Why are you cheating??!!

Ok I know this is probably irrelevant because it stops nothing, but I have noticed that a few people on Nintendo WFC use Action Replay codes. I just have to ask: why? Why in the heck would you try to take the fun out of this game? I mean, its like eating a cake with no sugar! No More challenge! If you can't put in the time to get Pokemon you want, then what is the point of playing?? Sorry for the rant i was merely sharing my thoughts.

Everyone has different ways of having fun, even with the same thing.

I once had an Action Replay that I used on my Gen 4 games to get the event only legendaries whose event(s) I had missed and was not expecting another event anytime soon. Hacking in the Azure Flute to go to the Hall of Origin and catch Arceus there was fun, and then it allowed me to go to the Sinjoh Ruins in Soul Silver. I also used the Action Replay on Phantasy Star Zero to get some of the best weapons and equipment in the game given that drop rates for the really nice stuff in PSZ and Phantasy Star Online (would've loved to use an Action Replay or some such on that one in particular) are disgustingly low.

And I say this as someone who's done a metric fuckton of breeding and spent literally two weeks straight farming a Spread Needle in PSO, nevermind all the other grinding I've done in my life. It can be hellishly boring, so I find it hard to blame people for using cheating devices and whatnot when it comes to that.

I think the part where cheating is wrong though is when one uses it at the expense of other people's fun. Since like I said how people have fun in different ways, it's one thing when you do cheating stuff and it only affects you, but it's another when it starts affecting other people. It might be fun to you, but maybe not them, and so it'd be best to not do it then.

I would have been Pokemon cheating free but I did once use my cousin's action replay to trigger the Shaymin event cause I wanted one really bad, but I won't don't think I'll ever cheat again.

I've cheated a few times when I've been more concerned with the storyline than the challenge of the game. It's not something I make a habit of, because yeah it does make the game less fun for me. That said... I really don't understand people's impulse to rant about this. The Pokémon games, or at least the main game, which is what we're referring to here, are singleplayer-only. There's no competition with other players, there's no main story leaderboard, there's nothing that makes any reference to the experience or "score" of other players in any way. So why does it matter if someone cheats? They're enjoying (or not, but it's up to them) the experience in their own way, and letting you enjoy it in yours. When you're playing in a singleplayer vacuum, the way other people play is of no concern to you.

I understand being angry about people cheating in Pokémon to use in online/competitive battling, but anger about the way a player goes through their singleplayer experience is pretty indefensible when you think about it rationally.

I cheated just to get lots of full restores and sitrus berries so I don't need to spend money to buy them also love using infnite PP so I can spam powerful moves a lot. Cheating in-game is different between people's point of view either it's fun or digust by it

Well, in regards to breeding and shiny hunting: because it's not fun.

There. I said it. Relying on RNG to find or breed a Pokemon with the IVs and Nature you want - and Egg moves sometimes, too - is a time-consuming, tedious, and outright boring task. When the Pokemon obtained through using devices like Action Replay are possible to acquire in the games without them (i.e. they don't have stats, moves, or abilities that aren't programmed into the game) I personally do not see what the problem is. Some people do not have the time or the patience for competitive breeding. So they should be denied competitive battling because of it? This is fair...how, exactly? What if someone who works and doesn't have time for breeding Pokemon really wants to battle with their friends who do?

"Fun" means different things to different people. Some people just want to battle without the fuss and will take shortcuts, whilst others take pride in the Pokemon they spend hours breeding and training.

If anything, it benefits other people as well, because it gives them more opponents to battle. If someone is clearly cheating to give themselves an unfair advantage, then yes, it is absolutely wrong and you have every right to complain about it. But otherwise, no. You're probably not even going to know about it unless someone tells you. A shiny Pokemon with perfect IVs or whatever is perfectly possible to acquire without the use of a cheat device, so what difference does it really make to you?

It's not challenging, either. It's time-consuming. I really wish people could understand the difference between these two concepts. A challenge is a system of gameplay that does not draw upon RNG and other cheap mechanics beyond player control to frustrate your efforts to get what you want. A challenge is a system that you can fully manipulate (I am aware there are methods to manipulate circumstances in Pokemon games, so no need to point those out to me, thank you) to produce the desired results, but with significant effort.

There is no inherent difficulty or challenge in luck-based systems. Let's take a hypothetical scenario where two people are trying to find the same Pokemon with certain parameters; perfect IVs, a certain nature, whatever. They both use the same method. One person could find it on their first encounter. The other person could take 10 hours or more to find it. Explain to me the challenge in this...outside of needing an incredible amount of patience for something that ultimately might never reward you. With Pokemon, you don't always get back a reward proportionate to the time spent, because the odds are so ridiculously slim that you can literally never find what you're searching for.

Regarding event-only Legendaries: a lot of them are timed events. Almost all of them, in fact. You miss them, tough luck: you're reliant on either the goodwill of other people who use the GTS (which, let's face it, is in short supply) or even worse, you have to wait for Nintendo to release them again. Wi-Fi distribution is fantastic, but unfortunately these things aren't available permanently. So say you miss something...what, you're supposed to just go without? Why is it not OK to use a cheat device in that scenario to get one? Sure, these are things that aren't available in the game, but they should be. There is no reason that they couldn't be unlockable events through your actions in the game.

...and those that are. Some of them, like Gen IV's Arceus, Shaymin and Darkrai events, are locked behind coding barriers for no reason whatsoever. Arceus' event was never even made available in the West. Put this into context with literally any other series of video games...would it be acceptable then? Rather than asking what the point in using cheat devices to access these things is, I think the better question is: what is the point in even including these things if you're not even going to make them available through natural means? Why include it, but not include it?

Think of this whole thing more like drinking tea than having cake. Some people like milk and/or sugar, and others don't. Some people just have different tastes. It doesn't take the fun out of the game for some, and it doesn't take the fun out of YOUR game if other people cheat to acquire things, unless they are competetive battlers with Pokemon that clearly break the rules of the game by having abilities or moves that they shouldn't have.

Yeah, cheating really is not a bad thing. I wouldn't even call manipulation of a game's code to generate or access things that are naturally programmed into the game cheating at all, really. To me, cheating would be manipulating the game to generate an unfair advantage for yourself if you planned on interacting with others.

That depends. I've used Action Replay in Emerald to hack in event items such as the Aurora Ticket and Old Sea Map so that I could go and catch Deoxys and Mew legitimately. I don't consider that outright illegitimate, especially because many of those older Gen III events were so exclusive to Japan or the Pokemon Center in NYC. As a kid growing up in suburban California, there was literally no way for me to try and complete the Pokedex and get these events. I admit that I hacked for the items, but that doesn't mean the Pokemon itself is hacked. Sure, it may not be fair that those who choose to hack in event items have an advantage over those without the capabilities to do so, but it really isn't fair that Japan especially had so many cool events, while the U.S. ones tended to be lacking or nonexistent. Those who live in Japan or in other East Asian countries had that advantage (and quite honestly, still do). I'm making this argument for events in Gen III only.

I at least take solace in the fact that I didn't illegally generate an encounter with Deoxys or Mew with a cheating device--I caught them with the same methods I use with other legendaries by False Swiping, paralyzing, and lobbing balls until one clicks. I ran around the stupid tall grass to find and battle Mew. I mashed my A button for Deoxys's triangle to chill out and start the battle. The Pokemon were generated by the game. I'm not trading my own personal Mew and Deoxys around because they're for me, and many Pokemon trading communities have mixed opinions about events like mine anyway.

In terms of cloning, everyone has a different opinion on that, and I think that's a controversial discussion far outside of this thread.

In terms of RNG abuse for shinies and good/perfect IVs or using in-game glitches, I don't view that as cheating. I'm not hacking in the Pokemon--the game itself is generating the Pokemon. Just because I know how the RNG system works and can utilize it to my benefit doesn't mean that I'm hacking or cheating. Whether or not the developers intended for players to know that much about how the game works is an actual mystery, so that cannot be a counter argument. In-game glitches such as the cloning glitch in Emerald also seem fine to me. Look at the recent VC releases of Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow, all of which are games that are notorious for their sheer amount of glitches (and the infamous MissingNo). Gamefreak and Nintendo chose to ignore the decision to fix those glitches, but they are very aware of all of those glitches. Such glitches seem to be accepted by the higher-ups and devs.

You could say that the recent patches of Sun and Moon were an effort on the devs' part to fix some glitches, and that would at least make sense. GF has also chosen to make cloning through in-game trading glitch techniques more difficult by blocking players from Internet facilities should a communication error happen during a trade, but they have not outright fixed the cloning glitch itself (which existed in XYORAS as well).

I have a lot to say about this, clearly, but also different people enjoy different things. What a concept. Some people prefer to play one way and that's okay, too. The trouble is when people are outright negatively affecting the gameplay of others. One thing I like about PC here is that, if people are using Action Replay or Powersaves, they're at least upfront and honest about the extent that they're using it. Clearly communicating what is happening while making negotiations for trades avoids these awkward situations where one party feels like the other may have cheated/scammed them.

Also, this really isn't some kind of groundbreaking moral decision here unless, like I stated before, you're outright negatively affecting other players. I don't see why some individuals feel more justified in playing a certain way without RNG abuse, using in-game glitches, etc. if it literally doesn't affect them. Pokemon is a game. Yes, we all love and care and put a lot of time in the game, and some prefer to put more time into something (shiny hunting, collecting legendaries, IV breeding, etc.) than others. That's fine. It's also fine if people don't like to do that. It doesn't affect me, so I'm not invested. Anyway, I'm speaking as a shiny hunter and breeder myself.

I've really only used an Action Replay for the sole purpose of Generating TMs especially during the time that they only could be used once. As well as obtaining event locked legendaries. It's not like it's effecting others since the same is solely single player while playing through the story. Fun is such an subjective word when it comes to Pokémon and it has always been.

The only generation where I cheated a lot was back in Generation III, where a lot of Pokémon just weren't obtainable (especially when Ruby/Sapphire were the only games out). I hated a lot of the Hoenn Pokémon at the time, and having TMs be single use didn't help matters either.

I can't say I mind if others cheat. There's a certain thrill to be had after raising generations of Pokémon to have the right nature, IVs, etc., but I can understand why a lot of people don't have the patience to do it, even if they're interested in it. Pokémon is still largely single-player, so as far as I'm concerned, what some random stranger does in their game isn't any of my business. To each their own.

Ever since I got an AR for Christmas in 2013, I've been using it quite a bit on the Gen IV games, and to be honest I'm not doing it on the expense of anyone's fun, but to alleviate the pain of doing things that would otherwise take ages.

The first thing I should bring up is the TMs. Or to be specific, the TMs for Flamethrower, Thunderbolt and Ice Beam in HG/SS. They're very useful in competitive battling, but the problem is you need to get 10k coins in Voltorb Flip, and we know that's incredibly difficult. It's made worse by the fact that TMs are single-use and if you've wasted a TM you want to teach on something else, then you're screwed. It's worse if it's one of the Voltorb Flip ones, because you'll need to grind up another 10k coins. So for convenience's sake, I set it so I could get 99 of every TM so I don't have to waste time going through getting every single one.

Also, breeding. In S/M I spend time breeding due to the mechanics being favourable towards good IVs, but the thing is before that, those conveniences weren't a thing and as a result breeding was harder. For example, the Destiny Knot is a staple in breeding because it allows 5 IVs to be passed down, but that didn't exist then, so you had to rely on the RNG (I may be missing something, because I haven't done a lot of breeding in the Gen IV games) or the power items, which would only pass down 1 IV. So what I do is breed for the nature only, and then hack the perfect IVs, much like Hyper Training. The EV training is done by myself because I always have enough time for it.

There's also the events as well. When I got SoulSilver I had missed a lot of the Gen IV events like Arceus and Celebi, and even in Platinum as well, I did the Darkrai and Shaymin events but restarted, so I lost them. I was regretting that decision because I wanted to use Darkrai and Shaymin (although I remember wasting the TM for Dark Pulse on Darkrai because I was too impatient to level it up, maybe that's why I restarted...) so I hacked in the Member Card and Oak's Letter in order to gain access to the event-exclusive locations. The thing here is that I'm still catching the Pokemon properly, without using some kind of Master Ball code or always-catch code. As for the HG/SS events, I only really hacked in the ones for the mythical Pokemon because I wanted to see what would have happened. For the Celebi one in particular, I was wanting to know what the point of the radio was in Tohjo Falls and its connection to the event.

The only time where I draw the line on hacking is when it's used for something that takes effort to do and rewards you for it. In particular, one thing I've always not liked is when people brag about their shiny which took, like, let's say 942 random encounters, when in reality it's hacked. Shiny Pokemon have lost a lot of value due to this, to the point where it's just seen as a Pokemon with a different colour. It's really unfair to see people hack in something that could be perfectly attainable with effort, and it shows that they're not committing to the challenge of doing something like Masuda method breeding, for example.