4th Gen Trading around the globe~

[Khoshi]

Arguably one of the best features of all of Pokemon, the Global Trade Station saw its upbringing in Pokemon Diamond and Pearl's release. Located just near the beginning in Jubilife City, the GTS allows you to trade with people all around the world (as long as you have that Coal Badge from Oreburgh :p). There, a giant globe called the Geonet will ask you for your location if it's your first time, so that other players around the world can pinpoint your area of residence and trade with you! From there on, you can put up a Pokemon for trade, or trade a Pokemon they own for one that's up for trade. You can make the search for a Pokemon tailored to your specifications, selecting search conditions such as gender and levels. It was brought back in HG/SS and later generations, and even got a site dedicated to it!

How did you feel about this new (and awesome!) addition to the series? Did you use it? How frequently? any thoughts on it? go on and say them~

go on and discuss to your heart's content. :p

 

[Hiatus]

Loved it, haha. There were plenty of Pokémon out there by the time Diamond and Pearl were released, and without a feature like this, it would have been extremely difficult for players to complete their PokéDex. Although I personally haven't done this, I'm sure plenty of other people have, and it had assisted them a ton.

 

[curiousnathan]

I didn't have the right internet connection to be able to utilise the global rade station unfortunately. :( But it did look pretty cool I have to admit. ;)

 

[Imperator161]

I really liked the addition of online trading, though it made completing the Pokedex a much more trivial task than it had been in the past (because I could just trade for things that were hard to get rather than obtaining them myself). I recall doing a lot of trading the summer after D/P came out (on a different forum), and I remember people doing shiny giveaways on the GTS. It was always really challenging to find the shinies because it seemed like you only got to look at a random selection of up to seven Pokémon at a time, but I had a lot of fun. I also remember negotiating lots of trades, getting into event and shiny collecting for the first time (because I finally could), and even trying to arrange trades via GTS. On a more sobering note, I recall getting scammed for the first time, and realizing that the advent of online trading brought with it opportunities for dishonest players to take advantage of their fellow forumers.

That being said, online trading, including the GTS, has definitely been a positive step for Pokémon. I've appreciated the improvements in the GTS from fourth generation to sixth, and I've used it in the fourth through sixth gens as a staple for Pokedex filling. Online trading, as well as forums like this one, reminds me of how many people still play Pokémon around the world; I am not alone in my fascination with this game series. In gen 1, everyone I knew played. In gen 2, most friends still played, but the numbers started to dwindle. In gen 3, I was practically alone. But come gen 4, and the dawn of the GTS and online trading, I realized that many other players still participated, and even if we lived in different cities, states, or even countries, we could help each other reach our Pokémon goals. Put that way, the GTS and online trading are pretty amazing.

 

[Radiam]

I'm a really big fan of the GTS. I used it a lot actually. There were other Pokemon that I haven't caught yet but I had seen on my journey, so I found out what this thing was, and I used it to my advantage. I was able to complete the full PokeDex with the help of this thing. There were other things that I had to use to get all of the Pokemon, but the GTS was certainly a huge help with it. There was also a time when my Pokemon Platinum game was glitched out. When I wanted to trade Pokemon to another game, I couldn't do so because for some reason, I kept going through the wall when going into the upstairs of the Pokemon Center. Don't know what I did really. Anyways, I found out that I could just trade my Pokemon to another game using the GTS by offering the Pokemon that I wanted to trade over to the target game and I would choose to want a Pokemon that my target game has. It was a lot of hard work, but it was worth it in the end because some of those Pokemon I still have up to this date!

This was definitely a good decision on GameFreak's part. It was good that they used the Wi-Fi feature for something that evolved into one of the most used things in recent games, next to Wonder Trade. Very helpful for a lot of us trainers. :)