The Pokémon Company To Crack Down On Sword, Shield And HOME Users Who Modify Save Data In "New Ban Wave"

Now, if only they could go into the basement and look at how the 3DS games are doing. Maybe even do something about all the thousands of hacked Pokémon in the GTS that have urls to YouTube videos in the name.

When trying to complete my Pokedex I actually received a Regieleki in a surprise trade that was clearly hacked (Shiny, 6IV, Perfect Nature) and I didn't even have the Crown Tundra expansion pass back then.

I found a trade request for Zamazenta on GTS asking for Regieleki so I just used it to get Zamazenta in my Sword for my living dex.

I also don't feel guilty because suprise surprise, the Zamazenta was probably hacked too (6IV, Perfect Nature).

This is all well and good, but I believe these are system wide bans which prevent people from accessing the internet at all.

Why now? They've not cared one jot for years, I mean there was a confirmed hacker who won the World Championship and they did nothing about him in Sun Moon era.

there are so many live streams on youtube, twitch, discord, etc that have fully functioning BOTs going all the time. People can request specific stats/abilities and the pokemon is generated and traded accordingly.

I have managed to get a complete Shiny Dex though trading with people online and am certain the vast majority are hacks!

I can think of a million better uses of their time. These games are too underwhelming for that many people to really care about modders, like who could blame someone for not wanting to grind the bland soulless world for a good team when they could just hack them instead? Make a game that has integrity worth protecting before taking yourselves so seriously. I say this as a lifelong fan of the series and the games but also as someone growing increasingly bitter with the growing laziness in each release.

I'm not sure if this should be such a priority. The Pokemon games are one of the few competitive games in which hacking cannot give you an advantage over other players since illegal Pokemon cannot be used anyway. Plus as was already said, they'd need to either go back and fix the 3DS games or cut them off entirely from Home because the majority of the hacked Pokemon I recieved via wondertrade are in fact from Gen7.

@TheLightSpirit someone isn't an idiot simply for expressing disapproval of a game you like. Plus, there are plenty of people out there who enjoy products with toxic or abusive design. Congratulations to you being one of the people that still likes agonizing grind.

Usually the ubiquitous existence of save modders in this capacity implies an issue with the reward system. It'd be cool to see Nintendo address this, but the faulty reward system is probably by design.

@TheLightSpirit it is a strange implication to say that the people who actually discovered a way to have fun with a broken system are the ones that are idiots. And to insinuate that Pokemon is the only RPG I played is also a strange implication. I speak from experience and from a place of love for RPGs, mate.

Loving a genre doesn't mean it's free of flaws and thus free of criticism. There is an overwhelming majority of people who get taken advantage of by predatory design, and find an identity in it, which causes them to defend it relentlessly. There are simply far too many games now that simply cannot be played by people who aren't children with loads of free time (or the unemployed, I suppose) for the sole fact that the time sink and/or save scumming required for a "good outcome" by legitimate means is a prohibitive barrier for enjoyment. And sure, it could be argued "that's not the way the was meant to be played", but it is still the way the game was designed. It is a design, and potentially even a philosophy flaw. It may even be a cursed problem as far as RPGs are concerned.

The "ruined enjoyment" isn't so much the fault of the people who refused to spend more time than necessary for something, as much as it is the environment that enabled this to be the far more desired practice in the first place. And stat grinding versus stat purchasing is a huge social and gameplay issue in MMOs where save modification isn't nearly so feasible.

ooh so they will ban you if you've catched pokemon that you never catched before...well this is sword and shield we're discussing about, the game is like super dead/boring..so i could care less to be quite frank with you all xD lol.

the only way this game is interesting is through the modding community <3 it's much more alive to use the game - oh shi- i cannot put that on here....i may get thrown to time out lol jk but like for real...uhh i suppose this will upset some players who have been doing this since x and y or maybe before...idk..

@TheLightSpirit You're again defending the grind, and also defending the design problem of it with the "oh, it's not that agonising" argument. This is a fundamentally flawed stance. Just because other games have more grind doesn't make this gen's grind good. If anything, your argument comes off as a sunk cost fallacy because you chose to already spend time with the game where others saw there was no value in that time spent.

The argument here isn't that people should cheat, rather it's that the games should instead offer more easily controlled avenues towards leveling the playing field. Randomness is fantastic when well-utilised, but this here isn't such a fantastic example.

If anything, by the nature of competition and multiplayer being an option in the game, the deep flaws with grind and save-scumming design are accentuated with these exact cases. It all comes down to the comment that sparked yours, as well as this whole discussion: Pokemon suffers from poor design and lazy implementation. You disagreed with that statement by pinning this problem on people who simply manage to ignore it, and gained access to an "unfair advantage"

Maybe when it comes to illegal movesets? But that's the fault of the game for not having sanity checks to prevent this garbage. As for perfect IVs and shinies? There's no true advantage there. Either spend (read: waste) the time it takes to get those and feel morally superior, or respect your time and place it into your save on your terms.

For a lot of people who have been playing the series for a long time, especially those who play it competitively, there's nothing to be gained from spending additional time. Your limited perspective on the matter is indicative to why you're upset.

Again, I speak from a place of love and experience. If this release filtered out pokemon with illegal movesets as some previous games have, a large chunk of this problem would be null and void.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't modifying save data the supposed reason we '''can't''' have cloud saves for the main series games? If people are doing it anyways, and GameFreak plans on punishing those people, why can't we have cloud saves?

@TheLightSpirit If you're willing to read my replies, you might find that I am against cheating, and I state as such in them. You might also find out that what you're stating glosses over the reason why you're experiencing the problem that makes you upset in the first place. And hate is such a strong word, too. If anything, it's disappointing, especially when considering the team has the capability of making a functioning product.

Maybe it's lost on you when I say I speak from a place of love and experience. All I'm saying is your disdain is misplaced, and the reasons why it is. You refused alter your stance based on information and several perspectives. This is ultimately your own problem, and all I've been doing is attempting to provide you with even the slightest bit of insight. No need to take your frustrations out on me, or other commenters for that matter.

@TheLightSpirit while I agree with your comments saying hacking is bad, I don't agree with the way you're handling this argument. It seems to me that you're taking your frustration of hackers out on these commenters, which to me seems disrespectful for no reason. If you dont like hackers, thats fine theres nothing wrong with that. But getting so upset over one person saying that not everyone has the time to get perfect competitive pokemon isn't necessary. Just my thoughts, I mean no hate to anyone here.

And I'm also not saying that flooding wonder trade with shiny legendaries doesn't detract from the game's intended experience, only that there isn't an accessible alternative without the use of such tools. For a franchise this old, there needs to be something better than "transfer your pokemon repeatedly up from 8 generations of games you may or may not have kept until you can access Pokemon Home, and then you don't actually own them despite them being yours"

That image is perfect xD

They need to do something about the various websites that generate hacked Pokemon. I have even seen adds for them before YouTube videos!

Full on they show how you can design a Pokemon in an app, choose your moves, stats, shiny, EVs, IVs, and stuff then the app will spoof a trade for that Pokemon.

It's never been easier to make legit competitive Pokemon. But it's also never been easier to cheat!

This is one of the main reasons I don't battle online because of hackers. Hackers mostly are cheaters and they can make the battle not very fun. I battled twice on Pokemon Moon and the first battle was a hacker. And my sister met many hackers too. I only do pokemon trades if they were a friend who is trustworthy.

@SpaceboyScreams @SirAileron that might have more merit if these weren't the easiest pokemon games for competitive training. They have been streamlining the training process so much, it's a bit ridiculous tbh.

You can literally take any trashy pokemon, give it candy to take it to level 100, use items to max out its stats, and more items to change its stats modifier and ability.

Modding gave people an advantage in the old days, but now it's only really useful for illegal movesets and instant shinies.

@Eel honestly, that is the one real counterpoint that exists. Not that it would stop even lazier people who don't want to item grind for that, but I definitely would rather they implement the move/stat verification feature to mitigate actual cheating.

@SirAileron Yeah, there will always be people who will want their perfect designer team with the push of a button. As long as they don't make it obvious, who will really notice, after all?

As many have pointed out, through Surprise Trade and other means, legitimate players can end up with hacked Pokemon. I hope they continue the practice of making these mons unusable (turned into Bad Eggs) rather than banning accounts when players may not have done anything wrong.

I think people need to realize if you get a hacked PM through trade you will be fine, anything what can be passed as a legit PM won't cause any issue. I got a hacked PM i got in a "giveaway" a year back and i've been using it to battle in online tournaments just fine, reason is everything about it a legit version can have. What TPC is going after is the people who are making the hacked PM rather then going after those who have got them through trading, Home and Surprise are infested with Hacked PM so if they banned everyone who has hacked PM they are banning 99% of the playerbase.

@TheLightSpirit Unfair advantage? Come on it takes barely any work in S&S to get a battle ready PM set up in a legit way, a lot of people like myself like to have a battle ready shiny team what can be a pain in the *ss due to how hard getting shiny PM are, 5/6 of my shiny team is legit and PM i've either bred or caught myself, that 6th one is a hacked one someone gave me in trade group, that PM i own battle ready in non shiny form what is legit but i wanted to complete the shiny team so instead of spending days trying to get it the legit way i went with a hacked version, there's no unfair advantage here as shiny PM are vanity only. A battle ready legit team can be done in a couple of hours, there's no unfair advantage if some decide to cut that time to half hour and just hacked. Also i doubt you faced Shiny Galarian Articuno online as its a banned PM, i have a shiny one myself what someone traded me and i can't use it online as i tried just to see if i could.

@Eel while these are definitely way easier games to make competitive teams in, it still takes too long to make said perfect team in-mass.

You can level stuff to 100 with the candies; If you have them. For 6 slots you’ll have to grind quite awhile to have all those candies, plus grind for the candies should you test the team and discover one Pokémon needs replaced, and then a week later probably remake the whole team because the meta shifted for the trillionth time.

On top of that you have to EV train, which isn’t nearly as long especially with vitamins, but it’s another thing to consider. What really hurts is PP maxing, that you can’t humanly grind for in time for a tournament without either being incredibly lucky, or grinding BP. PP stalling is a legitimate play style that you will auto lose in if you don’t PP max (pressure users become even scarier).

If modding doesn’t directly alter movesets and BST, then who cares lol, ever since gen 6 there have been auto filters for blocking illegal kits that disable being able to use them online or GTS them, their source of origin is the only thing off about them and at that point it’s just vanity (why would you show off a shiny you didn’t get yourself anyway). Trust me, Hackmons used to be a fun ladder, nothing funnier than 6v6 metronome shedinja but GF disabled being able to do that even privately.

Personally I haven’t bothered with modding in gen 8, I’ve done everything legit and it’s too exhausting to keep up with the battle stadiums constant rule set changes and formats while grinding this stuff. Gen 6 and 7 were way more chill since if I did need to pump out another team or redo a mon it took me a minute with powersaves. This is why most sane players use smogon’s Pokémon showdown simulator for instant team building and laddering, plus it doesn’t cost $60+Nintendo membership. Until GF acknowledges these grinding issues fully, they’re missing out on money and active player bases.

it will only slowdown if
1) they make all evs/ivs/movesets easily interchangeable in the game. they should just take pokehex and put it into the game but as something that has to be unlocked by beating the game.
2) they should stop with the event/paywall only pokemon nonsense and shiny locking things so they can't be shiny in game and up the encounter rate to 1/10
this would eliminate most of the needless grind that has caused this mess for years and subsequently render save mods obsolete, outside of just people messing around with mods in ways that are not meant to cheat.

Hey guys I think we might need to fight Game Freak for causing chaos to our Pokémon life and I DJ Octavio will fight Game Freak head on and won’t go down without a fight so members of Nintendo life are you with me to fight against Game Freak once and for all .