Culture Why it’s OK that so many top Pokémon players ‘cheat’ - TL;DR - Polygon has a balanced and somewhat-unbiased opinion on a game’s competitive scene for once

Does a Pikachu lose legitimacy if you didn’t organically breed and train it yourself? What if you hacked a copy of a game and created it? Both are virtual, but is one less valid? I don’t think any of the great philosophers pondered the ethics of hacked Pokémon, but these questions have long served as the center of debate within the ranks of the world’s best competitive Pokémon players.

During the 2023 Pokémon World Championships in Yokohama, Japan, a number of players were disqualified for using hacked Pokémon. In a recent interview with gameland.gg, one pro player estimated as many as 90% of players in tournaments use hacked Pokémon. To some, this reveal is scandalous: These are supposed to be the world’s best players. Why would they need to cheat? However, the debate brings up genuine questions about the challenges of training and catching Pokémon fit for competitive play. It also brings up questions about the strictness of the rules behind competitive play, and the way that current versions of Pokémon, including Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, lack certain gameplay features that would benefit top competitive players.

First, it’s important to note that competitors are not using hacks to create Pokémon that surpass the limits of what’s mathematically or strategically possible in the game. A Pokémon’s stats vary within a set range based on a number of factors — take a Pokémon like Dragonite, for example, and its speed stat. The slowest possible Dragonite will always be faster than the fastest possible Slowbro, because the range of Dragonite’s speed stat is higher than Slowbro’s. If you hacked a Slowbro into your game that was faster than a Dragonite, that would be clear-cut cheating, because it’s not possible to achieve by playing the game normally.

A high-tier player wouldn’t hack the game to create a Slowbro that can outspeed a Dragonite. Instead, they will hack in a Dragonite that has the best stats a Dragonite could possibly have. You could get this Dragonite legitimately in the game, but without hacking, you’d have to spend time and a lot of in-game resources on training the Dragonite and maxing out its stats. One Pokémon might not take much time to train, but pro players are often iterating on an idea dozens of times across all six Pokémon they’d have on their team, which adds up to hours and hours spent making the Pokémon rather than battling with them.

Scarlet and Violet contain quality-of-life features that making acquiring and training tournament-ready Pokémon easier than it was a few years ago — items like mints and Bottle Caps let you adjust a Pokémon’s stats more easily — but they still take time and in-game money to get, and earning more money in Scarlet and Violet can be a massive grind. Add in the fact that securing certain Pokémon might take a lot of trading between different versions of the games and Pokémon Home, and it just adds up. So instead of doing all of this, many top trainers will use programs like PKHeX, a popular save file editor, to create specific Pokémon with precise stats.

So is the cheating good or bad?​

It depends on whether you consider the labor of catching, breeding, and training Pokémon to be an essential component of a competitor’s performance. It’s worth noting the best players aren’t great solely because they have a perfectly built team. Many players could undertake the hours and hours of work required to create a “perfect” Pokémon. What makes a top player is the ability to read, predict, and react to different strategies that a challenger is using. Put another way: It would be like playing chess, but you had to take a ton of extra time to carve out the pieces themselves, in addition to experimenting with different strategies.

Since these “cheats” or hacks are used to make Pokémon with legitimate stats, it’s arguably OK for players to hack in Pokémon. This hacking doesn’t detract from the actual tactical play required of competitors during matches, nor does it give competitors a strategic advantage.

This seems to be the commonly shared position. In the interview with gameland.gg, a regional champion and top-20 contender at the 2022 World Championships, Brady Smith, estimated that as many as 90% of pro players use hacked Pokémon. It would certainly save these competitors a lot of time. Many competitive players balance the hobby with other responsibilities, like full-time careers or having a family, and don’t have time to devote to training all their teams by hand. Still, it can be hard for players to speak out, because it could impact their standing in official tournament play.

As evidenced by the disqualifications at the 2023 World Championships, The Pokémon Company has becoming increasingly stringent with enforcing its hacked Pokémon policy. According to the official competitive rules, “The use of external devices, such as a mobile app, to modify or create items or Pokémon in a player’s Battle Team is expressly forbidden.” Players who are found to have hacked Pokémon or items will be disqualified from tournaments. However, enforcement has been irregular. Some of the players disqualified from Worlds made it through regional tournaments without issues, and the practice of generating Pokémon has been around for years.

Regardless of how a person may feel on the matter, it seems now it is best for players to avoid using hacked Pokémon when they can.

https://www.polygon.com/pokemon/239...violet-cheating-scandal-competitive-explained
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[ilovejews]

Boris Onishchenko brought his own epee. Do you think he should have won?

Disclaimer: I'm an amateur athlete, I have no interest in pokemon. My closest connection to pokemon is buying the "You can surgically mold your dick into the Eiffel tower. You're not going to become France" 41% terf game. I think people shouldn't bring an F1 car to a foot race (even F1 has regulations, it's not anything goes), or a DJI to a modelling plane competition, or a painted rock to a pumpkin contest.

Yeah sure if they outright make their stats impossible fuck them.

 

[Left Ass Cheek]

lol, lmao even
There is no such thing as "casual competitive pokemon", it's called the single player campaign. The one made so easy these days that even toddlers can beat it.

None of this has anything to do with my point. Casuals aren’t the targeted demographic of my proposal.

Showdown is a battle sim that is customizable enough to let you play with different rulesets and generate teams according to whatever tier/format you want to play in. It’s popular because it is easily accessible as a browser game with no obligatory, frontloaded toddler mode singleplayer content to slog through. If it was inconvenient it would not be so popular an alternative among players.

Nintendo doesn’t have their own Showdown equivalent despite multiplayer being popular, despite VGC being their esport league to advertise the multiplayer, and despite pro players already using Discord groomed mons that serve the exact same practical and time investment purpose as just generating a mon would. Instead, they play their tournament matches at a paltry 15fps via the local multiplayer of the current generation games made by Gamefreak. To even engage with the multiplayer, you’re obligated to play the toddler mode meant for thr casuals, preferably to completion.

The gate barring entry isn’t difficulty, it’s boredom - and its entirely at the expense of hardcore fans. Hence the “cheating” quandary.

 

[lolwut]

So by purists' logic, a competitive trading card player should be forced to shell out for booster packs until RNGesus gives them the cards they want instead of just buying those specific ones? This is why Kick the Autistic is America's real favorite competitive game.

 

[30+GameOvers]

None of this has anything to do with my point. Casuals aren’t the targeted demographic of my proposal.

Showdown is a battle sim that is customizable enough to let you play with different rulesets and generate teams according to whatever tier/format you want to play in. It’s popular because it is easily accessible as a browser game with no obligatory, frontloaded toddler mode singleplayer content to slog through. If it was inconvenient it would not be so popular an alternative among players.

Nintendo doesn’t have their own Showdown equivalent despite multiplayer being popular, despite VGC being their esport league to advertise the multiplayer, and despite pro players already using Discord groomed mons that serve the exact same practical and time investment purpose as just generating a mon would. Instead, they play their tournament matches at a paltry 15fps via the local multiplayer of the current generation games made by Gamefreak. To even engage with the multiplayer, you’re obligated to play the toddler mode meant for thr casuals, preferably to completion.

The gate barring entry isn’t difficulty, it’s boredom - and its entirely at the expense of hardcore fans. Hence the “cheating” quandary.

You're missing my point: If you can't even bother to raise a Pokemon properly, then you don't have the patience to learn the ins and outs of competitive Pokemon either. Go on youtube and type in "False Swipe Gaming *insert name of your favorite Pokemon here*. Some of these go for over an hour, that's how long it takes to summarize how well one does in competitive format and how you're supposed to use it. Now add 2-5 more of these, analyze and keep up with the ever changing metagame(even Red Blue Green from the 90s still have new strategies and fads to this day, with only 151 Pokemon and paltry amount of moves), learn obscure gameplay mechanics and how they can impact moment to moment gameplay and finally start doing math on how effective your team will be against the current metagame and enemies you might have trouble with(by this point you should know what counters and checks your team might have problems with, you will then need to do some calculations as to how much damage from each attack they might be running will be done to every single team member of yours, creating strategies and counter-attacks for every possible serious or plausible scenario. Note these calculations need to take weather, stat boost or debuffs as well as enemy's potential main strategy into question, all of these are variables that need to be kept in mind when calculating damage ranges).

We haven't even touched the game yet, at this point you usually run simulators to check if a team like this is even viable. Then, and only then, do you have to start catching, breeding and raising Pokemon of your choice, once you're sure that this is the team you're going with. Breeding has it's own mechanics, EV training has it's own mechanics, items you want to use might be hard to find, same goes for certain evolutions to trigger, and you might need to shell out Battle Points for certain moves. That's after you hatch a perfect or near perfect IV Pokemon and the godawful time it can take for the eggs to hatch, thankfully if you level up a Pokemon to 100 in recent games you can use a golden bottle cap to give your Pokemon all perfect IVs but the grind itself is arguably not worth it in the end.



Raising a Pokemon is only the last part, even if you had a Pokemon create screen like the simulators do, that doesn't absolve the player from doing research in order to get themselves familiarized with how the game works. In fact, it should be treated as a way to gatekeep people who don't have the stones to put in the work with how anal it is to get started, and with a franchise like this, that means a lot of people will be filtered. That's not a bad thing, only few fans will ever play competitively on any serious level, but you're not going to have a good time if you're easily dissuaded and not willing to put in the work(ie complaining about breeding eggs). I should note that there are special divisions in the VGC for children, and many current competitive players started out as children when they went competitive as well. That means that everything I just mentioned, even a literal minor can do, so it's not a question of "this is too hard!", but rather a question of "is this worth my time?"

If you're caught in the middle, where as you want to play against other people but you know you will never make this a hobby of yours, the simulators are right up your alley. You can create any team you want, no strings attached and others do the same, you skip to the good part right away. The appeal of actual competitive Pokemon is taking the ones you raised yourself and putting them on the big stage, getting a huge win with your bros always feels better than ones with Pokemon that were genned in. They feel like rental Pokemon from the Stadium games more than anything, I can tell you right now that if you know what you're doing, even unoptimized Pokemon can have a good chance at winning tourneys. It's more about your skill and experience more than the numbers going up or down, that simply helps with the RNG and even the best teams can just get fucked for no reason. Simply put, if you want to know why someone would go thru all this trouble instead of just cheating Pokemon in, think of the feeling the Elite 4 tries to instill into you as you finish beating the game. In a sense, going into a tournament like VGC with the team of your choosing, that you raised by yourself, recreates that feeling but in the real world. Watch some of the final games of the past tournaments, some of these get crazy, you just can't replicate this with an online simulator where both parties have fake Pokemon.



So, a TL;DR is that simulator matches and actual competitive matches are two different things, and should be treated as such. Raising and training your team as intended prepares you for the torrent of autism that you are expected to learn if you want to get any good. If you simply skip to the end and generate a meta-perfect team without understand why Smogon recommended you these 6 Pokemon, you will likely eat shit from someone who barely even tried. Just like with real sports or talents, there is no shortcuts or simple tricks that will substitute for the time and effort needed to learn them, but some people know they will never be Soldiers or Football players, and instead play Videogames or maybe Airsoft/Paintball or footie with friends instead. You can't join a Football team without qualifications for it and you can't skip out on the basic training when joining the Army either, that's simply not how it works.

 

[Gar For Archer]

It's similar to speedrunners restarting runs over and over again to get a particular outcome; it's up to the community to decide if that's what they're here for and if they can enforce it, or if it would be better to skip to what's important to them.

The community doesn’t have any sway in this, VGC competitions (the official competitive format) are run/sponsored by Nintendo so they make all the rules.

On the other hand, the community-run singles competitions exclusively use Pokémon Showdown, a fan-made online battle sim where every Pokémon is genned.

So by purists' logic, a competitive trading card player should be forced to shell out for booster packs until RNGesus gives them the cards they want instead of just buying those specific ones? This is why Kick the Autistic is America's real favorite competitive game.

I think it’s more like forcing competitive trading card players to use original cards instead of being allowed to use proxies. It’s almost 1:1 - owning the right cards doesn’t really say anything about your skill in deckbuilding or playing the game, just the size of your bank account. And like a hacked but otherwise legal Pokémon, a proxy can be indistinguishable from the original without close examination, and doesn’t function any differently from the thing it’s copying.

 

[VargReallyDidNothingWrong]

I cannot imagine being so fucking lame and gay that I would want to participate in a "competitive game" that is so easily optimized and meta-gamed and one where the performance of your game pieces is dependent on how much autistic timewasting you spend re-rolling gacha bullshit.

Even games like Magic the Gathering typically don't require you open 18000 booster packs to make sure you build an "optimal" deck. All the ultra-rare bullshit cards are banned from most competitive play so you don't have the game turn into a wallet-flexing competition.

I don't see a problem here honestly. Let everyone build optimized Charizards and Zapdoses and whatever. If everyone is equal and all Pokemon are optimal, then you remove one of the gay elements of chance out of the game and leave just pure player performance and strategy.

Being a competitive Pokemon player is still super gay, though.

 

[Moja Zemlja]

I 100% support using hacked Pokemon just like I support using stand ins for TCGs and tabletop games, let autistic gatekeeping be what weeds out the tourists not bullshit time wasting.

 

[Left Ass Cheek]

You're missing my point:

Bro I appreciate the effort but this is a ludicrous amount of shit to type and literally none of it addresses the point that I made originally, which is that Nintendo themselves can address the "cheating" dilemma without compromising the hyper autistic integrity of raising your own team by creating a standalone battle sim that works like Showdown but also allows you to transfer the monsters you've personally raised or traded for into the sim. It's a convenience option that has the obvious benefits of being officially compatible with the main games.

That would solve the problem. If Nintendo doesn't have Gamefreak make the sim it'll 100% be better optimized for VGC, have customization options for different battle formats, at least run at a reasonable framerate, and would be way quicker to drop in and drop out of for people who don't care about the singleplayer. Hell they could probably even fit the full national dex since it wouldn't be packaged with an open world. That's it. That's all I was saying.

 

[30+GameOvers]

Bro I appreciate the effort but this is a ludicrous amount of shit to type and literally none of it addresses the point that I made originally, which is that Nintendo themselves can address the "cheating" dilemma without compromising the hyper autistic integrity of raising your own team by creating a standalone battle sim that works like Showdown but also allows you to transfer the monsters you've personally raised or traded for into the sim. It's a convenience option that has the obvious benefits of being officially compatible with the main games.

What the fuck are you talking about? Pokemons STILL doesn't even have voice acting, they're not going to do jack shit. If you want a good quality of life feature, you're going to have to depend on the fans to mod it in. It's not going to get any better than Showdown, unless they DMCA it for some reason.
Also, they won't actually let you gen Pokemon because one of the big selling points for the games is ability to collect and trade them. If you can create them out of thin air, then that defeats the whole purpose of buying two separate games and trading with friends or strangers. You're out of your mind if you think Nintendo will cuck out on 50% profits, let alone a game with a full dex at this point in time.

 

[Oddjob OTP]

I'd like to point out that every RNG stat mechanic in the game other than shiny is fucking gay and Game Freak can suck a fat cock over how hard they make getting perfect IVs and the correct EV spread and nature and abilities onto a specific pokemon. And fuck egg moves inheritance. Get rid of IVs and nature, buff EVs and make them easy to manipulate and make ability switching items more available. Move tutors should be able to copy a move off one pokemon and move it to another. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

 

[Agent of Z.O.G.]

Would there even be a pro scene if there was no autism grind to keep the creatures invested?

 

[Blacklight]

This shit is why games turn into absolute sweatfests when the development teams listen to the try hard faggots. I've lost interest in so many games because the dev team goes from tuning games from originally being fun to play to being slogs with little to no fun to be had because some retard who plays the game 'professionally' got his panties in a wad over his favorite character getting a 0.25% nerf on something.

 

[Left Ass Cheek]

What the fuck are you talking about? Pokemons STILL doesn't even have voice acting, they're not going to do jack shit. If you want a good quality of life feature, you're going to have to depend on the fans to mod it in. It's not going to get any better than Showdown, unless they DMCA it for some reason.
Also, they won't actually let you gen Pokemon because one of the big selling points for the games is ability to collect and trade them. If you can create them out of thin air, then that defeats the whole purpose of buying two separate games and trading with friends or strangers. You're out of your mind if you think Nintendo will cuck out on 50% profits, let alone a game with a full dex at this point in time.

Holy shit I'm not saying "NINTENDO WILL DO THIS I KNOW BECAUSE MY UNCLE WORKS THERE", I'm saying that they should do it if the "cheating" dilemma is a valid concern and they want to create a profitable solution. I'm not even suggesting that they MUST do it because the issue this article touches upon is miniscule when you consider how much these games sell regardless of their quality.

Also your problem is easily solved by having the genned mons be treated like rentals were in previous official Nintendo battle sims, which is that you can't affect how they look and you can't trade them to the main games where your collection is. Obviously. We can go even further and mark the genned mons with an icon next to their name so that you know for sure if someone's team is genned or authentic, then true fans can retain bragging rights and judge the Showdown refugees who only use that site because its the only way to play a customizable and accessible version of every multiplayer pokemon game.

You're either being deliberately obtuse to have an excuse to proselytize about really stupid shit regarding the competitive integrity of a children's video game or you just don't read, dude. That's the only conclusion I can come to at this point.

 

[30+GameOvers]

Holy shit I'm not saying "NINTENDO WILL DO THIS I KNOW BECAUSE MY UNCLE WORKS THERE", I'm saying that they should do it if the "cheating" dilemma is a valid concern and they want to create a profitable solution

That's your problem, expecting something that would make sense from Gamefreak(not Nintendo btw, they let TPCi and Gamefreak largely operate as they please).
Gamefreak is an incompetent company that can't do anything right, and they regularly remove QoL features for no other reason than to make the previous games that had them "unique". There is no rhyme or reason to anything they do because no matter what, the games will print money, so they don't need to try to appeal to fans. If any other company had rights to the franchise, we would no doubt be seeing much more from the games than we do now, but that's not the case, now is it?
Funny thing about rental Pokemon(which I agree with you, that's something they could do, but you and I both know they won't) is that they already INTRODUCED THEM INTO THE MAINLINE GAMES. In Battle Frontier, you have a "Battle Factory" where you have to use pre made Pokemon instead of your own, you can trade one of the defeated opponent's Pokemon at the end of the battle if you chose. I can easily imagine a similar mode where you instead get points, and you get to spend them on the "perfect Pokemon" by selecting it's stats, natures ect. with the superior choices costing more, obviously. This would let you make balanced teams on the fly and be able to rent them whenever you want, however that sounds like a nice feature so we will never get it.
Thing is, even these rental Pokemon in Battle Factory are fucking garbage, these Pokemon are not competitively viable at all and were likely created by people who don't know how to play their own game. That's just the thing, you're giving them too much credit by thinking they know anything about the game mechanics they themselves created or have the skill required to make a Pokemon builder within the game to begin with. Gamefreak are a bunch of morons and they can barely make a functional game in the first place, so nothing of the sort will ever happen. Again, the closest thing to a game where you can have competitive Pokemon from the get-go will be Stadium games or PBR, and Showdown. For literally everything else, you will have to raise the Pokemon yourself or gen if you're lazy, I already made my case as to why raising them is the more optimal choice(at least at first).
As I already said, Gamefreak is much more inclined to continue making you work your ass off to bring your competitive Pokemon into tourneys anyways because that is more time spend with the game, more engagement with the algorithm and it lets you grow attached to them, which means you're more likely to buy DLC, pay for HOME and buy the next game. If it can make GF even a few yen more, they will do it without caring what the right option would be.

 

[Psyduck]

Competitive pokemon is some of the most autistic shit ive ever seen and im a psyduck

Stick to the collectathon, game is over once you fill the pokedex

 

[Nick Gars]

Boris Onishchenko brought his own epee. Do you think he should have won?

Disclaimer: I'm an amateur athlete, I have no interest in pokemon. My closest connection to pokemon is buying the "You can surgically mold your dick into the Eiffel tower. You're not going to become France" 41% terf game. I think people shouldn't bring an F1 car to a foot race (even F1 has regulations, it's not anything goes), or a DJI to a modelling plane competition, or a painted rock to a pumpkin contest.

That analogy doesn't work when a "hacked" Pokémon and a legit Pokémon are almost 100% indistinguishable from one another. Every "hacked" Pokémon used in these tournaments can be obtained legitimately in game, meaning all their stats, moves and abilities are tournament legal. Nothing about them gives the owner of the hacked Pokémon an advantage outside of time saved. The only thing "illegal" about them is  how they're made.

As was pointed out earlier in the thread by @Gar For Archer , the "time save" is a cope of an "advantage" as well. Almost all of the major tournaments players have fans or discord groups that will catch/breed perfect pokemon for the tournament player, saving them way WAY more time than any normal player trying to compete.

 

[Left Ass Cheek]

That's your problem, expecting

I don't and didn't have expectations. My suggestion was just the result of a passing thought on how Gamefreak, Nintendo, Creatures inc or whoever could solve the dilemma in the article, which is that people cheat to reach the starting line because they don't want to invest time in the game outside of battles. That's not a thought experiment that warrants this much autism, you'd be better off just saying my idea is shit.

 

[coof coof]

My opinion is likely skewed because I'm autistic and the only game I play is one where you could assemble a team of people and spend hundreds of hours trying to make an item only to have it be evaporated to a 50/50, but you are a massive fag if 100 hours is too much to spend for your super serious children's game tournament. Pokemon was always for fags though so it checks out.

 

[Mewtwo_Rain]

Nintendo doesn’t have their own Showdown equivalent despite multiplayer being popular, despite VGC being their esport league to advertise the multiplayer, and despite pro players already using Discord groomed mons that serve the exact same practical and time investment purpose as just generating a mon would. Instead, they play their tournament matches at a paltry 15fps via the local multiplayer of the current generation games made by Gamefreak. To even engage with the multiplayer, you’re obligated to play the toddler mode meant for thr casuals, preferably to completion.

Sadly in modern era, if they were to have such a app or multiplayer featurette it would probably be at a costs or nickel-n-dime instead of being free or part of the game purchases. They should do it, but you already know how it is with Nintendo's lack of ambition on that regard.
--end response

One reason I'm not in favor of edited Pokémon is it creates what I call an unorthodox meta. Certain Pokémon would be almost impossible to replicate for all or many teams with perfect stats (or certain set ups) so the actual meta becomes an unrealistic one because of all the edited Pokémon. It doesn't help most competitors in actual competition don't even know how to make a true anti-meta team. This is because Pokémon competitive is full of lazy people including many of the tournament goers. Not all but a large enough portion that it badly reflects on Pokémon as a whole.

Some people argue they don't have enough time but that's how tournaments work, quite a few pros in other games spend hours upon hours it's just most tourists/dreamers think that by just hacking a team they'll top the tourney they promise it doesn't really pan out for many. It may open up a potential chance for new players with a lack of gatekeep but I'd have to see the results of that.

--

I know a lot of people hate hearing this when comparing to other tournaments and competitive, but all competitive is filled with RNG, people forget in shooting games not everyone is born with the same reflexes, and have to waste hours to learn perfect shots and positions of maps sometimes (some people are prodigies and don't have to waste time but again that's reflex/random variable of their abilities) so even in games that seem less random in tournament scene there are certain variables that can effect a person's performance that might as well be defined as RNG as well even if the other details are not RNG based (again like shooters)...

I know a lot of people don't like the idea of gatekeeping, but even if you create a team out of thin air, the pros already have people making Pokémon for them and are testing the teams and sharing results on which statistically is the most practical teams. So even if you remove the "grind" gate keep you're going to be behind them either way, and their advantage doesn't change.

Note: Someone could still technically win tournaments without practice or by pushing a hypothetical anti-meta Strat, done it a few times in my past in card game tournaments as a "poor kid" who couldn't afford all the meta decks, but a lot of people are not going to break that barrier to the pros who already have those resources afforded to them or their little in-groups testing for them. The key thing is in a new Pokémon game the meta resets with new additions so there is a favorable chance to get ahead when it's new.

Outside of tournament though I don't mind hacked Pokémon as long as legit stats and move pool.

 

[Geddy Lee's Fee and See]

I don't get why you would waste your time playing Pokemon competitively, especially since any Pokemon game after Gen 4 is just trash. It's supposed to be fun and shit you play against friends, not some sort of autism jamboree.