Pro Pokemon player says “80-90%” of top players hack in a rare interview
Pro Pokemon player says “80-90%” of top players hack in a rare interview
by srondina
43 Comments
Saint_Genghis
Only 80 to 90%?
scienceguy2442
I’ll be completely honest until the day Pokémon essentially buys out Showdown (or makes their own version) I think it’s totally fair for players to focus on the actual battle strategies rather than spending the time and more importantly money to team build. As long as a Pokemon has stats, movepool, etc. that would be legal, I don’t see a difference.
BoonDragoon
Well…duh? Have y’all ever trained Pokemon for competitive play legitimately? That shit takes FOREVER!!!!
OrangeNarwhal23
It has definitely gotten easier in newer generations with items like mints, ability capsules, and bottle caps, where you can turn any existing Pokemon into a perfect competitive Pokemon in just a few hours. RNG manipulation and breeding for specific natures and IVs in past gens took up such a ludicrous amount of time that hacking was obviously the better option.
ShnaeBlay
Oooh no.
Anyway..
motoxim
Is this really surprising? Like I cant imagine how hard is breeding before gen 6 or 7.
meowy99
I don’t mind. Anyone can hack pokemon, but you can’t hack skill or strategy.
Umber0010
For anyone here who isn’t familiar with competitive Pokemon or who is confused because of how much easier Gamefreak has made it to make a Competative-ready pokemon, let me make it abundantly clear that it is still EXTREMELY time-consuming to build a team from scratch.
Youtuber Im a blisy •_• made a [video](https://youtu.be/XFc1mkPiXQQ?si=FCisPaH3Pfl_zHn7) a couple months ago detailing the process of making a competative team from nothing, and it took them over 17 hours and 4 different games to get one up and running.
Remember, when you’re fighting for the title of world champion, there is no “good enough”. Competative players are looking for a degree of optimization rivaling that of speed runners. And that level of optimizing takes a ton of time and money. Especially sense they’re probably going to need an entirely new team for every tournament due to new additions or shifts in the meta.
Kwayke9
r/NoShitSherlock, this shit has been an unbearable grind for over 15 years (and you also need old games because money). The vgc community really needs to get more vocal about this (and the day competitive gets a Showdown like dedicated app shall be one drenched in expensive wine)
If a few people hack/cheat, it’s their fault. If everyone hacks/”cheats”, there are glaring qol issues and it’s the dev/publisher’s fault for not properly addressing those
magikarp-sushi
We knew this
oraclestats
The time sink just isn’t worth it. You spend an entire night + trying to get a pokemon trained for competitive and there is a chance it just doesn’t work in the meta. I guess you can do training quickly in showdown to see what works and what doesn’t but getting quality practice is worth the risk over grinding. Not to mention the high cost of unlocking mons via games and dlc.
wandererboi
How rare is this interview and why would they hack on it? 🤔
AllRadioisDead
I don’t care if people’s pokemon are legitimate, as long as they’re legal.
Captain_Warships
People who use Hidden Power in a nutshell. Not saying you shouldn’t cheat or use HP, this is just me hating Hidden Power BECAUSE you have to hack the game in order to make it good.
Sp3ctre7
Lol that this is Brady Smith, aka the guy who used some of the most obviously-hacked pokemon and got DQed for it.
Like, at least put in the effort to make sure that your Urshifu doesn’t say it was caught in Scarlet.
TheWizKelly
If Pokémon Showdown didn’t exist, it would be 100% of players. Lots of QOL changes have been made but it is still very time consuming to do everything legit, especially Tera Shards. Now imagine doing all of that for 6 Pokémon and the strategy you had in mind completely tanks online and you have to start again from scratch. Showdown allows you to quickly craft a team and test it out so even if you do everything on cartridge 100% legit, you still have some experience with what you want.
MegaCrazyH
One thing that I think gets overlooked but gets discussed in the article is that it’s entirely possible for you to get a Pokémon you think is legit in a trade only for it to turn out to be hacked. Then suddenly you can’t use it at the tournament because it failed the hack check and you definitely weren’t prepared for it.
It’s honestly a major oversight of the system given that trading is a core mechanics of the games. To say otherwise is to demand that people but both copies of the games and dlc for version exclusives and I don’t think that’s what should be promoted
Animedingo
Was the interview rare or was that the name of the publication
TrandaBear
At this point, I think they need to hard fork competitive battling. Like the players shoe up with a wishlist of mons, stats, natures, etc and the tournament organizers generate the teams on official hardware. It’s not cheating if everybody gets the same treatment.
IronbloodPrime
This gen has generally made it super easy, but breeding took a big step back in my opinion. Generally, if you’re not aiming for 0 IVs in a certain stat, the in-game mechanics for competitive training work just fine.
I’ve got no compunction when it comes to hacking events though, especially when it’s something that’s geographically isolated.
Low-iq-haikou
For the sake of competitive Pokémon I think players *should* be able to hand pick their IVs.
If there’s no type of standard, then whoever has the most free time or the best luck would be at a huge advantage.
Reworked
Calling it an open secret would be understating how open it actually is. Breeding up pokemon to a competitive standard is miserable. So long as nobody’s fucking around breaking the limits of the game, it makes for more interesting competition. Been this way from the word go.
karhall
1500+ resets to get a 0 Speed Bloodmoon Ursaluna that takes minimum Foul Play damage, I honestly don’t blame them.
I wanted to compete in VGC 2024, then I started prepping. I don’t think I can compete in 2024, I don’t have the time or the money to buy 3 more games + DLC and play through them all *and* reset like that for IVs. It’s a completely unreasonable ask for any person.
At the very least, Game Freak needs to add an item that can lower IVs to 0. Second, competitive formats should only include Pokemon obtainable in the game the competition takes place in, none of this HOME transfer stuff. Or, if they do let other stuff in, they need to run Tera Raid events for them to be obtained in SV.
haze25
The worst part is, the online battle community would explode in popularity if it was more easily accessible by casual players. My wife and I each did a ‘competitive’ team for BDSP and we used the item cloning bug (Ability Patches). It was the most monotonous thing I’ve ever done, we were both so burned out by perfecting our teams we played online for like…a week, got creamed a decent amount of times and didn’t have the fortitude to do the grind again to make changes.
We discovered Pokemon Showdown and had an absolute blast on it.
Aduro95
Honestly if most competive players didn’t/couldn’t hack, the pokemon company would have realised years ago that they need to take drastic steps to cut out the grind. I don’t just mean baby steps like cheaper bottle caps and nature mints. I mean just letting us put EVs wherever we want from storage.
Not to mention adding the brand new time sink of needing League Points *and* materials to make TMs (including materials from version exclusive pokemon).
Ideally I’d like completely separate games for competitive and story mode. Legends Arceus is a much better single-player experience than Scarlet and Violet, and nobody should have to slog through SV to play competitive.
SinisterPixel
Honestly if I were designing the EV system today, I would just make it so when levelling up, Pokemon earned “skill points”. These skill points would be directly comparable to EVs and you could spec them however you wanted, and easily respec them later. It would mean you could train Pokemon in a specific way in casual too. It would allow them to create more difficult games as well that encourage you to spec your Pokemon efficiently.
brainsapper
This is the equivalent of finding out that pretty much all cyclists dope.
The only time I did IV breeding was in generation 6 to get a Volcarona. It took me a few days just to get one with 5 perfect IVs and desired nature. Mind you I started out with a 3 perfect IV breedject I got on the GTS, so a good chunk was already done for me.
Couldn’t fathom doing this all from square one.
blz4200
Yeah I’ve thought about this a lot. Like even if Gamefreak could detect hacked Pokémon there’s nothing stopping players from giving them Destiny knot and just breeding legit Pokémon from the hacks.
barisax9
I wonder why people “cheat” in a franchise that has multiple layers of RNG, version exclusives, and even some mons that require a full game playthru for ONE attempt for a legendary
sephtis
Last time I made a full team was back in X and Y, shit took forever. Before then It was just action replay a team with legit possible stats and moves.
Pyroteche
I imagine it saves an incredible amount of time that’s used for practice matches and testing.
DepletedMitochondria
yeah because RNG is a waste of fucking time lol
Bubbly_Alfalfa7285
You can breed the perfect team from a 0 IV stats ditto. That’s all you need now. Give it a destiny knot and make some eggs, whatever 0s you need should be there and you’re golden. Bottle cap it, mint it, ability patch/capsules from there.
If it’s naturally bred from a genned ditto it can’t be illegal.
Jumpy_Menu5104
I think the core of the issue is that what makes Pokémon an interesting competitive game and what makes it a compelling RPG are pretty different. Like, even if it was locked to the post game the ability to just manipulate your pokemon stats with the freedom that exists in showdown would essentially entirely devalue the ideas and mechanics of the game itself.
What point is there is working through the experience of a like ~40 hour RPG when at some point you just get to activate creative mode. Especially now that the games get dlc. The DLCs and raids, stories and content would be entirely trivialized be everyone having access to literally mathematically perfect pokemon.
I think having some official version of showdown, maybe using the stadium name, that doesn’t not content to the main line games would be the best solution. Even if it’s just something that exists for tournament play. That way you have a tool for pure competition, but the ecosystem of the RPGs aren’t impacted in any way.
thepithypirate
Hack what ?
Caridor
As they bloody well should. Not only is it a time saver , competitive breeding isn’t hard and let’s be real, it’s pay to win, since not every pokemon is obtainable in every game. If you want any regional form, you have to buy a different pokemon game to evolve it or catch and breed it.
GGsusTV
I fill never play competitive pokemon because the game is not fun
IVs and EVs are unnecessarily tedious even though its been nerfed multiple times.
the only way to test pokemon without wasting hours of your life is to hack or play illegal 3rd party games .
even as min maxxy as kids are these days im sure they have a hard time.
Molorque
In other news, water is wet
Cakers44
Yeah just genning pokemon to save a frankly ridiculous amount of time
Legonist
Because Nintendo and Gamefreak don’t properly support their own games.
AcrobaticAd2377
I don’t know how many non-VGC players are here but if you think that every Pokémon should be legit then you are delusional. Hacking is, as of now, the ONLY reliable way to train specific Pokemon like Ursaluna-B, Enamorous and others.
luigisp
Yep, this has been the case since around Generation 4 when VGC/Smogon became big/serious. Thankfully it’s much easier now to make a competitive team (though having to acquire tera shards to change tera types is quite a hassle, especially when you’re changing your Pokémon’s tera type regularly as you adapt/improve your team).
The thing is, it’s VERY easy to make your hacked Pokemon look legit/indistinguishable from non-hacked Pokemon, but a lot of VGC players seem to be incapable of doing so which is why so many of them got disqualified at tournaments this year.
EMI_Black_Ace
0% surprising when you consider just how much *work* it is to get *one* Pokemon to a competitively viable status — even *after* the inclusion of Hyper Training (so you don’t have to engage in *eugenics* to get perfect IVs) and EV resetting.
Being competitive isn’t just “get your Pokemon as strong as you can.” It involves *testing the everloving crap out of your strategies and tweaking your Pokemon for consistent wins against a broad range of other highly tested competitive strategies.*
Your choices are essentially either “hack” or “spend your entire f$#@ing life prepping teams.”
GameFreak needs to acknowledge this and accept that the single-player experience plus trading *cannot* be the *only* input for the competitive aspect. If they want competitive play to be reasonably accessible they need to include a team builder for it.
43 Comments
Only 80 to 90%?
I’ll be completely honest until the day Pokémon essentially buys out Showdown (or makes their own version) I think it’s totally fair for players to focus on the actual battle strategies rather than spending the time and more importantly money to team build. As long as a Pokemon has stats, movepool, etc. that would be legal, I don’t see a difference.
Well…duh? Have y’all ever trained Pokemon for competitive play legitimately? That shit takes FOREVER!!!!
It has definitely gotten easier in newer generations with items like mints, ability capsules, and bottle caps, where you can turn any existing Pokemon into a perfect competitive Pokemon in just a few hours. RNG manipulation and breeding for specific natures and IVs in past gens took up such a ludicrous amount of time that hacking was obviously the better option.
Oooh no.
Anyway..
Is this really surprising? Like I cant imagine how hard is breeding before gen 6 or 7.
I don’t mind. Anyone can hack pokemon, but you can’t hack skill or strategy.
For anyone here who isn’t familiar with competitive Pokemon or who is confused because of how much easier Gamefreak has made it to make a Competative-ready pokemon, let me make it abundantly clear that it is still EXTREMELY time-consuming to build a team from scratch.
Youtuber Im a blisy •_• made a [video](https://youtu.be/XFc1mkPiXQQ?si=FCisPaH3Pfl_zHn7) a couple months ago detailing the process of making a competative team from nothing, and it took them over 17 hours and 4 different games to get one up and running.
Remember, when you’re fighting for the title of world champion, there is no “good enough”. Competative players are looking for a degree of optimization rivaling that of speed runners. And that level of optimizing takes a ton of time and money. Especially sense they’re probably going to need an entirely new team for every tournament due to new additions or shifts in the meta.
r/NoShitSherlock, this shit has been an unbearable grind for over 15 years (and you also need old games because money). The vgc community really needs to get more vocal about this (and the day competitive gets a Showdown like dedicated app shall be one drenched in expensive wine)
If a few people hack/cheat, it’s their fault. If everyone hacks/”cheats”, there are glaring qol issues and it’s the dev/publisher’s fault for not properly addressing those
We knew this
The time sink just isn’t worth it. You spend an entire night + trying to get a pokemon trained for competitive and there is a chance it just doesn’t work in the meta. I guess you can do training quickly in showdown to see what works and what doesn’t but getting quality practice is worth the risk over grinding. Not to mention the high cost of unlocking mons via games and dlc.
How rare is this interview and why would they hack on it? 🤔
I don’t care if people’s pokemon are legitimate, as long as they’re legal.
People who use Hidden Power in a nutshell. Not saying you shouldn’t cheat or use HP, this is just me hating Hidden Power BECAUSE you have to hack the game in order to make it good.
Lol that this is Brady Smith, aka the guy who used some of the most obviously-hacked pokemon and got DQed for it.
Like, at least put in the effort to make sure that your Urshifu doesn’t say it was caught in Scarlet.
If Pokémon Showdown didn’t exist, it would be 100% of players. Lots of QOL changes have been made but it is still very time consuming to do everything legit, especially Tera Shards. Now imagine doing all of that for 6 Pokémon and the strategy you had in mind completely tanks online and you have to start again from scratch. Showdown allows you to quickly craft a team and test it out so even if you do everything on cartridge 100% legit, you still have some experience with what you want.
One thing that I think gets overlooked but gets discussed in the article is that it’s entirely possible for you to get a Pokémon you think is legit in a trade only for it to turn out to be hacked. Then suddenly you can’t use it at the tournament because it failed the hack check and you definitely weren’t prepared for it.
It’s honestly a major oversight of the system given that trading is a core mechanics of the games. To say otherwise is to demand that people but both copies of the games and dlc for version exclusives and I don’t think that’s what should be promoted
Was the interview rare or was that the name of the publication
At this point, I think they need to hard fork competitive battling. Like the players shoe up with a wishlist of mons, stats, natures, etc and the tournament organizers generate the teams on official hardware. It’s not cheating if everybody gets the same treatment.
This gen has generally made it super easy, but breeding took a big step back in my opinion. Generally, if you’re not aiming for 0 IVs in a certain stat, the in-game mechanics for competitive training work just fine.
I’ve got no compunction when it comes to hacking events though, especially when it’s something that’s geographically isolated.
For the sake of competitive Pokémon I think players *should* be able to hand pick their IVs.
If there’s no type of standard, then whoever has the most free time or the best luck would be at a huge advantage.
Calling it an open secret would be understating how open it actually is. Breeding up pokemon to a competitive standard is miserable. So long as nobody’s fucking around breaking the limits of the game, it makes for more interesting competition. Been this way from the word go.
1500+ resets to get a 0 Speed Bloodmoon Ursaluna that takes minimum Foul Play damage, I honestly don’t blame them.
I wanted to compete in VGC 2024, then I started prepping. I don’t think I can compete in 2024, I don’t have the time or the money to buy 3 more games + DLC and play through them all *and* reset like that for IVs. It’s a completely unreasonable ask for any person.
At the very least, Game Freak needs to add an item that can lower IVs to 0. Second, competitive formats should only include Pokemon obtainable in the game the competition takes place in, none of this HOME transfer stuff. Or, if they do let other stuff in, they need to run Tera Raid events for them to be obtained in SV.
The worst part is, the online battle community would explode in popularity if it was more easily accessible by casual players. My wife and I each did a ‘competitive’ team for BDSP and we used the item cloning bug (Ability Patches). It was the most monotonous thing I’ve ever done, we were both so burned out by perfecting our teams we played online for like…a week, got creamed a decent amount of times and didn’t have the fortitude to do the grind again to make changes.
We discovered Pokemon Showdown and had an absolute blast on it.
Honestly if most competive players didn’t/couldn’t hack, the pokemon company would have realised years ago that they need to take drastic steps to cut out the grind. I don’t just mean baby steps like cheaper bottle caps and nature mints. I mean just letting us put EVs wherever we want from storage.
Not to mention adding the brand new time sink of needing League Points *and* materials to make TMs (including materials from version exclusive pokemon).
Ideally I’d like completely separate games for competitive and story mode. Legends Arceus is a much better single-player experience than Scarlet and Violet, and nobody should have to slog through SV to play competitive.
Honestly if I were designing the EV system today, I would just make it so when levelling up, Pokemon earned “skill points”. These skill points would be directly comparable to EVs and you could spec them however you wanted, and easily respec them later. It would mean you could train Pokemon in a specific way in casual too. It would allow them to create more difficult games as well that encourage you to spec your Pokemon efficiently.
This is the equivalent of finding out that pretty much all cyclists dope.
The only time I did IV breeding was in generation 6 to get a Volcarona. It took me a few days just to get one with 5 perfect IVs and desired nature. Mind you I started out with a 3 perfect IV breedject I got on the GTS, so a good chunk was already done for me.
Couldn’t fathom doing this all from square one.
Yeah I’ve thought about this a lot. Like even if Gamefreak could detect hacked Pokémon there’s nothing stopping players from giving them Destiny knot and just breeding legit Pokémon from the hacks.
I wonder why people “cheat” in a franchise that has multiple layers of RNG, version exclusives, and even some mons that require a full game playthru for ONE attempt for a legendary
Last time I made a full team was back in X and Y, shit took forever. Before then It was just action replay a team with legit possible stats and moves.
I imagine it saves an incredible amount of time that’s used for practice matches and testing.
yeah because RNG is a waste of fucking time lol
You can breed the perfect team from a 0 IV stats ditto. That’s all you need now. Give it a destiny knot and make some eggs, whatever 0s you need should be there and you’re golden. Bottle cap it, mint it, ability patch/capsules from there.
If it’s naturally bred from a genned ditto it can’t be illegal.
I think the core of the issue is that what makes Pokémon an interesting competitive game and what makes it a compelling RPG are pretty different. Like, even if it was locked to the post game the ability to just manipulate your pokemon stats with the freedom that exists in showdown would essentially entirely devalue the ideas and mechanics of the game itself.
What point is there is working through the experience of a like ~40 hour RPG when at some point you just get to activate creative mode. Especially now that the games get dlc. The DLCs and raids, stories and content would be entirely trivialized be everyone having access to literally mathematically perfect pokemon.
I think having some official version of showdown, maybe using the stadium name, that doesn’t not content to the main line games would be the best solution. Even if it’s just something that exists for tournament play. That way you have a tool for pure competition, but the ecosystem of the RPGs aren’t impacted in any way.
Hack what ?
As they bloody well should. Not only is it a time saver , competitive breeding isn’t hard and let’s be real, it’s pay to win, since not every pokemon is obtainable in every game. If you want any regional form, you have to buy a different pokemon game to evolve it or catch and breed it.
I fill never play competitive pokemon because the game is not fun
IVs and EVs are unnecessarily tedious even though its been nerfed multiple times.
the only way to test pokemon without wasting hours of your life is to hack or play illegal 3rd party games .
even as min maxxy as kids are these days im sure they have a hard time.
In other news, water is wet
Yeah just genning pokemon to save a frankly ridiculous amount of time
Because Nintendo and Gamefreak don’t properly support their own games.
I don’t know how many non-VGC players are here but if you think that every Pokémon should be legit then you are delusional. Hacking is, as of now, the ONLY reliable way to train specific Pokemon like Ursaluna-B, Enamorous and others.
Yep, this has been the case since around Generation 4 when VGC/Smogon became big/serious. Thankfully it’s much easier now to make a competitive team (though having to acquire tera shards to change tera types is quite a hassle, especially when you’re changing your Pokémon’s tera type regularly as you adapt/improve your team).
The thing is, it’s VERY easy to make your hacked Pokemon look legit/indistinguishable from non-hacked Pokemon, but a lot of VGC players seem to be incapable of doing so which is why so many of them got disqualified at tournaments this year.
0% surprising when you consider just how much *work* it is to get *one* Pokemon to a competitively viable status — even *after* the inclusion of Hyper Training (so you don’t have to engage in *eugenics* to get perfect IVs) and EV resetting.
Being competitive isn’t just “get your Pokemon as strong as you can.” It involves *testing the everloving crap out of your strategies and tweaking your Pokemon for consistent wins against a broad range of other highly tested competitive strategies.*
Your choices are essentially either “hack” or “spend your entire f$#@ing life prepping teams.”
GameFreak needs to acknowledge this and accept that the single-player experience plus trading *cannot* be the *only* input for the competitive aspect. If they want competitive play to be reasonably accessible they need to include a team builder for it.