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I'm alarmed by how bilious people get if you so much as hint that you aren't 100% scrupled in raising Pokémon for competitive play, even if you hew to rules to ensure you aren't breaking any of the games' own restrictions.

For instance, I refuse to ever cheat for a shiny and I don't do anything which isn't theoretically obtainable without cheating ingame (yes, it takes a great deal of time and/or luck to get a high-IV Pokémon with an egg move, but there's nothing in the game's coding saying you can't) but people act as if I just took a giant dump on their cat if I say that I don't spend five million hours breeding and checking IVs.

The way I see it is if you can derive entertainment from the process of raising six Pokémon to use in a tournament scenario more power to you, but I can't. I find it to be boring busywork; the bit I derive entertainment from is the actual competitive battling. As long as what I produce is legal by the rules the game sets, why do you care how I got them?

So let's make this a thread. What's your perspective and reasoning on the subject?

As long as what I produce is legal by the rules the game sets, why do you care how I got them?

Because how you get them is part of the rules of the game.

Any combination of different cards is a perfectly legal poker hand, but I doubt you'll want to play with me if I peek at the deck and deal myself a royal flush.

Technically, RNG abuse is also cheating. That's peeking at the deck for you, though.

I guess it's just that people feel robbed when they spend all that effort to get something that you can just hack out in five minutes.

If you're not going to spend the time, you may as well be using shoddy or whatever Smogon uses for fake battles nowadays. There's nothing wrong with either way, but hacking for a 'real' game tournament is unfair. If you're getting perfect IVs then it's nearly impossible, if just ensuring they're in a good percentile less so? It's a whole fuzzy area.

Of course, it is up to the ones who run the tournament to decide what's cheating. A Nintendo sponsored tournament does not allow any third party devices, a fan run one would be different. It is still tough to enforce it, but then good sportsmanship comes into play.

It's basically an issue of fairness. If you cheat and your opponent doesn't, you have an unfair advantage, not because your perfect-IV Pokémon are [i]inherently[/i] unfair but because you're not facing off on the same terms: they did an obscenely greater amount of work than you did and yet ended up with almost definitely inferior results, not because they're bad at it or inefficient but because they chose to play the game the way it was meant to be played. Of course it doesn't feel just to them.

On the other hand, if you play against others on the same terms - using simulators or against somebody else who also hacks or even just somebody who happens to be fine with it - there is nothing wrong with using hacked Pokémon. If you don't enjoy doing the work of breeding and so on, that's great, but then you have forfeited your right to face off against people who do choose to do all that work.

Any combination of different cards is a perfectly legal poker hand, but I doubt you'll want to play with me if I peek at the deck and deal myself a royal flush.

I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. There's no luck involved in getting perfect IVs, just time investment. If you're allowed to deal over and over and keep the cards making up a royal flush it makes no difference to me whether or not you skip the rigmarole and just grab the royal flush cards straight out of the deck other than the time spent waiting for you to deal cards.

On the other hand, if you play against others on the same terms - using simulators or against somebody else who also hacks or even just somebody who happens to be fine with it - there is nothing wrong with using hacked Pokémon. If you don't enjoy doing the work of breeding and so on, that's great, but then you have forfeited your right to face off against people who do choose to do all that work.

Your logic is flawless, but that ends up being Hobson's choice - there are no competitive arenas which don't enforce the "must be generated by the game's PRNG" rule other than Smogon. (I'm not a fan of simulators because I'm weird in that at least part of the reason I play these games is because I like the move animations.)

"(I'm not a fan of simulators because I'm weird in that at least part of the reason I play these games is because I like the move animations.)"

I'm hoping Four Star Mon will cure that :3 shameless plug

I always have to ask what the point is in having a perfect IV pokemon; when most of the time you only use 2 of them effectively. how often will 31 s.def save you compared to the generic (and more probable) low 20's s.def IV?

I have nothing against using "legal" vs "legit" pokemon, cause I have way too bad of luck to actually trudge through 100+ eggs per thing, but an all 31 pokemon is kind of a dick move.

I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. There's no luck involved in getting perfect IVs, just time investment. If you're allowed to deal over and over and keep the cards making up a royal flush it makes no difference to me whether or not you skip the rigmarole and just grab the royal flush cards straight out of the deck other than the time spent waiting for you to deal cards.

Yeah, yeah, I know. 8) Not so many games rely on random preparation ahead of time.

But yes, if you want to play by house rules, then find people willing to do so. Don't be the guy who shows up to play Monopoly and announces halfway through the game that we're using the Free Parking rule. (Okay I will stop with metaphors now.)

"I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. There's no luck involved in getting perfect IVs, just time investment. If you're allowed to deal over and over and keep the cards making up a royal flush it makes no difference to me whether or not you skip the rigmarole and just grab the royal flush cards straight out of the deck other than the time spent waiting for you to deal cards."

That time investment is the whole argument.

If there is no other difference, then you should have no problems with people using hacked Pokémon. However, people will argue that the time investment "builds character" or "is only fair to people who really want a good Pokémon" or some spiel like that.

It's one of the reasons I'm programming Four Star Mon to, by default, make the total EV limit (now set to 510) to be dependent on IV's as well (510 + 4 for every IV the Pokémon doesn't have). It provides an even greater power skew for competitive battling, but at the same time balances out the random, uncontrollable nature of the IV's so that there are no objective "winners" or "losers".

"It's one of the reasons I'm programming Four Star Mon to, by default, make the total EV limit (now set to 510) to be dependent on IV's as well (510 + 4 for every IV the Pokémon doesn't have). It provides an even greater power skew for competitive battling, but at the same time balances out the random, uncontrollable nature of the IV's so that there are no objective "winners" or "losers"."

This will kinda just make Pokemon with a specific mixture of 31 and 0 IVs the best. Even with equal totals (they won't be due to natures often), distribution of those points is huge. For something which uses just one attack to dump 31 points out of the useless stat into HP or one of the defenses. All out defensive 'mons can cut both defenses and some speed to max out the three other stats. Interesting idea though.

That's why I said the power skew is greater in competitive battling - you're still aiming for optimal distribution, the distribution will affect it even more, but "perfect" IV's is no longer an objective goal, because depending on what you're doing with the Pokémon, the optimal IV distribution might not be all 31, or even all "high" stats on stats that aren't being specifically lowered for something like Trick Room.

I believe that that will make the metagame even more dynamic, and will shake up the strategies quite a bit.

I always have to ask what the point is in having a perfect IV pokemon; when most of the time you only use 2 of them effectively. how often will 31 s.def save you compared to the generic (and more probable) low 20's s.def IV?

Primarily it's a laziness thing. If you run up Pokégen then it's easier to just type 31 six times rather than trying to pretend you're the PRNG for the sake of 'realism'.

Here's a suggestion, then. Would it be permissible for Pokégenned 'mons to be used if the person using Pokégen had a way to produce realistic IV spreads? Something I considered was assigning 96 points to put into IVs; that gives a maximum of three 31 IVs at the cost of completely gimping the other three.

IV's can go to 0 as well, which is why I had the 93.

Then you have 16/16/16/15/15/15 and 31/31/31/0/0/0.

So; as a matter of consensus, how fair is it to, say, hatch a bunch of eggs and take your pick of the litter? Or catch a box of Absol and take the Adamant one with Super Luck and the good Attack IV? That can't be so wrong in people's eyes.

If one member of the haul is obviously ser... er, SUperior to the others you've caught/hatched; are you really expected to disregard that mon as being "unfair"? You went through the trouble of catching or breeding it, after all. Why would using a better Pokemon be /wrong/?

No, that's the kind of practice that's smiled upon, as it takes more effort and actually uses the mechanics of the game.

It's when people actually interfere with the game's mechanics by hacking or RNG abuse that people go up in arms over it.

Well, I'm going to guess none of your friends are EV trainers either. If you aren't battling competitively, the need to have high stats is less pressing. I have a router that refuses to work with my DS, so I don't really bother to IV breed and I imagine it's less painful that way.

On a side note, calling yourself a 'movepool-guru' is a teensy bit self-inflating, since type coverage is one of the basics of movepool building. How old are you?