The Current VGC Format Actually Rewards Cheating.

[Vietflame]

I am going to imput my opinion (Yes I do gen).

Breeding has become significantly easier as a result of 6IV Ditto distributions from forums everywhere. So now, anyone can breed competitive Pokemon in a matter of minutes. Of course, it will take some time to train them up with specific EV spreads and even get them to level 50. With that said, the effort doesn't result in you being a good battler. In battle, everyone is blind to if that 6IV Pokemon was genned or bred/trained legitimately. But is that what you think about in a competitive battle? No. You think about what nature the Pokemon is, and ALWAYS assume that it has perfect IVs in crucial areas. While it has already been said, Imjust want to say it again. It is impossible to determine whether a legendary is genned or not.

I think some people have forgotten what Pokemon is about. It is so much more then a genned or legitimately caught Pokemon. It is about having fun. Aaron Zheng, one of the best and most well known player in the competitive scene, made this speech before he graduated.

Aaron makes several good points, but what he says at 11:00 pretty big in my opinion.

"One thing that sets the best players apart from the average players is their ability to work with their circumstances, rather than complain about how unlucky they may have been."

Later he goes on to say "Pokemon has taught me a lot. It taught me to look at defeat and victory, with an open mind. To laugh a bit more, even though sometimes things don't necessarily go my way."

And if you watched the whole video, then you know this: No one looks ill at one another. People who gen, people who breed and train, they are all friends, and have lots of fun on the competitive scene. To be honest, while Nintendo has taken precautions with hacked Pokemon, I am sure they have the same outlook. Just smile and be happy at every turn. Genning doesn't give you any advantage, as breeders and SRers just need to work harder to achieve that same Pokemon. Don't dedicate too much time SRing. Spend time on battle spot to jake sure you are on top of your game as well. I believe it is a matter of balancing what time you have. I think the VGC format is fine. Nintendo honestly doesn't have to worry about a thing.

[evilsabre]

(Aug 15, 2015, 04:23 PM)Vietflame Wrote: I am going to imput my opinion (Yes I do gen).

Breeding has become significantly easier as a result of 6IV Ditto distributions from forums everywhere. So now, anyone can breed competitive Pokemon in a matter of minutes. Of course, it will take some time to train them up with specific EV spreads and even get them to level 50. With that said, the effort doesn't result in you being a good battler. In battle, everyone is blind to if that 6IV Pokemon was genned or bred/trained legitimately. But is that what you think about in a competitive battle? No. You think about what nature the Pokemon is, and ALWAYS assume that it has perfect IVs in crucial areas. While it has already been said, I just want to say it again. It is impossible to determine whether a legendary is genned or not.

I think some people have forgotten what Pokemon is about. It is so much more then a genned or legitimately caught Pokemon. It is about having fun. Aaron Zheng, one of the best and most well known player in the competitive scene, made this speech before he graduated.

Aaron makes several good points, but what he says at 11:00 pretty big in my opinion.

"One thing that sets the best players apart from the average players is their ability to work with their circumstances, rather than complain about how unlucky they may have been."

Later he goes on to say "Pokemon has taught me a lot. It taught me to look at defeat and victory, with an open mind. To laugh a bit more, even though sometimes things don't necessarily go my way."

And if you watched the whole video, then you know this: No one looks ill at one another. People who gen, people who breed and train, they are all friends, and have lots of fun on the competitive scene. To be honest, while Nintendo has taken precautions with hacked Pokemon, I am sure they have the same outlook. Just smile and be happy at every turn. Genning doesn't give you any advantage, as breeders and SRers just need to work harder to achieve that same Pokemon. I think the VGC format is fine. Nintendo honestly doesn't have to worry about a thing.

I think you miss the major points of my main post i actually state that for breedable pokemon genned mons offer such marginal gains that its practically irrelevant but event and legendaries take up weeks or in some cases years to get via soft-resetting, this does create a competitive advantage due to extra practice time + the ability to change (or gen a new pokemon with a new) a hp/nature without the need to start over and get another. While arguably practice may not seem huge when aspiring players have jobs etc the time take to just get their team becomes a scarily large % of their free time just getting their team meaning learning the format, how to play and most importantly practicing battling to gain experience ahead of any tournaments they might want to enter lose out on time they desperately need.

I mean personally when i bring my teams out and i see a shiny, contest ribbon thundurous against me and then it uses hp ice it does majorly suck the fun out of the game (i mean yea that could legit but the odds of that are tiny), after all i invested hours and hours into breeding my teams and the thunderous i face is almost certainly not legitimate which i really find to be demotivating for me. While this might just be me if i saw this in an official tourney i would be so annoyed if i lost to a team that was fully genned like that as its not even stealthily done. Online i put up with it because the matches aren't serious i mean I've not got anything on the line. While such a player may have had no advantage over me in the actual battle it still feels really annoying to lose to someone who properly didn't put in the same amount of effort as you did. I mean that's the entire point of pokemon, to catch your pokemon, train them and then battle with them and that catching includes getting the perfect battle pokemon via soft reseting/ breeding.

I'm just going to reiterate i have nothing against people who gen/powersave for online play or unofficial tournaments etc (i fully understand not everyone has the time and they want to play competitive online for fun) but when people bring them to official event when the rules clearly disallow them i think its very unfair to people who do put the time in. After all these events are for money/scholarships and if you blatantly disregard the rules because you don't think its cheating your ruining the spirit of the game. Sure people might all be friends at the top but when mutual acceptance of cheating happens that is incredibly bad for any competitive scene, yes everyone who goes to worlds did not get their solely because of their genned mons and they are all highly skilled but if they break the rules getting there they should not be there at all.

Also I fully appreciate that gamefreak and nintendo are unlikely to ever be able to reliably detect an genned or edited pokemon which is why i suggest changing the format to one that minimizes the effect of cheating over attempting to stamp it out entirely which is unlikely to work.

I'm just going to finish by saying that at the moment while legendaries are commonplace in the vgc meta people will be encouraged to break the rules instead of playing the way they are supposed to be playing. Unless gamefreak and nintendo plan to change the rules to make genning fine (which they won't as it has wider implications than competitive) they need to either create a method of editing the pokemon iv's and natures in game or remove event pokemon and legends from competitive as this alone makes the stage as close to even as you will ever hope to get without perfect detection. The saddest part in all this is that cheating in vgc is even a discussion i mean the fact that rule 2.1 of vgc15 banned genned/edited pokemon meant it should have been pretty clear cut but sadly it seems it isn't.

[Vietflame]

I see your point. I just think if Nintendo saw the problem with the same perspective, they would implement such a system similar to what you had mentioned. Yes, it would change the meta completely, and honestly, well known competitive players may not even be that good anymore in the new format, but what matters is it puts players on an even ground.

With that though, the community really needs to come together, and let Nintendo know "this is what we want!" The thing is though, I don't see this being such a huge issue in the community. I want to say this; I had always fought my competitors with the mentality that we are both equals, and that we are playing to have fun. I understand now that it may not be the case on the other side.

I do agree with what you are saying though. Rules and regulations are implemented for the purpose of everyone having a fair chance. Especially with scholarship prizes, people who work legitimately hard deserves a fair shot at their future. I just don't know if that part of the community is large enough to come together and make it happen (Of course, I would gladly side against genning for official tournaments).

[evilsabre]

(Aug 15, 2015, 06:08 PM)Vietflame Wrote: I see your point. I just think if Nintendo saw the problem with the same perspective, they would implement such a system similar to what you had mentioned. Yes, it would change the meta completely, and honestly, well known competitive players may not even be that good anymore in the new format, but what matters is it puts players on an even ground.

With that though, the community really needs to come together, and let Nintendo know "this is what we want!" The thing is though, I don't see this being such a huge issue in the community. I want to say this; I had always fought my competitors with the mentality that we are both equals, and that we are playing to have fun. I understand now that it may not be the case on the other side.

I do agree with what you are saying though. Rules and regulations are implemented for the purpose of everyone having a fair chance. Especially with scholarship prizes, people who work legitimately hard deserves a fair shot at their future. I just don't know if that part of the community is large enough to come together and make it happen (Of course, I would gladly side against genning for official tournaments).

Gamefreak have started to do it with changes to breeding give legends 3 31 iv's min etc but yea i suspect when they caught a significant number of cheaters online recently they will put even more emphasis on narrowing the gap it just depends if they are happy seeing legends go from the competitive format or not. Otherwise we might be waiting till gen 7 to get closer to even.

Yea i feel the main problem is its become an issue of cheating being accepted by players if that makes sense, it was a big part of why i made this huge post to try to show people it wasn't an acceptable thing to do (in official events) in order to make it more frowned upon or put pressure on gamefreak and nintendo to change the system in a way to make the format more fair.

[Apo]

I agree that legends should not be allowed, even for the RP part, legends should be unique or rare in the world of Pokemon, if everyone uses them its not the same feeling.

but in my opinion it's only a short term solution. the real issue is the way breeding/IVs/Nature/Evs etc works.

[akg12x]

For the sake of honesty, I have only read the first page of this thread.

Just curious on what peoples thoughts are as to the banning of legends and event mons for next season. How do you think this would have changed this years top 8 in masters at worlds? It was dominated almost entirely by the likes of Landorus, Thundurus, Cresselia and Heatran.