Unite Guide’s Year in Review – A Big 2023

It’s no secret that the Unite Guide has gone through a lot of changes this year. 

From its humble beginnings as a google doc passed around the Pokemon Unite Discord Server (that you really should join if you haven’t already) to the site you’re currently on we’ve come a really long way, but we’re not done yet. 

Of course, none of this could have been possible without you -our readers. At the end of the day our meta advisors put in the grind and hard work to make these guides for you and we thank every single one of you for coming on this journey with us and making it possible.

Honestly it’s a little hard for us to believe less than a year ago, we were still using that google doc to provide the most up to date builds and strategy guides! 

Photo of the original Pokemon Unite Guide document headline section. Header image in this document is warped and degraded in quality.
A deep fried document at that

Join us for a fond look back at the history of the guide from its early days, the transition from document to site and a look at what the future holds. (Oh, and we’ve also made social media accounts so join us on Facebook and Reddit if you want to stay up to date when we publish new content or update our guides.)

Since we’re Data Nerds here, we’ve also included some of our site data, reviewing and analyzing the traffic we’ve had since we re-launched the site in August!

Remembering the OG: There for Players since (almost) the Very Beginning

Although our guide did a lot of growing up this year, it’s been a labor of love basically since the release of Pokémon Unite. 

The original document was started by our very own Chunkymilk back in Oct 26, 2021, just three months after the initial launch of the game. 

Chunky, who remains a major contributor to this day, saw a need within the community for easy to read builds and strategy guides for Unite’s growing roster. Turns out there’s only so many times a day you can tell people what items to run on Lucario before you think “Somebody should write this down.”

Image of Lucario with the held items leftovers, shell bell and rocky helmet selected.
Hint: not this.

Chunky reached out to Joe, another one of the discord’s active community members (read: another member who couldn’t help compulsively answering the same questions all day long.) about putting pen to paper and the rest is history.

Eventually marteen was brought on along as a main contributor with some rotating guest contributors who have helped to fill in any gaps as needed.

If you’re new to Unite, haven’t been to the Discord or have only found us since our website days, it’s worth noting things are a little different ‘round these parts from how they used to be. Back then if you were reading the guide you came there from the discord, so it was written with the assumption that you were at least familiar with one, if not all of the contributors and their sense of humor. 

The guide was originally made for the audience of the discord and was full of memes, crude jokes and general tomfoolery. Back then you could call a build “uwu sh–” and everyone knew what ya meant. 

Photo of someone complaining about the guide's tone/info presentation on reddit.
Opinions on this era were mixed.

Eventually as the guide’s audience and the game’s roster grew the team came to realize the Google Doc maybe wasn’t the best format to be serving this info. Google Docs is not the most mobile friendly and sometimes you were looking for this info as a game was queuing up, meaning you needed easier navigation (or just the ability to save a Pokémon in a bookmark.) 

Much like the pocket monsters in the game, the team knew it was time to evolve.

The Evolution: From Document to Website

The decision to go from a google doc that was passed around between those-in-the-know to a true blue website happened in early 2023. After an intense game of rock, paper, scissors; the loser (Joe) had to pony up for hosting and figure out how to actually make the site.  

The domain was bought on March 22nd 2023.  Instead of boring you with all the details of development, we’ve decided it’ll be more fun to just search up “Joe” and “Website” in the Discord history and let you read between the lines.

Photo of a discord chat log sent from Joe with the text: We've purchased a domain as of last night, and are slowlyyyy working towards creating a fully functional website and moving over all the guide info onto it (and expanding more)
A man full of raw hope and enthusiasm

Although making a website meant that Joe would have to teach himself web development while helping maintain the content of the guide, it was a project he took upon himself and worked on tirelessly. 

Photo of a discord chat log sent from Joe with the text: "Need to eventually pick up the website project again. Heavy slacking on it"
 It wasn’t slacking it was “consolidating skills.”

With much hard work and perseverance, the Guide website came together quickly and easily!

Photo of discord chat logs sent from Joe with the texts:

Chat 1: "I'm extremely inexperienced with web design so it's proving to be difficult to format pages the way I want them."

Chat two: "Censored is hard as censored though and we're
basically teaching ourselves web design as we go so it prob won't be live anytime"

Chat 3: "Why would a crab have webs"
oh um… ignore that last one. That’s about…something else

The V.1 Site officially launched on June 22nd 2023. Exactly three months after the purchase of the domain.

Image of the V.1 Unite-Guide.com home page.
Behold its awesome power!

The transition from document to site was complete!… though not quite right. The V.1 site turned out to be temperamental, hard to edit and ended up eating hours per Pokémon on formatting alone.  

That July, the last piece of the puzzle was found. Joe made an offhand comment in the chat about the site having cost him “3 of his 9 lives.” to put together, some psychopath in the chat saw that and thought “I bet rebuilding their site from the ground up could be fun.” and two weeks later on the first of August the current version of the site (V.2) was launched!

When asked about the relaunch, the team agreed they felt an emotion that could only be described as “Where the $#!& was this guy 3 months ago?”

Talkin’ About Today: The Guide, the Game and the Goings On

We’re not going to waste too much time chatting about how things are today. You’re here reading this and we’re writing it so we think things are going swell. We’re really proud of how the website has turned out after that journey we started early 2023. 

That said, nothing in life is ever finished, and that’s doubly true when you’re producing content about a MOBA. The gamestate is constantly changing, new Pokemon are arriving on Aeos Island and new items and patches and and and… well you get it.

We’re still in the process of bringing every single Pokémon’s in-depth guide content up to the new standard that we’ve set for ourselves, so some of the older guides might feel a little content light but we stand behind every build we recommend. 

Unite-Guide.com's mascot standing in front of a blackboard as though teaching a lesson. 

Blackboard reads: "How to make it to masters. 1.visit unite-guide.com 2.get the best builds and movesets for your favourite Pokémon 3. dominate the ladder. (can't make any promises about your team mates though)
We’re even making cocky graphics about it.

The items and move selections in these guides are always up to date, oftentimes within hours of the patch or Pokémon arriving. 

We work with the unite Mathcord, Unite-DB and playtest to ensure we’re getting the best info to you and we’re confident using these builds will give you an edge in the majority of scenarios while playing your favorite Pokemon.

We’re working to get all our legacy guides up to scratch content wise, and while we’re on the topic of what we’re working on….

Looking to the Future: 2024 and Beyond!

We’re absolutely buzzing with anticipation for the adventures ahead at Unite-Guide.com, and we’re eager to give you a sneak peek at some of the cool stuff we’ve got in the pipeline.

Top of the list, we are going to continue with our transition away from the official Unite Roster images over to our hand-drawn doodle aesthetic for the top level roster pages. We like the look of notebook doodles and feel that it better captures the essence of the guide. This guide basically started as some notes kept between friends and we think this style is a fitting tribute to that.

Image of the standard pokemon roster image with an arrow pointing to our updated art style for these images over a background of the Pokemon Scarlet and Violet evolution screen.
Just look at that hand drawn goodness!

Another exciting development we’re inching closer to (actually, it’s what you’re reading this very moment) is our brand-new blog section. Here, we’ll be spilling the beans on the latest news, tossing out extra strategy tips, voicing our take on the game’s dynamics, and jotting down other musings that matter.

Take our Playstyle Guide, for instance. We will be breaking it down from one colossal page into bite-sized blog posts that zero in on each playstyle. This way, you can easily scout out the strategies that match your preferred way to game, and we get to update and expand on content in a snap.

Also, Draft is coming to Unite and we’re all beyond excited for this change!  It’s especially exciting that the matchup sections we built into the site will finally be more than just some pretty pictures! 

Stay tuned for a Drafting Strategy guide sometime before the official release of the format.

We can’t wait for the year to come and we hope you all stick around with us! Ever since V.2 of our site went live, we’ve been keeping tabs on our traffic stats, and guess what? We think you might get a kick out of some of the fun facts and figures we’ve gathered. Stay tuned for those insights and more!

Unite-Guide.Com’s “Year End Review Report”

If you’re having trouble viewing this report on a mobile device, your screen size may be too small to render it. Try looking at it again on a computer later. Sorry. We didn’t claim we got THAT much better at this.

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TiredGiant

TiredGiant is the nerd who put this site together. Not much of a Unite player; he probably needs this site more than the rest of ya combined which is why he offered to develop the version of it you're currently on. Interested in all things web and some things MOBA he comes to this game thanks to his nostalgic love for these little pocket monsters and came to making this site cuz he saw Joe complaining about web development in the meta chat. (On a personal note if we queue up together in SoloQ and I'm not playing Trevenant - I am so, so sorry. I gotta learn another Pokemon somehow.)

PSA: THE GUIDE IS NO LONGER MANAGED OR UPDATED IN ANY FORM, AND WILL NOT BE FOR THE FORSEEABLE FUTURE. Joe thanks everyone for their support (and ad revenue ;) ) and hope the site helped improve their play and hopes you kids enjoy your lives. We encourage you to use the information here in combination with Unite-DB and Mathcord as a jumping off point for your own builds.

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