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Should Hacked Pokemon Be Legitimate In Competition?

Should Hacked Pokemon Be Legitimate In Competition?

There has been a debate going around for a long time about hacked Pokemon in official Pokemon competitions.

For those of you who have been living under a Graveler, (Brock, I’m looking at you) nearly every Pokemon game can be hacked rather easily using flash carts, action replays, or even save editors on your computer. Heck, recently, an exploit was found that can utilize the 3DS’s camera to scan QR codes and inject data into your Pokemon games. It has never been easier to get Pokemon that you didn’t catch or didn’t train.

The knee-jerk reaction to Pokehacking is that it’s bad. There are a whole bunch of trainers that have spent a lot of time and effort training up the Pokemon that they want to use in tournaments. This includes breeding, EV training, IV training, and a whole lot of other stuff that casual Pokemon players probably don’t even know about. It can take days, weeks, even months to be able to get a fully capable battle team ready for competition. It is no easy task.

But then, hackers have asked us the question, “Why?” Why should we have to spend all that time just to get ready for a competition?

The obvious answer is “well because your Pokemon would be weaker than someone who spent the time to train their team up, right?” To an extent, this is true. However, no one ever enters a Pokemon competition with a team that isn’t trained up perfectly.

All professionally trained Pokemon end up at level 100 with the absolute perfect spread of stats, skills, and passive abilities, with the perfect item equipped on each. In fact, the method to perfect these Pokemon is so well documented that when you see two trainers with the same Pokemon they are very likely to be exact carbon copies of each other, right down to their stats.

So if people are going to be entering a tournament with maxed out perfectly trained Pokemon anyway, you then have to ask the question of what the Pokemon competition is really measuring. It doesn’t appear as if it’s measuring your skill in training and raising your Pokemon, as everyone has already managed to do that before even entering. Instead, hackers would argue that Pokemon competitions are all about your proficiency in using your Pokemon in battle against other trainers.

If that is the case, if Pokemon competitions are all about battling and not about raising, then hacking your Pokemon shouldn’t really cause a problem, or at least that’s what hackers would have you believe. As long as you don’t hack it to have stats outside what you could obtain in the game, you are playing with a Pokemon that is no better or worse than any other competitor’s. These competitors are basically not limited in their Pokemon selection, so why should you be?

Here we come to the major point of the argument. Hacking allows people access to higher levels of Pokemon competition faster. It doesn’t necessarily make them a better player, it simply gives them the tools needed to even stand a chance in the competitive scene. Better Pokemon trainers should still be able to beat hackers who haven’t put in the time to learning how to actually play the game, and if they have, there’s no real reason why they shouldn’t win because they played the game competitively better.

Should Hacked Pokemon Be Legitimate In Competition?

Let’s examine some parallels to see why I don’t think hacking is all that bad. What about Magic: The Gathering? As a collectible card game, you would think that the “training” portion of the game involves purchasing packs in order to build up an impressive collection, and then building decks out of that collection. Someone with an incomplete collection is limited to building weaker decks. Except, people who were serious about the game circumvented this by purchasing singles at an admittedly higher rate from stores and collectors. This would allow them to skip right to having a complete tournament worthy deck, without having to open booster pack after booster pack.

Similarly, look at fighting games like Super Smash Bros. The Wii U and 3DS versions have a wide variety of character customization available. But since you would need to grind for an excessive amount of time to find your perfect character build, character customization is largely outlawed in tournaments. In fact, most fighting games that have character customization of any sort are reduced to just the bare bones normal roster in competitive play. Why? Because the game is considered more fair when players have less input on what their character can do. This is because the game is measuring a player’s skill with the character, not the player’s amount of free time.

Finally, look at World of Warcraft . This MMO now allows you to skip directly to level 90 when making a new character. Why? Because many people consider the “game” of World of Warcraft to take place after you have already maximized and built your character. The “game” lies in raids, instances, and other things you can do with other people. Everything else is just buildup to the game. Some people may like leveling up, but others prefer to skip it and just get to the part they like.

That’s sort of what hacking is to Pokemon . It’s a way to skip one part of the game and instead get to another part of the game that you enjoy playing more. That’s not even to say that players who hack their Pokemon don’t like the game’s single player mode. It’s just that most Pokemon players do not want to spend the majority of their time grinding out stats just to be able to fight in a competition. As long as the Pokemon they fight with have stats that lie within the boundaries of the actual game itself,  I don’t see a problem.

What do you think? Are you ok with Pokehacking, or would you rather everyone raise their pokemon legitimately? Let us know in the comments.

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