Like they say, time is money. Any change in how fast yen, hold items, or even Pokemon as a whole are obtained throws that equilibrium all out of whack, be it the Luvdisc heart scale farmer being able to spend 5 seconds less per battle obtaining a heart scale, or the gym rematcher which now can complete the gyms 30 seconds faster due to the lack of animations. Having animations turned off would honestly be an 'obtain yen/items faster' toggle for a LOT of farmers in PokeMMO, which isn't a good thing to have. It just becomes the de-facto best option to have turned on for grinders, and puts those at a disadvantage who have the animations turned on either because they like them, or don't know of the disadvantage.

No

You could also make sure you don't have one Pokemon remaining by the end of the battle.

I can't speak for how this specific ranking system works in terms of the logic of how it decides your ELO gain or loss, but this is decently in par with any game that tracks player skill by a ranking like this. Losses can typically be harsher on the player. If you are as good as you thought you are at the 10.05 ELO loss, then you should easily climb back up to 628.17 where you were at.