EFFORTPOST [EFFORTPOST] Drama at the Pokemon World Championship as trainers are expected to actually catch 'em all instead of cheating

The setting

So this past weekend, the Pokemon World Championship happened in Japan. It's where the biggest nerds best players gather to compete for the title of world champion in the various Pokemon games. The oldest and probably most prestigious of these contests is VGC - the video game championship. It's exactly what you'd expect: people use the newest mainline games (Scarlet and Violet at this time), bring six mons and battle each other. For reasons only The Pokemon Company (TPC) understands, instead of using these six mons to battle one-on-one as most players would suspect and as 99% of these games play, the VGC format is choose-four-out-of-six and use them in a double battle (2-on-2). While this is a bit of a tangent, the important takeway is this: TPC does not particularly care about competitive play, it does not have its finger on the pulse of the community and is frankly pretty much r-slurred when it comes to handling the biggest media franchise on the planet.

But this year, they did something truly heinous - they actually tried to stop cheating.

Gotta catch 'em all - or do you?

Competitive Pokemon has a bunch of boring rules, but the relevant one for this drama is one that has existed in a form similar to this since the very beginning:

As a little background, Pokemon games have been hacked for a long time. And as early as 2002 (probably earlier, not gonna bother checking ), people figured out what 0s and 1s you need to build a little monster. This resulted in programs like PokeGen, where you can easily generate (or "gen" as it will be commonly called) a Pokemon with whatever moves, abilities and stats you want with the click of a button. I really cannot overstate how simple this process is. Naturally, this is a big help for people really serious about battling: no need to bother with all that tedious catching, training and breeding of perfect Pokemon, you can just cheat and get them instantly. Of course this goes against the spirit of the series and the fairness of the competition, hence the rule against manipulated mons. And surely TPC with all its money and influence is very serious about checking and enforcing this rule, right? Well, no. In its usual incompetence, TPC did little to nothing to inspect for manipulated mons. Aside from checking if your Charizard has Hydro Pump, they really didn't care. And without punishment, people started cheating. A lot. Here is someone analysing teams from last year showing just how widespread cheating had become, especially in the West:

Note that these checks could easily been done by TPC itself to stop the most obvious offenses, but they choose not do that. Until this year.

TPC, in a move I can only assume was sheer coincidence, actually realised that as part of their relatively new Pokemon Home service (a storage for all your Pokemon to move them between games), they 'tag' Pokemon that have been stored. Among other things, this tag can tell if a Pokemon had its stats changed in an impossible way since Home last saw it and, perhaps more importantly, it also shows that any mon that would require a transfer through Home (such as those only available in older games) yet lacks a Home tag was obviously injected into the game through illegtimate means. And for once, they actually used the cowtools at their disposal to check for cheating. And the result was LOTS of top players getting disqualified.

The drama or "what do you mean I can't cheat?!"

Now in any other game, you'd think that cheaters getting ousted is a good thing and the community would celebrate. But not in the VGC community. Almost 20 years of almost completely punishment-free cheating have made the practice so widespread and accepted, players actually grew entitled to it. Here's one demanding respect for his noble non-effort:

Got disqualified from worlds last round on 4-2, I cannot stop crying. So many effort put in this season for literally nothing, cancelling the open less than 1 month before worlds + this new hack check last minute way its no sense. We spend money for this, we need RESPECT.

> most prepared VGC player:

Well that's silly, surely there are more reasonable takes. Ah yes, this looks better.

DQ'd at 2-0. Should have gotten my mons myself!

Half my team was modified/genned

I didn't have Legends of Arceus to get the Lando

And I didn't have my copy of Sword/Shield to get Urshifu

I tried trading for the mons with a reputable trader, but the mons didn't pass

Here's the paste I was gonna use, sorry y'all. I'll do better next time

Time to enjoy my time in Japan!

Just calm acceptance, surely a role model for the com-

Anyone else down to go on strike this upcoming season?

If numbers of competitions go down, they might try to come up with a solution to increase player attendance.

What we want is genning to be legal.

We know that Pokémon can't do this with the primary genning method being a third party software.

Ideally this forces them to come up with a solution.

This solution may involve changing the rules to allow modified Pokémon or creating a battle simulator game.

If enough people are on this idea, we can consistently send support tickets to demand the changes we want to see.

This is a lot to ask, and we as a community would need to work together to make this happen if we really want genning to be official.

>LET US CHEAT OR WE STRIKE

A bunch of people sympathetic towards cheaters because, you know, they paid money to be there and stuff and obviously nothing is their fault

No shade at all. It's just insane to me that someone could probably spend over $5000 to travel and stay in Japan. Just to get disqualified for genned Pokémon.

I honestly feel awful for the people who spend $1000s to compete at Worlds to then just get DQ'd.

I understand fair play absolutely but I just can't help but feeling bad for those who legit didn't even know they owned genned Pokémon.

This situation sucks for everyone involved.

Some true competitors display a real sigma grindset and try to get legit mons at the event at the last second:

(this is not actually the context of this image but it popped off and is funny so there you have it )

Now as people kept bitching about being disqualified and it started to cause a fuss on twitter X, naturally a lot of more casual observers became involved. And of course, those more casual observers saw people cheating, saw they got disqualified and started to wonder just what exactly the problem was here? Isn't this supposed to happen? Our brave competitors were quick to adapt of course - they needed a justification. And they found one in accessability. Clearly, expecting people to actually go through the effort to catch and train your mons legitimately is totally unreasonable:

Sorry, TCPi, we don't live in the anime world so no one is gonna treat competing in Pokémon like a full time job and grind thousands of hours for their perfect team.

Expecting people to put some time into their hobby when they're trying to be the best in the world?! Oh the audacity!

Aside from the time investment, a bunch of people also tried to argue that's it's just way too expensive to compete. It costs like, 200 bucks a year. Who can possibly afford that for a hobby?

But again, people quickly pointed out that a person buying tickets to fly to tournaments all around the world can probably also afford to actually buy the fricking games they wish to compete in and that the Pokemon games have made it increasingly easy to build a competitive team. Gone are the days were your IVs (your Pokemon's genes, basically) were set in stone. Every game throws more shit at you that makes catching and training mons in exactly the way you want more and more accessible. But our brave cheaters have an answer to everything:

"It takes 30 mins to make a legit team"

🔹soft resets for specific 0 IVs on legendaries

🔹need certain 0 IV Dittos for a specific IV

🔹EV train all 6 Pokémon

🔹Grinding for Tera Shards (need 50 btw)

🔹For a shiny, hatch 100+ eggs

This takes 30 mins? Yeah aight

Note: Shininess makes a Pokemon have an unusual color and is completely irrelevant in battle. While I'm sure this person included this in jest, it's still very funny to include it in your super serious list to justify cheating.

And if all else fails, there's always one completely bulletproof defense - "who cares lmao" :

Making the game more inaccessible is horrendous for the game. If people's Pokémon stats are legit and it doesn't alter game play at all, who cares how they got it.

DQing people at worlds with suddenly stricter rules is such a bad look. So sorry to all who were affected.

I would say cheaters getting banned is a very good look for any game, but that's just me.

the Pokemon VGC discourse is so laughably charged like do u think Ray Rizzo was the best player of his era out of skill or because he was REALLY good at hatching eggs

Yeah man who cares that training and building your team is supposed to be part of the competition. He clicked the buttons so shut up.

Pokémon company or whoever needs to stop crying about this hacked mons shit. Grow up and let the players play man

No blunder not you too I actually really like your content Though he hasn't played an actual mainline game in a decade so it's expected I guess

I genuinely cannot fathom going to Pokémon worlds and getting fricking disqualified because your perfectly legal Pokémon with completely valid stats wasn't "caught and rained with love uwu" like who cares!!!!! And then some people had them and weren't even aware!!! It's unfair lol

>The pokemon were hecking cute and valid so who cares!!!

Though that last post raised an interesting point, which others also noticed - you could get disqualified for using a Pokemon someone traded with you, not knowing it's illegitimate. But how could this happen? Surely there's a way for you to check if your Pokemon is legit? Surely TPC would prohibit these trades and use the same checks it uses for tournaments to also check mons ingame?

As it turns out, TPC in their endless incompetence just tells people to not use one of the core features and selling points of the franchise - trading:

Just a little side note to keep you updated in the stellar performance of TPC to do anything.

Side drama

Not content with only one dramatic event, TPC really raised the bar this weekend by also failing to properly set up their consoles, leading to disconnects and sudden deaths.

And to top it all off, at the end of the event they announced the location for the world championship next year - HAWAII

Aside from people feeling it is somewhat poor timing, it also lead to a sizeable donation from TPC to the hawaiian recovery. Of course, this also invited the usual suspects to tell people to boycott the event because the natives hate tourism and it ruined their island and imperialism and all that stuff. You know the drill, typical twitter lefty stuff. Not really unique to Pokemon so I don't wanna get into it. Knock yourself out if you really care.

Conclusion

/vp/, 4chan's Pokemon board, summed it up like this:

In my personal opinion, this is a good move. While I sympathise with the people who really only care about battling, the fact of the matter is that Pokemon games ship as monster catching, training and battling games. The first two aspects are kind of a big deal. Gotta catch 'em all is the fricking tagline (or was). If you truly don't enjoy these aspects, that's too bad. Pokemon Showdown is a pretty popular Pokemon battle simulator. Just play there if you don't want to bother with the rest. Of course, then you lack the prestige of the official Pokemon world champion, but guess what? If you want to be the best Pokemon trainer, you need to actually train your Pokemon. That's the fantasy these games are selling. Deal with it.

PS: This was my first effortpost, be nice.