This is a big thread, covering a topic that's been pressing into me lately. I apologize to the mods of the in-game play forums if this is a hassle to deal with. I've wanted to talk about this sort of thing for a very long time, and I felt the need to speak about it somewhere as best I can.
A History of Competitive Pokemon and External Device Usage
Pokemon has failed to make its competitive game accessible, for 26 years and counting.
It has constantly presented a system where going outside of normal gameplay is the easiest way to obtain Pokemon. It has let Pokemon that violate their competition rules infest their paid products and rendered what could be helpful alternative systems inert. You can obtain a Pokemon on an officially supported software with premium passes and then have it get you disqualified from an event.
It has always been this way and it has only improved with glacial pacing. After explaining some preamble, I would like to explain just how bad it’s been, how long it’s gone on, and how inexcusable it is we are still dealing with this problem, especially now that it is disqualifying people from paid events.
I have been around the competitive Pokemon community for a long time. I’ve come to realize now that I am legitimately one of the few still out there who have been present and playing in at least a minor capacity throughout nearly every era of official tournaments with context for how easy or hard (read: HARD) it is obtaining Pokemon on cartridge for competitive play. People who were babies when I rigged the random number generator to get my first flawless Pokemon for a competition can now register a Smogon account and access the greater internet. I feel I should taper down some of the history behind the struggle of getting decent Pokemon, instead of letting it rot and get lost in twitter maelstroms.
With this post, I want to demystify the advantages going outside of what Pokemon considers normal gameplay gives a player, as well as show just how deeply tied competitive Pokemon has been tied to external device usage, not out of any desire to maliciously gain an upper hand, but as, at times, a near necessity during many eras of the game to play outside of a simulator without greatly handicapping yourself.
This thread will attempt to explain concepts for people at more casual Pokemon literacy, as well as folks versed in competitive Pokemon, but not necessarily the legitimacy stuff behind the in-game aspects of it, like what exactly makes a Pokemon hacked. I’m going to assume you know what things like IVs, EVs, and Soft Resetting are. I might simplify some concepts with regards to Pokemon legality to the point where people with more intricate experience might feel it’s an oversimplifications. I will be upfront: Everything I’ve learned about legality has been second hand from other people digging into it over the years. I am not a first hand source as to how the mechanics of these games work. I’m just an old brick of limestone baked from years of grains of information. What I’ve learned has been used for the practical application of people playing PVP. Please understand that I’m trying my best to simplify without leading to egregious conflations. On the opposite end of that reader spectrum, for others not super familiar with Pokemon legality stuff, I also ask that you don’t parrot anything from here mindlessly as gospel. The world has enough people regurgitating others’ opinions on competitive video games already from youtube video essays.
Why This Thread?
I don’t like the uptick in disqualifications for hacked Pokemon that have happened recently. I feel they are not the fault of the players, but a sign that Pokemon has utterly failed at policing their own environment for these things to happen, and then dropping the burden on players who are paying the full retail price of a video game for a tournament.
There are a wide range of people at these events. There are children and young teenagers who don’t know any better, or don’t know how to cut through the complex web of all the media surrounding the most popular property in the world and know what are dos and don’ts for these events. I know that using a stream that sends you free Pokemon is giving you a hacked Pokemon. Andy, age 40, who last played the games on the gameboy in high school and is taking their ten year old daughter to a fun event and needs the karate bear, likely doesn’t know anything about this world. That daughter also probably doesn’t suspect that the genie she got off of Pokemon Home’s GTS has any problems, especially given she could do free battles with it just fine. I have helped out at leagues and TPCI events before. I have had a parent approach me asking if power saves are allowed for events. A thorough understanding of what out there is and isn’t cheating can be incredibly confusing to players, and the official rules pdf offers two sentences of clarification on the matter.
There is not a powerful enough support system to help people understand what is and isn’t kosher for prepping for an event. A judge at an event, by no fault of their own, might not be able to tell you where that line is. Judges are hard working people with a deep love of their game doing underpaid volunteer work. They also are first and foremost focused on the TCG by their necessity, and now have sometimes up to three video games parasitically injected into their system thrusted upon them to officiate at these events.
In the absence of that protection, fan projects have taken its place. Posts, websites and programs dedicated to checking legality have been made, maintained, and abandoned over the years. We have one here in the wifi section I started back in 2014, which has since been taken over, piloted, and updated by a lot of wonderful contributors. It's a good repository of information. A parent going to a video game event should have to know it exists. Let's talk about how bad this situation's gotten.
Who Am I?
Before I start, I want to lay out some background as to who I am and why I should have any grounds to record this information. Again, I have never directly contributed to the nitty-gritty aspects of legality dissecting the games, other than what was easily testable on a default cartridge or perusing movepools for fun trivia and oversights. My standing comes from being a very old community member who’s helped run places that care about Pokemon legality, and breeding and catching entirely too many competitive Pokemon myself.
Over the years, I have:
I have done a lot of breeding. I have done a lot of RNG manipulation. I have done a lot of policing of hacked Pokemon. I have worked pretty hard to help players overcome the varying accessibility issues that come with all manner of playing Pokemon.
I have grown tired of the root issues never being tackled, and am fed up now that it’s leading to DQs.
The Vernacular of Pokemon Legality
Let’s start by tackling some terms on what Pokemon are and aren’t considered altered by an external device, to get everyone up to speed.
Making sure your Pokemon aren’t hacked has been a constant fascination with players. Community definitions to describe legality have been around for a long while. This diagram gives a nice overview of some of the most important ones.
These definitions are well over a decade old now, as you can probably tell from this chart using words like Pokesav and Wondertomb in there. They have seeped into wider usage for the Pokemon community for a long while now, so I see little reason not to use them now too.
A few things to note: It is impossible to tell a legal Pokemon from a legitimate Pokemon with no prior information about that Pokemon. If there is anything that can differentiate that Pokemon from the normal processes that make a Pokemon, it’s inherently illegal.
With these definitions established, let’s talk about how they apply to competitive battling and a forth term: Legal Hacks.
Legal Hacks
Since online play has existed, people have wanted to sideline the process of obtaining Pokemon so they can just play and enjoy the PVP experience. Thus, with Pokesav and Action Replay, players took to making “Legal Hacks”. These are acknowledged attempts at creating Pokemon from methods outside of normal gameplay that don’t go beyond the threshold of what’s possible in terms of battle stats. They are essentially proxy cards in a trading card game. They are functionally identical in most every practical way that matters, except to the company. Fixating on aspects like a Landorus lacking a Pokemon home ID on its data is completely inconsequential to the games being played.
You are almost always only ever fighting a legal hack if someone is using a Pokemon created by atypical means in a tournament. You are almost never going to fight one that gives you some sort of advantage, especially not anything that gives a numbers advantage in battle like 512+ EVs or something. Pokemon’s most basic hack checks catch these; you will not be allowed on even free battles if your team violates one of these aspects. These are the sloppiest of sloppy hacks and are typically instantly intersected.
By the strictest definition, any Pokemon where you’re able to detect it was modified is illegal, and not a legal hack, since legal would imply being possible through normal gameplay. However, this is a very strict definition that I don’t think falls in line with the spirit of how the concept has been used since I first was fighting them back on DP Wi-Fi in 2007. The goal is not to abide by every feature of a legal Pokemon, it is to have a functioning game piece without the burden of what is for many an unfun grind needed for the fun gameplay.
Legitimacy (And Why It Is Laughably Flimsy)
You might notice that the definition of “shortcuts” above is riddled with a lot of vague terms. The thing is, legitimacy is a very flimsy term. The only thing separating legitimacy from legality is memory. Like, your personal memory as a person remembering what happened to the Pokemon. There are so many ways for a Pokemon to not be legitimate that are impossible to ever track.
An observation I’ve made throughout several different Pokemon trading communities is that overwhelmingly we only care about detectable cheating. Things like wonder card injections, the use of hacked event items to access mythical Pokemon, resources like vitamins, bottle caps, candies injected into a save file, and even cloning, you will be stressed to find anyone mad about. This is something I’ve passively accepted for a long time, but seems strange held up from a more distant perspective.
For those unaware, there is nothing really on a Pokemon’s data tracking how your Pokemon got certain aspects to it, like its EVs or item. You can get your EVs on your Pokemon any way: EV Training, Vitamins, Using your 900 cloned Zincs in BDSP, date shenanigans with Pokepelago in base SM, changing a digit in an external device, whatever. You can’t tell what happened to any of them if you are presented that Pokemon without context. The only way you can detect if you’re using a hacked item is if, well, you hacked in an item not accessible at all through gameplay, like handing a Pokemon a Cherish Ball.
One sour note that people have not tolerated since the very early days is using hacked parents. Getting good IVs in past generations was hard. Why not put together two parents with perfect IVs until you get a great offspring? I don’t think I have to explain how using hacked Pokemon in the process of getting a Pokemon would be unsettling for a lot of players, and why it’s been banned in a number of communities. Unfortunately, this is nearly impossible to track outside of incredibly particular circumstances. The data on a Pokemon does not include anything pertaining to its parents. Have you wonder traded for a breedject ever? There is a very good possibility that it was bred with a hacked ditto. You’ll have no way of ever knowing beyond super niche circumstances, and it will have no bearing on the legality of anything you breed with it. A Pokemon bred with hacked parents is as good as legal one, until it very much isn’t.
Small aside: Probably the most ridiculous version of hacked parents unfolded in 2017 when Heavy Ball Beldum was discovered to be impossible in base SM. The way the catch formula used to work, Pokemon with extremely low catch rates and weight could be flat out impossible to catch in a heavy ball. This was discovered after they’d flooded throughout wonder trade as spitbacks without any issue; I even saw vinny vinesauce get one. I was moderating the Wi-Fi section here at the time. We went into a hustle to get rid of all the Heavy Ball Beldums on here and discipline anyone who said they were a source. Then, by the end of the year, USUM came out and edited the catch formula so a catch had at least a tiny chance of success Your heavy ball Metagross you bred off a spitback from wondertrade went from being legal by merit of no one yet disproving its existence, to illegal, to legal again. I have no way of proving the Heavy Ball Metagross you bred in February 2017 used a hacked parent or not unless I trust your word of mouth.
Personally, I think it’s weird that there is any outrageous anger towards legal hacks when the system is so flimsy already. Hacking a pokemon to the point where only usage of some external device can see anything is wrong is grounds for disqualification. Going to some trade bot to get your hacked ditto and pumping out an egg there is fine, undetectable, and completely inactionable. Chastizing a player for using a hacked Pokemon from the GTS feels less like cheating to me than editing a save file and cramming a Pokemon full of every stat boosters. I don't think the sanctity of the competition has been compromised either way.
Clones:
Cloning also, for a lot of the game’s history, has not been emulating a strictly illegal process. Even if you ignore Gen 3 and Gen 4’s cloning glitches, In the first 5 generations of Pokemon, it is absolutely possible, sometimes borderline trivial, to get the exact same Pokemon. Legendaries aren’t exempt from this either; you can pretty easily follow a process to land a very particular trainer ID and start your DS at a certain time to get the exact same Pokemon you want..
Disqualifications over clones are extremely rare. There was a recent one where two players on an esports team were disqualified, which unfortunately doesn’t have a lot of public information at the moment. However, from as far as I can tell, they were using the exact same team with the exact same legendary Pokemon, potentially still with the same hidden Pokemon Home ID, and a judge caught it.
Clones have long been one of the most widely accepted methods of external device usage since the ability to trade your Pokemon went online. It’s impossible to tell which Pokemon is the clone; if you can, one of them is just a hacked Pokemon. They exist because they maintain perfect legality and that so many Pokemon over the years have been excruciating to get with solid IVs. In a weird round-about way, it's often using an external device to avoid using an external device in a slightly different way. A clone of a friend’s legal Pokemon is a way to get a legal Pokemon, without going into the wild and trading for a random one, or replaying through an entire adventure you might not even own for a single Pokemon.
Let’s talk about the drive to use external devices a bit more thoroughly.
What Drives External Device usage?
So then, ultimately, what makes these Pokemon so hard to get that it leads to going outside the normal boundaries of the game? There are a few problems, and then one massive problem that has been fermenting for 26 years.
The Major Offender: IVs
IVs are a truly awful system. It and its precursor, DVs, shouldn't have been a thing since the very start in Gen 1. An attempt to make Pokemon different from one another has ended up making 99.99% of Pokemon strictly worse than others, and incentivizes players to use external devices to access basic gameplay.
Like, people back in the gameboy era were using legal hacks too to circumvent this absolutely terrible system. Go, look here and see this cool page from October of 2000 where gameshark codes are shared under the pretense of “Hey, let’s not do this silly 999 stat stuff and actually cheat for an advantage over the other player with the cheating device, let’s just skip the stupid grind so we can actually play the game”.
IVs are terrible, they do so much more bad than good for the game, and every generation is just an additional band aid fix on a back-wide sword gash still festering and causing horrible problems. Cut out IVs and so many of the problems are gone.
Since Generation 7, we have had access to bottle caps, which can maximize a Pokemon’s stats with some effort in that gen, and not too much effort in Gen 9. The problem is, maximized IVs are not always the ideal. There are a bunch of important factors where you want it all slightly customized:
That’s nearly it. Outside of extremely small other benefits, like potentially giving a Leech Seed user an HP IV of 0 or a Counter / Mirror Coat Pokemon low defense, that is all the competitive depth that IVs provide for the sake of so much tiresome grindwork in the games. They suck. They suck bad. I hate them.
The Lesser Offenders
I want to put some space between IVs and the rest of these problems because I truly believe they are the root of so much external device usage. Without them, external device usage is almost exclusively for the sake of things that are overwhelmingly flourishes on Pokemon, like shininess. They are awful, but they’re also not the only problems.
Accessible Pokemon
New Pokemon, and getting Pokemon in specific games, is a key selling point of Pokemon’s games. I acknowledge this and I won’t attempt to change it. It’s profit motive. It’s ugly, but I realize it's a ground that’s likely never to be conceded.
I will, however, question the very work around Pokemon offers for people to get Pokemon they can’t otherwise get, be it version exclusives or whatever. The GTS exists and funnels extra dough into Pokemon through the subscription process. The fact you can pay for Pokemon Home, get a Pokemon off of its GTS, and then potentially be disqualified is outrageous. IVs compound this problem too, meaning if the Pokemon you wanted doesn’t have the right IVs, you have to toss it right back up and hope it’s not hacked. Why can using a service owned by Pokemon disqualify me from one of their tournaments.
Hidden Ability Accessibility
While now partially gone with the ability patch, it wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t mention the problems hidden abilities have caused in the past. So many abilities throughout Gen 5-7 were available exclusively on ancient events and long defunct services. If you wanted to use Chlorophyl Venusaur in Gen 5, you needed to get one through a Japanese only event, male only at that, which at the time meant its hidden ability wasn’t transferable through breeding. Worst of all have been hidden ability legendary events, which for several Pokemon were the only way to obtain them in that generation. Generation 6’s Static Zapdos, Telepathy Dialga, Multiscale Lugia, and more were all relevant competitive game pieces restricted to singular events. It was such a motive to ask others for clones of events.
Training Pokemon.
This is the least egregious offender of these core reasons, a blip compared to the problems with IVs, but it’s worth mentioning how obtuse getting competitive Pokemon’s stats up to par can be in many of these games. At the start of Gen 9, unless you were turbo controllering that Paldea tournament to death, you are probably EV training the same way we did in 2007 with power items and encounters. There is very little way to easily adjust intricate EV spreads, or to remember them with the weird JoJo stat graph system.
With definitions defined, and motive for why players seeking no competitive advantages still use external devices, I’d like to get to the meat of things, and show you how deeply entwined and reliant Pokemon has been on external devices over the years.
A History of External Device Usage, From A Witness
For large stints of this game’s history, external programs have been one of the only things kicking it down to a smidgen of accessibility to players. Things are better now, but they’re not good, and many extremely powerful gameplay options are locked by obtuse grinds that benefit no one.
Let’s go gen by gen:
Early Gen 4: Hell
I’ll be starting with Gen 4 since it’s where I started, and is close enough to the start of the modern VGC era, save the JAA tournaments. If you want to know how hard getting things in Gen 1-3 are, it varies from around as hell as early Gen 4 in contemporary Emerald, to infernal super omega turbo deluxe hell in contemporary RS. I hope you like breeding with no everstone natures, no easy 31s in the wild to breed down, and no EV training reset button.
Competitive Pokemon accessibility in a world where most of the community had no idea what an IV or an EV were was abysmal. There were precious few systems in place to even get a read on what your IVs were without external device usage. The easiest way to check your IVs was to use an Action Replay code. If you got something good breeding, you cloned it with external devices; no way in hell you’re ever trading your one copy. I should mention that the actual standard for what constituted a godly breed back then was through the floor. If you had a 31 in speed, your offensive stat, and 20+ in the others, you had an amazing Pokemon on your hand. The Everstone didn’t even pass down your nature 100% of the time.
In this world where IV inheritance was this janky system I myself never bothered to learn beyond getting three IVs from your parents, hacked parents ran rampant. You had, and still have, no idea if your stuff was bred with legal Pokemon, only a rising suspicion if someone produced a few too many outstand breeds a bit too fast.
External device usage was absolutely essential. When you got your good Pokemon, you used an action replay or pokesav or a save file back up on a flash cart to clone it. TMs were still one use, so you had to go through entire playthroughs again unless you want to use an “action replay all TMs x 900” code. As an aside, I should mention that there was a cloning glitch in base generation 4 involving how the GTS worked returning your Pokemon. It’s fair to argue that cloning was speeding up a process you could naturally do on your cartridge, though to call that normal gameplay is just not solid at all.
This is the only era I think where it’s safe to say using a legal hack with maxed IVs is actually a serious advantage compared to anyone using normal in-game means. For what it’s worth, given we didn’t know much about the limits of a Pokemon’s IVs with regards to nature at the time, a lot of legal hacks made for wifi battles probably were illegal, but not out of any malice.
It was a very bad time. If you wanted to test out some cool new Pokemon moveset, you had to go through the worst possible grind imaginable. I felt like a god when I bred a 29/31/26/31/31/31 Tauros. It sucked.
Late Gen 4: You Still Really Want an Action Replay
By 2009, Emerald’s RNG was cracked, and soon all of Gen 4 with it. You could do an alarming amount of pokegear calls or journal reading with a well placed click of A in sync with a timer and suddenly your Zapdos was flawless. This left only a handful of Pokemon on the gamecube games as trouble, and Heartgold and Soulsilver washed away most (but not all :) ).
Still, your average player, not overwhelmingly deep into the competitive community, has no access to this. You have to learn a cryptic series of commands that rival, and have been used as, speedrun tech in their meticulousness as the very bottom barrier of entry to ensure you’re not losing matches for using strictly worse Pokemon. And still, you’re cloning everything, and you’re using hacked TMs probably too if they’re not clonable in Emerald, and even then you’re indulging in a glitch! There is still no easy way to check your IVs beyond that message on the summary screen stating you’ve got at least one perfect. It’s still terribly obtuse, and just barely even possible to legally obtain flawless Pokemon, only through the wildly crafty methods from a community of enthusiasts cracking the RNG. Where we would be without mingot is a mystery.
Gen 5: Cryptically Accessible, Widespread Fake GTS Usage, and Rotting Game Pieces
Gen 5 had a major step forward in accessibility with reusable TMs, legitimately a fantastic move. Gen 5’s RNG was also cracked within a month of the game launching in NA, and RNG manipulation was ludicrously easy compared to prior games.
Still, there were plenty of nightmare inaccessibility problems. Tornadus and Thundurus are so much harder to RNG with the right PID, the part of a Pokemon that gives it its personality, nature, and shininess. Shininess in VGC2012 unfortunately mattered a lot under such tight timer concerns, and the extra few seconds of time from that opening animation combined with all the slow ability prompts could have an actual tangible impact on your games.
After VGC 2011’s Gen 5 dex only, the whole world unlocked with VGC 2012’s everything. There were no regional markers or battle ready systems at this time. Your starter from Ruby version was legal. Your Wish Chansey was legal. Your Follow Me Magmar,a Pokemon from XD who’s RNG manipulation was so difficult that in 2013 maybe like two people on planet earth could even get you one with good IVs, was legal. Your event Eruption Heatran was legal, and would later go on to be very good! I hope you still have the wondercard, or accepted the wondercard on your flashcart savefile so you can copy the save data and get one with 0 Speed and one with 3 Attack and 2 Speed for HP Ice 70. Oh, also, Chlorophyl Venusaur, the Gen 5 JP event exclusive DW Pokemon, available to be male only so it can’t be bred with a ditto in gen 5 to get Chlorophyl Bulbasaur babies, was legal.
Thankfully, we had probably the best accessibility tool ever for getting players these Pokemon: Pokecheck. Pokecheck was a website focused on legality that let you upload Pokemon to check their legality. It also worked as a hub where people could allow their Pokemon to be freely downloaded for others to use. It used FakeGTS technology; younger folks might have seen these referenced in youtube videos where Gen 5 events are still accessible now.
Most every single competitor was using this or Pokegen. It’s usage for cloning was omnipresent in the VGC community. It got to a point were at a VGC tournament, one of my opponents with the Flordia State Pokemon league thanked me for uploading some of my RNGs to Pokecheck. I then fought a clone of my own Excadrill. The one match loss at that tournament I took that day was to my own Tyranitar. I think it is safe to say in that era, a big heap of Pokemon at competitions were bred from users floating around that community; biosci, cassie, myself, agonist, or hozu among a slew of other Pokecheck goers.
Yet, all this is still using external devices, and creating Pokemon beyond the normal means of the game. It was effectively undetectable, but it was still rule breaking as hell, even though it became so normalized because the final products were perfectly legal. It was a bandaid, and should Gen 6 not tackle these issues, we were in trouble.
Early Gen 6 - No External Devices
VGC 2014 is legitimately the only era, at least initially, in the game’s history where there was no external device usage. The 3DS hadn’t been hacked yet. It took like a few weeks for people to realize Diancie and friends were in the game. If Pokemon were as inaccessible as in Gen 5, a major feature of competitive Pokemon would be the dice rolls to actually get your gamepieces with close to acceptable IVs, on par with Gen 4’s status initially.
Thankfully, the Destiny Knot was buffed in Gen 6 to have its signature breeding effects it’s now synonymous with, passing down 5 of a parent’s IVs instead of a normal 3. It’s a band-aid on the IV problem, but one that worked reasonably well to start.
Do you know who was winning these events in an external device free era? The exact same crop of people who were winning in Gen 5. One of the first regionals of the generation, the 2014 Virgina regional, was won by threepeating world champion Ray Rizzo.
Breeding was an annoying thing to do, but it influenced who was winning or not very little. The most it did was my friend who beat me with my own Tyranitar at that gen 5 regional told me he was addicted to breeding for a bit. To anyone who might have had the idea planted in their head that magically poofing away all hacked Pokemon would drastically shake up who was and wasn’t winning events, here’s your example as to what it does. It does nothing.
Sadly, it wasn’t all good times with accessibility forever. Zapdos was a fairly viable Pokemon, and had the most garbage way of being obtained involving a ridiculous wild goose chase and making sure you picked the right starter, on top of the whole soft resetting process. Gen 6 introduced the new region marker system, which effectively banned everything from Gen 3-5 in a big large slate cleaning that made the game far more accessible for players without decade old hardware. This was good and bad; good because so many powerful old options like Eruption Heatran were relegated to history. Bad because, well, some Pokemon would only be easily obtainable with good IVs in these earlier games, as the rest of Gen 6 showed.
Mid-Late Gen 6 - Enjoy your Shiny Hunt
Powersaves, 3DS hacking, and the first versions of PkHex would come around with ORAS’s introduction, and thank god they did.
Alongside X and Y’s breeding changes, another huge change came with the 3DS era: Guaranteed x3 31 IVs on legendaries. This made the act of soft resetting for a perfect legendary actually something reasonably achievable. Barely. And not really, ultimately.
This is the modern system of catching legendaries, but with the big Gen 7 innovation of Hyper Training missing. Essentially, you have to soft reset until you’re lucky enough to get IVs of 31 or 30 for an uninvested stat, with whatever for Atk or Spatk. This is presuming you’ve given up hope on more complicated stat spreads than a simple 252 252 4; otherwise you’re going to need to buckle in for those two 31s in the right places. And hey, this is all just for physical attackers! If you want a special attacker, you want that 0 for foul play, a legitimately widespread move in some of these formats. If you’re using an HP Ice Thundurus, you’re going to want a spread of 31/0 or 2/30/31/31/31. You are probably running into a shiny before you hit that.
With external devices back, cloning was back in swing. Again, it is worth mentioning that this does actually emulate a process you can do in game with the Gen 6 cloning glitch, but again, it’s for sure not normal play given how drastically they penalize any mid-trade interruptions in the very next gen’s games (and, you know, you’re cloning a Pokemon). As someone still actively playing at the time, this felt like a legitimate step back from the Gen 5 system. At least in those games, I could go catch my own Landorus and have it perfect in an hour.
Was there any attempt at making things more accessible by Pokemon? Partially, but they weren’t very good and they came way too late. The Kanto legendary birds, locked by an insane system dictated by your starter in XY, did receive a distribution to get them as wondercards in May of that year. A shiny Mewtwo with Unnerve, Mewtwo’s hidden ability which is otherwise inaccessible in Gen 6 aside from events in Asia, was made available the weekend of NA nats in 2016, one of the last events of the year. Meanwhile, rare events like Telepathy Sinnoh Legends were locked to events not even in america.
Gen 6 VGC formats past 2014 are total jokes of accessibility, all but requiring external device usage to even play with the most powerful and widely used Pokemon around.
Gen 7 - Bottle Caps Are Good. Still Lackluster.
Another generation and another band aid on the IV problem. This one cured most of the absolutely insufferable problems with Gen 6 accessibility, but plenty still remain. Bottle Caps and Hyper Training made it so any Pokemon could finally overcome the digits they were assigned upon birth, but it still was not easy at all. The items themselves were rare and required using weird oversights with the multiplayer plaza to access a constant supply. Training to level 100 was required, with SM having very little easy EXP training. You couldn’t just bottle cap everything, as we’d previously hoped. You had to work hard for them, and still there were plenty of issues.
You also have to rebreed. The mark system is still in place and lacks any sort of function to let your clearly legal Pokemon through for use in official competitions. It’s not the unspeakable frustration caused by Gen 6’s marks, but it’s another little slope guiding people towards external device usage.
This is where some of the more tiring features of IVs start to come into play where specific numbers are needed, with Bottle Caps only giving you that 31. Ironically, the changes that made obtaining usable legendaries possible in Gen 6 makes ideal legendaries in Gen 7 and on more difficult. Your 1/16 to get a 0 or 1 (equivalent for all Pokemon at level 50 uninvested) on Attack or Speed for a legendary is now a 1/32; the 1/16 chance for the IV, then a coinflip for whether the game decided to make that your 31 stat. If you want a specific hidden power, you are probably outlandishly screwed; A 0 Atk IV Hp Fire is so damn hard to get because you’re specifically need to roll 31/0/31/x/31/x, then have those two last x’s be even (You have to go for the 0 because the only sequence with three odd IVs that can produce Hidden Power Fire is Odd/Even/Odd/Even/Odd/Even).
And throughout all this, still we have international events that produce viable Pokemon, still with no international equivalent. I had to come online here and beg for a clone of a Fula City Lugia for a kid at our Pokemon to have for a tournament. Bafflingly, a huge series of event distributions happened that year and none of them took the time to make hidden ability Pokemon widely accessible.
Gen 8: Increasingly Accessible, And Not
I will say, with the improvements to Gen 8’s candy system, this is the first time I would call obtaining most Pokemon legally near acceptable. There were no legendaries to start. Pokemon could pass down egg moves through a new method that didn’t lead to just permanently less useful Pokemon. Nature mints let you change most Pokemon. I was legitimately impressed I could catch a Haxorus in that one Island in the wild area and have a battle ready Pokemon with a few item usages. This is increasingly close to the ideal situation where a Pokemon I caught wherever with a few smart training decisions can be useful in a competitive battle. The battle ready mark was also fantastic! There’s no more rebreeding, and no more soft-resetting for the legendaries you already have. You can wipe their movesets and use them for this game; like a companion is actually still helping you even after your first adventure!
Yet, there are still problems. Getting past gen Legendaries requires rolling through Dynamax raids every time if you’re not importing from an older generation / bdsp or pla I guess for the last 6 month of SWSH’s life. Cool new features like compatibility with Pokemon Home cropped up, but were sub-optimal for any special attacker with their guaranteed higher than ideal attack stat. I'm just going to avoid talking about Dynamax Candy being another grind to make your Pokemon objectively better.
Gen 9 - More Than Ever, Less Than Ever
Gen 9’s biggest innovations are dropping the level cap for bottle caps to level 50, as well as making most competitive items and training items readily available in shops. This is a good change! If you want a 0 Atk IV Pokemon that can be bred, it’s legitimately not hard at all to get anymore. Use a power item to pass along that 0 Atk IV fron one of your Pokemon, breed the egg, and then level up and cap. Accessing the non-legendary Pokemon is actually pretty good in SV.
The legendary Pokemon are terrible.
If you want a 0-1 Atk Tornadus in this format, which is not only a top 5 usage Pokemon, but one you want to have with 0 Attack given a number of viable Pokemon in the format can run Foul Play, Tornadus included, what’s your best option?
Your best option is to have a 3DS, to have installed Pokemon Bank before the 3DS eShop was taken offline, and to soft reset for one in Black, Omega Ruby, or Ultra Sun after the entire adventure. If you were a child when you played these games and caught yours before learning about competitive Pokemon, sorry, you probably don’t have an ideal one and will need to delete your childhood save file and replay a 10-20 hour adventure for another shot. This level of accessibility requiring a minimum 6 year old release to get an optimal version of one of the most common Pokemon in the format is ridiculous. At least using Urshifu this last summer just required one separate $90 purchase.
I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t mention the brand new queen of obtuse accessibility failures to have graced us: Enamorus.
Enamorus is an atrocity on par with ORAS soft-reseting. Enamorus-T is not necessarily a popular or particularly good Pokemon, but if nothing else, it’s an interesting competitive game piece sporting unique typing and high stats.
If you want an optimal one, a 31/0/31/31/31/0 Enamorus-T, you just don’t have options beyond going outside of the normal possibilities of the game.
There is no way to check IVs in PLA at all through normal means. The only way to reasonably obtain one of these is through the use of external devices; to contact a trade bot who can look at your Pokemon’s IVs before you save. You are not obtaining one without external devices. Even with the recent Pokemon Go event, it physically can’t have the 0 Attack you want, and its a raid pass every time the speed IV gacha of moving a Pokemon from Go to Home decides it doesn’t want to be that low speed you need.
This is where we are now. You need games out of circulation and 13 year old consoles to access all the pawns for your chess board.
What Needs To Change?
It is so bizarre seeing this disregard for the ability to obtain competitive Pokemon while at the same time seeing how gamefreak treats battle problems. When Wide Guard was blocking extra damage in USUM, it got patched out very quickly. When Fula City Lugia was a viable competitive gamepiece and available in like three areas in Asia, nothing happened. When Sucker Punch wasn’t working properly at the start of SWSH, it pretty quickly got resolved. When Enamrous became a legitimate nightmare Pokemon to get in an ideal way, we’ve still been given nothing. Pokemon seemingly cares a lot about Pokemon battling the moment the game starts, and not at all during the set up.
I realize that listing out potential changes on a Pokemon form like this is in no way going to change what is actually done in the largest media franchise’s biggest games. Yet, I do know that I can at least keep people educated and to let them know that these systems are bad, and that solutions are something we should be asking for as competitive players from these games.
There’s a quote I’m sure many of you have already heard that has hung on me for a long while, about the topic of video game piracy. In October 2011, Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve, said this on stage at the Washington Technology Industry Association:
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue…The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
This is a quote that, at least I feel, extends to a lot of issues in life. Pokemon’s one of them. Pokemon has made a system where the path of least resistance is external device usage. Their changes are frustratingly incremental and have only driven more and more people to seeking answers beyond the games. If they are going to start disciplining players for their Pokemon lacking data they can’t possibly see on their Pokemon in-game, it’s time normal play in-game is the path of least resistance.
End IVs
IVs are a system that adds the smallest amount of competitive complexity while being a major barrier to entry of play, to the point of being the single greatest incentive for players to go beyond what’s officially Pokemon sponsored. Making every Pokemon unique by assigning stat points to them that make most Pokemon objectively worse than others is… a terrible system. Not only is it an outrageous flavor failure for making your companions feel less special, but it widens the gap for competitive entry with a whole heap of complex garbage to explain. Don’t even give me this rusty bottle cap stuff people keep suggesting. End it. End it now.
PLA already did this. PLA’s stat system sucks for like competitive play, but making IVs only factor into stats the most incredibly minor amount (you get some extra grit points without using that sand item) was great! IVs were tucked away as mostly vestigial data. All the while, Pokemon felt more interesting and unique than ever showing off their personality and different sizes. IVs failed as a way to differentiate Pokemon and more exciting and interesting systems exist now. All they are doing now is putting in barriers of accessibility. It’s time to tuck them away with contest stats and flower crown flags and remove them for good.
The only real ramification of ending IVs would be a nerf to Trick Room teams. Honestly, whatever. Your trick room Pokemon will be operating with 15 more points of speed. I am willing to swallow that as a generational mechanic shift. It’s probably less influential than comparable changes, and probably not as big as enormous stuff like dynamic speed updates.
Competitively Relevant Events
Do you have enough Gastrodons by now? Give players actually exciting and useful events with competitively relevant Pokemon that are difficult to obtain. Distribute an Enamorus with 0 Atk and 0 Speed. They already do stuff like this in some capacity; the Magearna you get for completiting your HOME Pokedex is built for Trick Room. Do more of these weekend event distributions with actually heavily desired Pokemon.
Make EVs More Accessible
Frustratingly, I can’t find a source for my claims here. Take this portion with a grain of salt as to some of the claims I make about the developers. If you have the interviews I’m remembering here, I think around the time of X and Y’s release, let me know and I’ll update this portion with a source.
Edit: Thanks to doipy hooves for finding one of the articles where they covered this: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/pokemon-interview
The developers have commented on aspects like effort values before, and how they’re very shy to show IVs or EVs. They are masked for the sake of not making Pokemon just feel like data. This is why instead of having flat out 252s and 31s visible to us, it’s masked behind hexagon graphs, sparkles, and perfects.
Not only do I feel the regular charm pumped into Pokemon animations nowadays (when they work) alleviate this concern, but it makes for an unneeded barrier to entry for competitive players to learn these systems and tinker with them, just because Pokemon wants to keep up this ridiculous kayfabe about these systems not existing. I guarantee you, learning about these systems and learning your pokemon just aren’t as good as others and that’ll never change is a great way to make people feel like their pokemon are just data. Sure bummed me out in middle school learning the Manaphy I’d spent hours with was stuck with a bad nature.
Let me see my EVs, do sliders without numbers if you must. Let me redistribute them on the fly, just coat it in some sort of flavor like adjusting their battle stance or something. Stop making the most accessible way to gauge a Pokemon’s stats to be plugging it in a calculator or looking at it in with an external device.
Hacking and Paranoia
I would like to end this giant mass of text by speaking on the paranoia external device usage and its widespread usage in the absence of sufficient systems can cause. It generates fear, and places what I feel is an unfair burden on the users so entrenched in a video game, they’re visiting a physical location to play it.
It’s 2011. I’m in a hotel room perusing through the Pokemon in my boxes of Pokemon White. I’m excited. My first ever VGC regional is tomorrow, and I’m super happy to nuke people with Fake Tears Whimsicot and Choice Scarf Jellicent. I have personally bred or caught all of my Pokemon. I learned RNG manipulation the previous month and have long since been versed in how the game’s at the time near invisible systems like IVs and EVs work.
Yet, I’m still a bit on edge. Throughout most of Gen 4, I’ve been an on-again, off-again member of the trading community here. There’ve been all sorts of people trading hacked Pokemon during the early days of competitive wifi battling. A close friend gave me a hacked infernape. The one Jirachi everyone had was hacked. There’s a full wifi blacklist to keep track of, with users being banned from trading. Every user’s primary fear is one that I believe echos to this very day: “What if I take this to an official competition, and it gets me in trouble?”.
I know very little about a lot of the imported Pokemon sitting in my boxes, and where they’re from exactly anymore. I also don’t know at all to what extent having potentially hacked Pokemon can penalize me. I’ve heard whispers that someone got DQed from an event for having 80 Energy Ball TMs. Does having some Pokemon in my boxes put me at risk? I don’t know. So, I start deleting Pokemon, a lot of Pokemon, from my boxes. I delete Pokemon from trades I made in 2007 from people I will never see or hear from again, and erase that lone point of human contact. Even after all that, I go to bed on edge. I still don’t know all the specifics. I might have dragged half of my family up here for something I get disqualified for instantly tomorrow.
I can look back on this experience and realize my fears were unfounded. As far as I’ve ever been made aware, Pokemon has only ever checked your party during these hack checks, and the current rules on Pokemon’s website only extend to battle boxes. I’ve learned a lot about Pokemon legality, knowledge of what Pokemon are actually possible to obtain in a Pokemon game, since then. However, I realize that I’m an adult who submerged himself into a very particular part of a Pokemon subcommunity, and that this sort of paranoia can run throughout the playerbase pretty effortlessly. It’s the most popular franchise on earth, with massively popular video games, and a competitive fanbase full of inexperienced teenagers. Social media allows misinformation and rumors to feed into people’s minds effortlessly. Knowing the ins and outs isn’t easy, and information is often incomplete and hard to find in one place.
Last year, the Pokemon World Championships took place in Yokohama Japan. Social media sparked up as an unexpectedly high number of players were disqualified for having Pokemon altered or created using external devices, methods that go outside of what Pokemon calls normal gameplay. This reached out so far that I had friends in other circles only distantly tied to Pokemon at all hear about what happened. It has doubtlessly seeped into the consciousness of so many online outside of the Pokemon community. I saw youtube recommendations about the situation. Fragments of the event have shattered far and wide, and often don’t have attached context.
Pokemon is the biggest media franchise. It is not hard to hear the words “Pokemon players cheating” and for people not entrenched in this niche competitive world to get the wrong picture of what exactly is happening. It is too simple for a person’s real-life name to be publicized across the internet and have the first search result come with the title of cheater. It is so easy to hear stories about people getting banned from tournaments and to worry about what it means for you or your possible future participation in these events. It is a worry I would like demystified. It is a problem that has been around for so long and left unanswered.
It is completely unacceptable.
A History of Competitive Pokemon and External Device Usage
Pokemon has failed to make its competitive game accessible, for 26 years and counting.
It has constantly presented a system where going outside of normal gameplay is the easiest way to obtain Pokemon. It has let Pokemon that violate their competition rules infest their paid products and rendered what could be helpful alternative systems inert. You can obtain a Pokemon on an officially supported software with premium passes and then have it get you disqualified from an event.
It has always been this way and it has only improved with glacial pacing. After explaining some preamble, I would like to explain just how bad it’s been, how long it’s gone on, and how inexcusable it is we are still dealing with this problem, especially now that it is disqualifying people from paid events.
I have been around the competitive Pokemon community for a long time. I’ve come to realize now that I am legitimately one of the few still out there who have been present and playing in at least a minor capacity throughout nearly every era of official tournaments with context for how easy or hard (read: HARD) it is obtaining Pokemon on cartridge for competitive play. People who were babies when I rigged the random number generator to get my first flawless Pokemon for a competition can now register a Smogon account and access the greater internet. I feel I should taper down some of the history behind the struggle of getting decent Pokemon, instead of letting it rot and get lost in twitter maelstroms.
With this post, I want to demystify the advantages going outside of what Pokemon considers normal gameplay gives a player, as well as show just how deeply tied competitive Pokemon has been tied to external device usage, not out of any desire to maliciously gain an upper hand, but as, at times, a near necessity during many eras of the game to play outside of a simulator without greatly handicapping yourself.
This thread will attempt to explain concepts for people at more casual Pokemon literacy, as well as folks versed in competitive Pokemon, but not necessarily the legitimacy stuff behind the in-game aspects of it, like what exactly makes a Pokemon hacked. I’m going to assume you know what things like IVs, EVs, and Soft Resetting are. I might simplify some concepts with regards to Pokemon legality to the point where people with more intricate experience might feel it’s an oversimplifications. I will be upfront: Everything I’ve learned about legality has been second hand from other people digging into it over the years. I am not a first hand source as to how the mechanics of these games work. I’m just an old brick of limestone baked from years of grains of information. What I’ve learned has been used for the practical application of people playing PVP. Please understand that I’m trying my best to simplify without leading to egregious conflations. On the opposite end of that reader spectrum, for others not super familiar with Pokemon legality stuff, I also ask that you don’t parrot anything from here mindlessly as gospel. The world has enough people regurgitating others’ opinions on competitive video games already from youtube video essays.
Why This Thread?
I don’t like the uptick in disqualifications for hacked Pokemon that have happened recently. I feel they are not the fault of the players, but a sign that Pokemon has utterly failed at policing their own environment for these things to happen, and then dropping the burden on players who are paying the full retail price of a video game for a tournament.
There are a wide range of people at these events. There are children and young teenagers who don’t know any better, or don’t know how to cut through the complex web of all the media surrounding the most popular property in the world and know what are dos and don’ts for these events. I know that using a stream that sends you free Pokemon is giving you a hacked Pokemon. Andy, age 40, who last played the games on the gameboy in high school and is taking their ten year old daughter to a fun event and needs the karate bear, likely doesn’t know anything about this world. That daughter also probably doesn’t suspect that the genie she got off of Pokemon Home’s GTS has any problems, especially given she could do free battles with it just fine. I have helped out at leagues and TPCI events before. I have had a parent approach me asking if power saves are allowed for events. A thorough understanding of what out there is and isn’t cheating can be incredibly confusing to players, and the official rules pdf offers two sentences of clarification on the matter.
There is not a powerful enough support system to help people understand what is and isn’t kosher for prepping for an event. A judge at an event, by no fault of their own, might not be able to tell you where that line is. Judges are hard working people with a deep love of their game doing underpaid volunteer work. They also are first and foremost focused on the TCG by their necessity, and now have sometimes up to three video games parasitically injected into their system thrusted upon them to officiate at these events.
In the absence of that protection, fan projects have taken its place. Posts, websites and programs dedicated to checking legality have been made, maintained, and abandoned over the years. We have one here in the wifi section I started back in 2014, which has since been taken over, piloted, and updated by a lot of wonderful contributors. It's a good repository of information. A parent going to a video game event should have to know it exists. Let's talk about how bad this situation's gotten.
Who Am I?
Before I start, I want to lay out some background as to who I am and why I should have any grounds to record this information. Again, I have never directly contributed to the nitty-gritty aspects of legality dissecting the games, other than what was easily testable on a default cartridge or perusing movepools for fun trivia and oversights. My standing comes from being a very old community member who’s helped run places that care about Pokemon legality, and breeding and catching entirely too many competitive Pokemon myself.
Over the years, I have:
- Been an on-again off-again moderator for the wifi section here since 2012, with a presence here since the place started in 2007. I made the discord server for the wifi portion of the site linked in the big repository.
- Ran a series of cartridge tournaments here with participation prizes to give some of VGC2015’s most terribly inaccessible gamepieces as entry rewards.
- Ran a project in early 2014 to get people VGC 2014 relevant Pokemon for the early regionals after Pokemon Bank’s “Run on the Bank”; Metagame important Pokemon like Iron fist Timburr, Dark Void Smeargle, and Unnerve Aerodactyl required a japanese subscription to Bank to access until February after it crashed on Christmas day, but January’s physical IRL VGC events still allowed them.
- Helped as a physically present legality aficionado / manual team checker for officially sponsored small premier challenge events in the southeastern US area between 2016 and 2018.
- Bred an entire competitive Pokedex of what could be bred in Gen 7 just because I thought it’d be cool and fun. It was; Gen 7 Battle Royals played IRL are peak Pokemon.
- Uploaded almost an entire Gen 5 Pokedex of perfect Pokemon caught or hatched with perfect IVs using RNG manipulation and made it free / public to use through the now defunct legality checking website Pokecheck for any competitor to use.
- Collected a catalog of every DW ability because ability accessibility in a pre-ability patch world was dropping like a rock.
- Actually played Pokemon of course; I have a VGC brick.
- I also ran Smogon’s VGC section years ago, but ehh I don’t think I was very good at it. I was overloaded from school. The people in the community at the time and the leaders after me elevated it. That title when I took it was about as prestigious as being the lifeguard of an above-ground pool.
I have done a lot of breeding. I have done a lot of RNG manipulation. I have done a lot of policing of hacked Pokemon. I have worked pretty hard to help players overcome the varying accessibility issues that come with all manner of playing Pokemon.
I have grown tired of the root issues never being tackled, and am fed up now that it’s leading to DQs.
The Vernacular of Pokemon Legality
Let’s start by tackling some terms on what Pokemon are and aren’t considered altered by an external device, to get everyone up to speed.
Making sure your Pokemon aren’t hacked has been a constant fascination with players. Community definitions to describe legality have been around for a long while. This diagram gives a nice overview of some of the most important ones.
These definitions are well over a decade old now, as you can probably tell from this chart using words like Pokesav and Wondertomb in there. They have seeped into wider usage for the Pokemon community for a long while now, so I see little reason not to use them now too.
A few things to note: It is impossible to tell a legal Pokemon from a legitimate Pokemon with no prior information about that Pokemon. If there is anything that can differentiate that Pokemon from the normal processes that make a Pokemon, it’s inherently illegal.
With these definitions established, let’s talk about how they apply to competitive battling and a forth term: Legal Hacks.
Legal Hacks
Since online play has existed, people have wanted to sideline the process of obtaining Pokemon so they can just play and enjoy the PVP experience. Thus, with Pokesav and Action Replay, players took to making “Legal Hacks”. These are acknowledged attempts at creating Pokemon from methods outside of normal gameplay that don’t go beyond the threshold of what’s possible in terms of battle stats. They are essentially proxy cards in a trading card game. They are functionally identical in most every practical way that matters, except to the company. Fixating on aspects like a Landorus lacking a Pokemon home ID on its data is completely inconsequential to the games being played.
You are almost always only ever fighting a legal hack if someone is using a Pokemon created by atypical means in a tournament. You are almost never going to fight one that gives you some sort of advantage, especially not anything that gives a numbers advantage in battle like 512+ EVs or something. Pokemon’s most basic hack checks catch these; you will not be allowed on even free battles if your team violates one of these aspects. These are the sloppiest of sloppy hacks and are typically instantly intersected.
By the strictest definition, any Pokemon where you’re able to detect it was modified is illegal, and not a legal hack, since legal would imply being possible through normal gameplay. However, this is a very strict definition that I don’t think falls in line with the spirit of how the concept has been used since I first was fighting them back on DP Wi-Fi in 2007. The goal is not to abide by every feature of a legal Pokemon, it is to have a functioning game piece without the burden of what is for many an unfun grind needed for the fun gameplay.
Legitimacy (And Why It Is Laughably Flimsy)
You might notice that the definition of “shortcuts” above is riddled with a lot of vague terms. The thing is, legitimacy is a very flimsy term. The only thing separating legitimacy from legality is memory. Like, your personal memory as a person remembering what happened to the Pokemon. There are so many ways for a Pokemon to not be legitimate that are impossible to ever track.
An observation I’ve made throughout several different Pokemon trading communities is that overwhelmingly we only care about detectable cheating. Things like wonder card injections, the use of hacked event items to access mythical Pokemon, resources like vitamins, bottle caps, candies injected into a save file, and even cloning, you will be stressed to find anyone mad about. This is something I’ve passively accepted for a long time, but seems strange held up from a more distant perspective.
For those unaware, there is nothing really on a Pokemon’s data tracking how your Pokemon got certain aspects to it, like its EVs or item. You can get your EVs on your Pokemon any way: EV Training, Vitamins, Using your 900 cloned Zincs in BDSP, date shenanigans with Pokepelago in base SM, changing a digit in an external device, whatever. You can’t tell what happened to any of them if you are presented that Pokemon without context. The only way you can detect if you’re using a hacked item is if, well, you hacked in an item not accessible at all through gameplay, like handing a Pokemon a Cherish Ball.
One sour note that people have not tolerated since the very early days is using hacked parents. Getting good IVs in past generations was hard. Why not put together two parents with perfect IVs until you get a great offspring? I don’t think I have to explain how using hacked Pokemon in the process of getting a Pokemon would be unsettling for a lot of players, and why it’s been banned in a number of communities. Unfortunately, this is nearly impossible to track outside of incredibly particular circumstances. The data on a Pokemon does not include anything pertaining to its parents. Have you wonder traded for a breedject ever? There is a very good possibility that it was bred with a hacked ditto. You’ll have no way of ever knowing beyond super niche circumstances, and it will have no bearing on the legality of anything you breed with it. A Pokemon bred with hacked parents is as good as legal one, until it very much isn’t.
Small aside: Probably the most ridiculous version of hacked parents unfolded in 2017 when Heavy Ball Beldum was discovered to be impossible in base SM. The way the catch formula used to work, Pokemon with extremely low catch rates and weight could be flat out impossible to catch in a heavy ball. This was discovered after they’d flooded throughout wonder trade as spitbacks without any issue; I even saw vinny vinesauce get one. I was moderating the Wi-Fi section here at the time. We went into a hustle to get rid of all the Heavy Ball Beldums on here and discipline anyone who said they were a source. Then, by the end of the year, USUM came out and edited the catch formula so a catch had at least a tiny chance of success Your heavy ball Metagross you bred off a spitback from wondertrade went from being legal by merit of no one yet disproving its existence, to illegal, to legal again. I have no way of proving the Heavy Ball Metagross you bred in February 2017 used a hacked parent or not unless I trust your word of mouth.
Personally, I think it’s weird that there is any outrageous anger towards legal hacks when the system is so flimsy already. Hacking a pokemon to the point where only usage of some external device can see anything is wrong is grounds for disqualification. Going to some trade bot to get your hacked ditto and pumping out an egg there is fine, undetectable, and completely inactionable. Chastizing a player for using a hacked Pokemon from the GTS feels less like cheating to me than editing a save file and cramming a Pokemon full of every stat boosters. I don't think the sanctity of the competition has been compromised either way.
Clones:
Cloning also, for a lot of the game’s history, has not been emulating a strictly illegal process. Even if you ignore Gen 3 and Gen 4’s cloning glitches, In the first 5 generations of Pokemon, it is absolutely possible, sometimes borderline trivial, to get the exact same Pokemon. Legendaries aren’t exempt from this either; you can pretty easily follow a process to land a very particular trainer ID and start your DS at a certain time to get the exact same Pokemon you want..
Disqualifications over clones are extremely rare. There was a recent one where two players on an esports team were disqualified, which unfortunately doesn’t have a lot of public information at the moment. However, from as far as I can tell, they were using the exact same team with the exact same legendary Pokemon, potentially still with the same hidden Pokemon Home ID, and a judge caught it.
Clones have long been one of the most widely accepted methods of external device usage since the ability to trade your Pokemon went online. It’s impossible to tell which Pokemon is the clone; if you can, one of them is just a hacked Pokemon. They exist because they maintain perfect legality and that so many Pokemon over the years have been excruciating to get with solid IVs. In a weird round-about way, it's often using an external device to avoid using an external device in a slightly different way. A clone of a friend’s legal Pokemon is a way to get a legal Pokemon, without going into the wild and trading for a random one, or replaying through an entire adventure you might not even own for a single Pokemon.
Let’s talk about the drive to use external devices a bit more thoroughly.
What Drives External Device usage?
So then, ultimately, what makes these Pokemon so hard to get that it leads to going outside the normal boundaries of the game? There are a few problems, and then one massive problem that has been fermenting for 26 years.
The Major Offender: IVs
IVs are a truly awful system. It and its precursor, DVs, shouldn't have been a thing since the very start in Gen 1. An attempt to make Pokemon different from one another has ended up making 99.99% of Pokemon strictly worse than others, and incentivizes players to use external devices to access basic gameplay.
Like, people back in the gameboy era were using legal hacks too to circumvent this absolutely terrible system. Go, look here and see this cool page from October of 2000 where gameshark codes are shared under the pretense of “Hey, let’s not do this silly 999 stat stuff and actually cheat for an advantage over the other player with the cheating device, let’s just skip the stupid grind so we can actually play the game”.
IVs are terrible, they do so much more bad than good for the game, and every generation is just an additional band aid fix on a back-wide sword gash still festering and causing horrible problems. Cut out IVs and so many of the problems are gone.
Since Generation 7, we have had access to bottle caps, which can maximize a Pokemon’s stats with some effort in that gen, and not too much effort in Gen 9. The problem is, maximized IVs are not always the ideal. There are a bunch of important factors where you want it all slightly customized:
- Trick Room Speed - The most obvious stat where a non-ideal IV is desired. If you want to be as slow as possible, you usually want an IV of 0-1 (level 50 stats make these equivalent; sometimes you can go slightly higher) to keep you as slow as possible. It can get worse though. A decent number of Trick Room Pokemon want to customize that bit of their speed so that they move right before or right after some other member of their team. The Metagross that won worlds in 2012 ran a speed IV of 14 so it could move immediately after its partner Cresselia swaggered into its Lum Berry. You can’t look at that Metagross today in game and tell what it’s speed is, beyond the notion it’s “Decent”. You have to track a specific invisible stat with only a tiny graph and some calculators to help you.
- 0 Atk Confusion Damage and Foul Play - This is a dumb optimization that will not matter in 90%+ of your games with most teams, but not doing so is just making your team strictly worse. You want your attack stat as low as possible on any Pokemon not using physical attacks.
That’s nearly it. Outside of extremely small other benefits, like potentially giving a Leech Seed user an HP IV of 0 or a Counter / Mirror Coat Pokemon low defense, that is all the competitive depth that IVs provide for the sake of so much tiresome grindwork in the games. They suck. They suck bad. I hate them.
The Lesser Offenders
I want to put some space between IVs and the rest of these problems because I truly believe they are the root of so much external device usage. Without them, external device usage is almost exclusively for the sake of things that are overwhelmingly flourishes on Pokemon, like shininess. They are awful, but they’re also not the only problems.
Accessible Pokemon
New Pokemon, and getting Pokemon in specific games, is a key selling point of Pokemon’s games. I acknowledge this and I won’t attempt to change it. It’s profit motive. It’s ugly, but I realize it's a ground that’s likely never to be conceded.
I will, however, question the very work around Pokemon offers for people to get Pokemon they can’t otherwise get, be it version exclusives or whatever. The GTS exists and funnels extra dough into Pokemon through the subscription process. The fact you can pay for Pokemon Home, get a Pokemon off of its GTS, and then potentially be disqualified is outrageous. IVs compound this problem too, meaning if the Pokemon you wanted doesn’t have the right IVs, you have to toss it right back up and hope it’s not hacked. Why can using a service owned by Pokemon disqualify me from one of their tournaments.
Hidden Ability Accessibility
While now partially gone with the ability patch, it wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t mention the problems hidden abilities have caused in the past. So many abilities throughout Gen 5-7 were available exclusively on ancient events and long defunct services. If you wanted to use Chlorophyl Venusaur in Gen 5, you needed to get one through a Japanese only event, male only at that, which at the time meant its hidden ability wasn’t transferable through breeding. Worst of all have been hidden ability legendary events, which for several Pokemon were the only way to obtain them in that generation. Generation 6’s Static Zapdos, Telepathy Dialga, Multiscale Lugia, and more were all relevant competitive game pieces restricted to singular events. It was such a motive to ask others for clones of events.
Training Pokemon.
This is the least egregious offender of these core reasons, a blip compared to the problems with IVs, but it’s worth mentioning how obtuse getting competitive Pokemon’s stats up to par can be in many of these games. At the start of Gen 9, unless you were turbo controllering that Paldea tournament to death, you are probably EV training the same way we did in 2007 with power items and encounters. There is very little way to easily adjust intricate EV spreads, or to remember them with the weird JoJo stat graph system.
With definitions defined, and motive for why players seeking no competitive advantages still use external devices, I’d like to get to the meat of things, and show you how deeply entwined and reliant Pokemon has been on external devices over the years.
A History of External Device Usage, From A Witness
For large stints of this game’s history, external programs have been one of the only things kicking it down to a smidgen of accessibility to players. Things are better now, but they’re not good, and many extremely powerful gameplay options are locked by obtuse grinds that benefit no one.
Let’s go gen by gen:
Early Gen 4: Hell
I’ll be starting with Gen 4 since it’s where I started, and is close enough to the start of the modern VGC era, save the JAA tournaments. If you want to know how hard getting things in Gen 1-3 are, it varies from around as hell as early Gen 4 in contemporary Emerald, to infernal super omega turbo deluxe hell in contemporary RS. I hope you like breeding with no everstone natures, no easy 31s in the wild to breed down, and no EV training reset button.
Competitive Pokemon accessibility in a world where most of the community had no idea what an IV or an EV were was abysmal. There were precious few systems in place to even get a read on what your IVs were without external device usage. The easiest way to check your IVs was to use an Action Replay code. If you got something good breeding, you cloned it with external devices; no way in hell you’re ever trading your one copy. I should mention that the actual standard for what constituted a godly breed back then was through the floor. If you had a 31 in speed, your offensive stat, and 20+ in the others, you had an amazing Pokemon on your hand. The Everstone didn’t even pass down your nature 100% of the time.
In this world where IV inheritance was this janky system I myself never bothered to learn beyond getting three IVs from your parents, hacked parents ran rampant. You had, and still have, no idea if your stuff was bred with legal Pokemon, only a rising suspicion if someone produced a few too many outstand breeds a bit too fast.
External device usage was absolutely essential. When you got your good Pokemon, you used an action replay or pokesav or a save file back up on a flash cart to clone it. TMs were still one use, so you had to go through entire playthroughs again unless you want to use an “action replay all TMs x 900” code. As an aside, I should mention that there was a cloning glitch in base generation 4 involving how the GTS worked returning your Pokemon. It’s fair to argue that cloning was speeding up a process you could naturally do on your cartridge, though to call that normal gameplay is just not solid at all.
This is the only era I think where it’s safe to say using a legal hack with maxed IVs is actually a serious advantage compared to anyone using normal in-game means. For what it’s worth, given we didn’t know much about the limits of a Pokemon’s IVs with regards to nature at the time, a lot of legal hacks made for wifi battles probably were illegal, but not out of any malice.
It was a very bad time. If you wanted to test out some cool new Pokemon moveset, you had to go through the worst possible grind imaginable. I felt like a god when I bred a 29/31/26/31/31/31 Tauros. It sucked.
Late Gen 4: You Still Really Want an Action Replay
By 2009, Emerald’s RNG was cracked, and soon all of Gen 4 with it. You could do an alarming amount of pokegear calls or journal reading with a well placed click of A in sync with a timer and suddenly your Zapdos was flawless. This left only a handful of Pokemon on the gamecube games as trouble, and Heartgold and Soulsilver washed away most (but not all :) ).
Still, your average player, not overwhelmingly deep into the competitive community, has no access to this. You have to learn a cryptic series of commands that rival, and have been used as, speedrun tech in their meticulousness as the very bottom barrier of entry to ensure you’re not losing matches for using strictly worse Pokemon. And still, you’re cloning everything, and you’re using hacked TMs probably too if they’re not clonable in Emerald, and even then you’re indulging in a glitch! There is still no easy way to check your IVs beyond that message on the summary screen stating you’ve got at least one perfect. It’s still terribly obtuse, and just barely even possible to legally obtain flawless Pokemon, only through the wildly crafty methods from a community of enthusiasts cracking the RNG. Where we would be without mingot is a mystery.
Gen 5: Cryptically Accessible, Widespread Fake GTS Usage, and Rotting Game Pieces
Gen 5 had a major step forward in accessibility with reusable TMs, legitimately a fantastic move. Gen 5’s RNG was also cracked within a month of the game launching in NA, and RNG manipulation was ludicrously easy compared to prior games.
Still, there were plenty of nightmare inaccessibility problems. Tornadus and Thundurus are so much harder to RNG with the right PID, the part of a Pokemon that gives it its personality, nature, and shininess. Shininess in VGC2012 unfortunately mattered a lot under such tight timer concerns, and the extra few seconds of time from that opening animation combined with all the slow ability prompts could have an actual tangible impact on your games.
After VGC 2011’s Gen 5 dex only, the whole world unlocked with VGC 2012’s everything. There were no regional markers or battle ready systems at this time. Your starter from Ruby version was legal. Your Wish Chansey was legal. Your Follow Me Magmar,a Pokemon from XD who’s RNG manipulation was so difficult that in 2013 maybe like two people on planet earth could even get you one with good IVs, was legal. Your event Eruption Heatran was legal, and would later go on to be very good! I hope you still have the wondercard, or accepted the wondercard on your flashcart savefile so you can copy the save data and get one with 0 Speed and one with 3 Attack and 2 Speed for HP Ice 70. Oh, also, Chlorophyl Venusaur, the Gen 5 JP event exclusive DW Pokemon, available to be male only so it can’t be bred with a ditto in gen 5 to get Chlorophyl Bulbasaur babies, was legal.
Thankfully, we had probably the best accessibility tool ever for getting players these Pokemon: Pokecheck. Pokecheck was a website focused on legality that let you upload Pokemon to check their legality. It also worked as a hub where people could allow their Pokemon to be freely downloaded for others to use. It used FakeGTS technology; younger folks might have seen these referenced in youtube videos where Gen 5 events are still accessible now.
Most every single competitor was using this or Pokegen. It’s usage for cloning was omnipresent in the VGC community. It got to a point were at a VGC tournament, one of my opponents with the Flordia State Pokemon league thanked me for uploading some of my RNGs to Pokecheck. I then fought a clone of my own Excadrill. The one match loss at that tournament I took that day was to my own Tyranitar. I think it is safe to say in that era, a big heap of Pokemon at competitions were bred from users floating around that community; biosci, cassie, myself, agonist, or hozu among a slew of other Pokecheck goers.
Yet, all this is still using external devices, and creating Pokemon beyond the normal means of the game. It was effectively undetectable, but it was still rule breaking as hell, even though it became so normalized because the final products were perfectly legal. It was a bandaid, and should Gen 6 not tackle these issues, we were in trouble.
Early Gen 6 - No External Devices
VGC 2014 is legitimately the only era, at least initially, in the game’s history where there was no external device usage. The 3DS hadn’t been hacked yet. It took like a few weeks for people to realize Diancie and friends were in the game. If Pokemon were as inaccessible as in Gen 5, a major feature of competitive Pokemon would be the dice rolls to actually get your gamepieces with close to acceptable IVs, on par with Gen 4’s status initially.
Thankfully, the Destiny Knot was buffed in Gen 6 to have its signature breeding effects it’s now synonymous with, passing down 5 of a parent’s IVs instead of a normal 3. It’s a band-aid on the IV problem, but one that worked reasonably well to start.
Do you know who was winning these events in an external device free era? The exact same crop of people who were winning in Gen 5. One of the first regionals of the generation, the 2014 Virgina regional, was won by threepeating world champion Ray Rizzo.
Breeding was an annoying thing to do, but it influenced who was winning or not very little. The most it did was my friend who beat me with my own Tyranitar at that gen 5 regional told me he was addicted to breeding for a bit. To anyone who might have had the idea planted in their head that magically poofing away all hacked Pokemon would drastically shake up who was and wasn’t winning events, here’s your example as to what it does. It does nothing.
Sadly, it wasn’t all good times with accessibility forever. Zapdos was a fairly viable Pokemon, and had the most garbage way of being obtained involving a ridiculous wild goose chase and making sure you picked the right starter, on top of the whole soft resetting process. Gen 6 introduced the new region marker system, which effectively banned everything from Gen 3-5 in a big large slate cleaning that made the game far more accessible for players without decade old hardware. This was good and bad; good because so many powerful old options like Eruption Heatran were relegated to history. Bad because, well, some Pokemon would only be easily obtainable with good IVs in these earlier games, as the rest of Gen 6 showed.
Mid-Late Gen 6 - Enjoy your Shiny Hunt
Powersaves, 3DS hacking, and the first versions of PkHex would come around with ORAS’s introduction, and thank god they did.
Alongside X and Y’s breeding changes, another huge change came with the 3DS era: Guaranteed x3 31 IVs on legendaries. This made the act of soft resetting for a perfect legendary actually something reasonably achievable. Barely. And not really, ultimately.
This is the modern system of catching legendaries, but with the big Gen 7 innovation of Hyper Training missing. Essentially, you have to soft reset until you’re lucky enough to get IVs of 31 or 30 for an uninvested stat, with whatever for Atk or Spatk. This is presuming you’ve given up hope on more complicated stat spreads than a simple 252 252 4; otherwise you’re going to need to buckle in for those two 31s in the right places. And hey, this is all just for physical attackers! If you want a special attacker, you want that 0 for foul play, a legitimately widespread move in some of these formats. If you’re using an HP Ice Thundurus, you’re going to want a spread of 31/0 or 2/30/31/31/31. You are probably running into a shiny before you hit that.
With external devices back, cloning was back in swing. Again, it is worth mentioning that this does actually emulate a process you can do in game with the Gen 6 cloning glitch, but again, it’s for sure not normal play given how drastically they penalize any mid-trade interruptions in the very next gen’s games (and, you know, you’re cloning a Pokemon). As someone still actively playing at the time, this felt like a legitimate step back from the Gen 5 system. At least in those games, I could go catch my own Landorus and have it perfect in an hour.
Was there any attempt at making things more accessible by Pokemon? Partially, but they weren’t very good and they came way too late. The Kanto legendary birds, locked by an insane system dictated by your starter in XY, did receive a distribution to get them as wondercards in May of that year. A shiny Mewtwo with Unnerve, Mewtwo’s hidden ability which is otherwise inaccessible in Gen 6 aside from events in Asia, was made available the weekend of NA nats in 2016, one of the last events of the year. Meanwhile, rare events like Telepathy Sinnoh Legends were locked to events not even in america.
Gen 6 VGC formats past 2014 are total jokes of accessibility, all but requiring external device usage to even play with the most powerful and widely used Pokemon around.
Gen 7 - Bottle Caps Are Good. Still Lackluster.
Another generation and another band aid on the IV problem. This one cured most of the absolutely insufferable problems with Gen 6 accessibility, but plenty still remain. Bottle Caps and Hyper Training made it so any Pokemon could finally overcome the digits they were assigned upon birth, but it still was not easy at all. The items themselves were rare and required using weird oversights with the multiplayer plaza to access a constant supply. Training to level 100 was required, with SM having very little easy EXP training. You couldn’t just bottle cap everything, as we’d previously hoped. You had to work hard for them, and still there were plenty of issues.
You also have to rebreed. The mark system is still in place and lacks any sort of function to let your clearly legal Pokemon through for use in official competitions. It’s not the unspeakable frustration caused by Gen 6’s marks, but it’s another little slope guiding people towards external device usage.
This is where some of the more tiring features of IVs start to come into play where specific numbers are needed, with Bottle Caps only giving you that 31. Ironically, the changes that made obtaining usable legendaries possible in Gen 6 makes ideal legendaries in Gen 7 and on more difficult. Your 1/16 to get a 0 or 1 (equivalent for all Pokemon at level 50 uninvested) on Attack or Speed for a legendary is now a 1/32; the 1/16 chance for the IV, then a coinflip for whether the game decided to make that your 31 stat. If you want a specific hidden power, you are probably outlandishly screwed; A 0 Atk IV Hp Fire is so damn hard to get because you’re specifically need to roll 31/0/31/x/31/x, then have those two last x’s be even (You have to go for the 0 because the only sequence with three odd IVs that can produce Hidden Power Fire is Odd/Even/Odd/Even/Odd/Even).
And throughout all this, still we have international events that produce viable Pokemon, still with no international equivalent. I had to come online here and beg for a clone of a Fula City Lugia for a kid at our Pokemon to have for a tournament. Bafflingly, a huge series of event distributions happened that year and none of them took the time to make hidden ability Pokemon widely accessible.
Gen 8: Increasingly Accessible, And Not
I will say, with the improvements to Gen 8’s candy system, this is the first time I would call obtaining most Pokemon legally near acceptable. There were no legendaries to start. Pokemon could pass down egg moves through a new method that didn’t lead to just permanently less useful Pokemon. Nature mints let you change most Pokemon. I was legitimately impressed I could catch a Haxorus in that one Island in the wild area and have a battle ready Pokemon with a few item usages. This is increasingly close to the ideal situation where a Pokemon I caught wherever with a few smart training decisions can be useful in a competitive battle. The battle ready mark was also fantastic! There’s no more rebreeding, and no more soft-resetting for the legendaries you already have. You can wipe their movesets and use them for this game; like a companion is actually still helping you even after your first adventure!
Yet, there are still problems. Getting past gen Legendaries requires rolling through Dynamax raids every time if you’re not importing from an older generation / bdsp or pla I guess for the last 6 month of SWSH’s life. Cool new features like compatibility with Pokemon Home cropped up, but were sub-optimal for any special attacker with their guaranteed higher than ideal attack stat. I'm just going to avoid talking about Dynamax Candy being another grind to make your Pokemon objectively better.
Gen 9 - More Than Ever, Less Than Ever
Gen 9’s biggest innovations are dropping the level cap for bottle caps to level 50, as well as making most competitive items and training items readily available in shops. This is a good change! If you want a 0 Atk IV Pokemon that can be bred, it’s legitimately not hard at all to get anymore. Use a power item to pass along that 0 Atk IV fron one of your Pokemon, breed the egg, and then level up and cap. Accessing the non-legendary Pokemon is actually pretty good in SV.
The legendary Pokemon are terrible.
If you want a 0-1 Atk Tornadus in this format, which is not only a top 5 usage Pokemon, but one you want to have with 0 Attack given a number of viable Pokemon in the format can run Foul Play, Tornadus included, what’s your best option?
- The one you caught in PLA? It almost certainly isn’t 0-1 Atk. You’ve got a pretty low chance that random capture had it, and you can’t even check its IVs without an external device without saving your game.
- Dynamax adventures? Every reset of your Tornadus is a monolithic exercise trudging towards the legendary for a crank on that 1/32 slot machine.
- Transfer one from Pokemon GO? Legendaries have a stat floor in that game that ensures you’re never close to 0 Atk.
- An event actually in Pokemon SV? There is none.
Your best option is to have a 3DS, to have installed Pokemon Bank before the 3DS eShop was taken offline, and to soft reset for one in Black, Omega Ruby, or Ultra Sun after the entire adventure. If you were a child when you played these games and caught yours before learning about competitive Pokemon, sorry, you probably don’t have an ideal one and will need to delete your childhood save file and replay a 10-20 hour adventure for another shot. This level of accessibility requiring a minimum 6 year old release to get an optimal version of one of the most common Pokemon in the format is ridiculous. At least using Urshifu this last summer just required one separate $90 purchase.
I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t mention the brand new queen of obtuse accessibility failures to have graced us: Enamorus.
Enamorus is an atrocity on par with ORAS soft-reseting. Enamorus-T is not necessarily a popular or particularly good Pokemon, but if nothing else, it’s an interesting competitive game piece sporting unique typing and high stats.
If you want an optimal one, a 31/0/31/31/31/0 Enamorus-T, you just don’t have options beyond going outside of the normal possibilities of the game.
There is no way to check IVs in PLA at all through normal means. The only way to reasonably obtain one of these is through the use of external devices; to contact a trade bot who can look at your Pokemon’s IVs before you save. You are not obtaining one without external devices. Even with the recent Pokemon Go event, it physically can’t have the 0 Attack you want, and its a raid pass every time the speed IV gacha of moving a Pokemon from Go to Home decides it doesn’t want to be that low speed you need.
This is where we are now. You need games out of circulation and 13 year old consoles to access all the pawns for your chess board.
What Needs To Change?
It is so bizarre seeing this disregard for the ability to obtain competitive Pokemon while at the same time seeing how gamefreak treats battle problems. When Wide Guard was blocking extra damage in USUM, it got patched out very quickly. When Fula City Lugia was a viable competitive gamepiece and available in like three areas in Asia, nothing happened. When Sucker Punch wasn’t working properly at the start of SWSH, it pretty quickly got resolved. When Enamrous became a legitimate nightmare Pokemon to get in an ideal way, we’ve still been given nothing. Pokemon seemingly cares a lot about Pokemon battling the moment the game starts, and not at all during the set up.
I realize that listing out potential changes on a Pokemon form like this is in no way going to change what is actually done in the largest media franchise’s biggest games. Yet, I do know that I can at least keep people educated and to let them know that these systems are bad, and that solutions are something we should be asking for as competitive players from these games.
There’s a quote I’m sure many of you have already heard that has hung on me for a long while, about the topic of video game piracy. In October 2011, Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve, said this on stage at the Washington Technology Industry Association:
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue…The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
This is a quote that, at least I feel, extends to a lot of issues in life. Pokemon’s one of them. Pokemon has made a system where the path of least resistance is external device usage. Their changes are frustratingly incremental and have only driven more and more people to seeking answers beyond the games. If they are going to start disciplining players for their Pokemon lacking data they can’t possibly see on their Pokemon in-game, it’s time normal play in-game is the path of least resistance.
End IVs
IVs are a system that adds the smallest amount of competitive complexity while being a major barrier to entry of play, to the point of being the single greatest incentive for players to go beyond what’s officially Pokemon sponsored. Making every Pokemon unique by assigning stat points to them that make most Pokemon objectively worse than others is… a terrible system. Not only is it an outrageous flavor failure for making your companions feel less special, but it widens the gap for competitive entry with a whole heap of complex garbage to explain. Don’t even give me this rusty bottle cap stuff people keep suggesting. End it. End it now.
PLA already did this. PLA’s stat system sucks for like competitive play, but making IVs only factor into stats the most incredibly minor amount (you get some extra grit points without using that sand item) was great! IVs were tucked away as mostly vestigial data. All the while, Pokemon felt more interesting and unique than ever showing off their personality and different sizes. IVs failed as a way to differentiate Pokemon and more exciting and interesting systems exist now. All they are doing now is putting in barriers of accessibility. It’s time to tuck them away with contest stats and flower crown flags and remove them for good.
The only real ramification of ending IVs would be a nerf to Trick Room teams. Honestly, whatever. Your trick room Pokemon will be operating with 15 more points of speed. I am willing to swallow that as a generational mechanic shift. It’s probably less influential than comparable changes, and probably not as big as enormous stuff like dynamic speed updates.
Competitively Relevant Events
Do you have enough Gastrodons by now? Give players actually exciting and useful events with competitively relevant Pokemon that are difficult to obtain. Distribute an Enamorus with 0 Atk and 0 Speed. They already do stuff like this in some capacity; the Magearna you get for completiting your HOME Pokedex is built for Trick Room. Do more of these weekend event distributions with actually heavily desired Pokemon.
Make EVs More Accessible
Frustratingly, I can’t find a source for my claims here. Take this portion with a grain of salt as to some of the claims I make about the developers. If you have the interviews I’m remembering here, I think around the time of X and Y’s release, let me know and I’ll update this portion with a source.
Edit: Thanks to doipy hooves for finding one of the articles where they covered this: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/pokemon-interview
The developers have commented on aspects like effort values before, and how they’re very shy to show IVs or EVs. They are masked for the sake of not making Pokemon just feel like data. This is why instead of having flat out 252s and 31s visible to us, it’s masked behind hexagon graphs, sparkles, and perfects.
Not only do I feel the regular charm pumped into Pokemon animations nowadays (when they work) alleviate this concern, but it makes for an unneeded barrier to entry for competitive players to learn these systems and tinker with them, just because Pokemon wants to keep up this ridiculous kayfabe about these systems not existing. I guarantee you, learning about these systems and learning your pokemon just aren’t as good as others and that’ll never change is a great way to make people feel like their pokemon are just data. Sure bummed me out in middle school learning the Manaphy I’d spent hours with was stuck with a bad nature.
Let me see my EVs, do sliders without numbers if you must. Let me redistribute them on the fly, just coat it in some sort of flavor like adjusting their battle stance or something. Stop making the most accessible way to gauge a Pokemon’s stats to be plugging it in a calculator or looking at it in with an external device.
Hacking and Paranoia
I would like to end this giant mass of text by speaking on the paranoia external device usage and its widespread usage in the absence of sufficient systems can cause. It generates fear, and places what I feel is an unfair burden on the users so entrenched in a video game, they’re visiting a physical location to play it.
It’s 2011. I’m in a hotel room perusing through the Pokemon in my boxes of Pokemon White. I’m excited. My first ever VGC regional is tomorrow, and I’m super happy to nuke people with Fake Tears Whimsicot and Choice Scarf Jellicent. I have personally bred or caught all of my Pokemon. I learned RNG manipulation the previous month and have long since been versed in how the game’s at the time near invisible systems like IVs and EVs work.
Yet, I’m still a bit on edge. Throughout most of Gen 4, I’ve been an on-again, off-again member of the trading community here. There’ve been all sorts of people trading hacked Pokemon during the early days of competitive wifi battling. A close friend gave me a hacked infernape. The one Jirachi everyone had was hacked. There’s a full wifi blacklist to keep track of, with users being banned from trading. Every user’s primary fear is one that I believe echos to this very day: “What if I take this to an official competition, and it gets me in trouble?”.
I know very little about a lot of the imported Pokemon sitting in my boxes, and where they’re from exactly anymore. I also don’t know at all to what extent having potentially hacked Pokemon can penalize me. I’ve heard whispers that someone got DQed from an event for having 80 Energy Ball TMs. Does having some Pokemon in my boxes put me at risk? I don’t know. So, I start deleting Pokemon, a lot of Pokemon, from my boxes. I delete Pokemon from trades I made in 2007 from people I will never see or hear from again, and erase that lone point of human contact. Even after all that, I go to bed on edge. I still don’t know all the specifics. I might have dragged half of my family up here for something I get disqualified for instantly tomorrow.
I can look back on this experience and realize my fears were unfounded. As far as I’ve ever been made aware, Pokemon has only ever checked your party during these hack checks, and the current rules on Pokemon’s website only extend to battle boxes. I’ve learned a lot about Pokemon legality, knowledge of what Pokemon are actually possible to obtain in a Pokemon game, since then. However, I realize that I’m an adult who submerged himself into a very particular part of a Pokemon subcommunity, and that this sort of paranoia can run throughout the playerbase pretty effortlessly. It’s the most popular franchise on earth, with massively popular video games, and a competitive fanbase full of inexperienced teenagers. Social media allows misinformation and rumors to feed into people’s minds effortlessly. Knowing the ins and outs isn’t easy, and information is often incomplete and hard to find in one place.
Last year, the Pokemon World Championships took place in Yokohama Japan. Social media sparked up as an unexpectedly high number of players were disqualified for having Pokemon altered or created using external devices, methods that go outside of what Pokemon calls normal gameplay. This reached out so far that I had friends in other circles only distantly tied to Pokemon at all hear about what happened. It has doubtlessly seeped into the consciousness of so many online outside of the Pokemon community. I saw youtube recommendations about the situation. Fragments of the event have shattered far and wide, and often don’t have attached context.
Pokemon is the biggest media franchise. It is not hard to hear the words “Pokemon players cheating” and for people not entrenched in this niche competitive world to get the wrong picture of what exactly is happening. It is too simple for a person’s real-life name to be publicized across the internet and have the first search result come with the title of cheater. It is so easy to hear stories about people getting banned from tournaments and to worry about what it means for you or your possible future participation in these events. It is a worry I would like demystified. It is a problem that has been around for so long and left unanswered.
It is completely unacceptable.
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