After winning his first two matches of the day at the Pokemon World Championship Series last weekend, professional Pokemon player Brady Smith, three-time regional champ and founder of VGC Corner, revealed that he had been disqualified from the competition. On the website formerly known as Twitter, Smith wrote, “DQ’d at 2-0. Should have gotten my mons myself! Half my team was m꧟odified/genned. I didn&r𒀰squo;t have Legends of Arceus to get the Lando. And I didn’t have my copy of Sword/Shield to get Urshifu. I tried trading for the mons with a reputable trader, but the mons didn’t pass.” Smith shared his team and promised to “do better next time,” but this was the end of his run at the World Championships this year.
Smith’s story drew a lot of attention online because of his pedigree as a competitive player, but as it turns out, he was just one of many participants at Worlds who were disqualified for using illegally obtained Pokemon. As reported by , at least two other high-profile players - Roberto Parente, who placed𒊎 top 16 last year, and Francesco Pi Pero, who placed top ei🍎ght at the Liverpool Regionals prior to attending Worlds, were both disqualified after being caught with unofficial Pokemon during a last minute ‘hack check’. It seems as though The Pokemon Company has either developed new methods for detecting cheaters, or simply decided to start taking it more seriously at Worlds. We reached out to Pokemon for a comment, but the company declined to offer an official statement on the methods or the reason for the crackdown.
Lots of competitive games deal with cheaters, but this is a unique situation, as not everyone agrees that the cheaters deserve to be punished for it. Some consider the process of building a legitimate competitive team to be an unreasonable burden that creates an unfair barrier to entry into the competitive scene, while others feel team building is an important part of a trainer’s journey that no one should be allowed to skip over. Players on both sides of the debate are upset about the way bans were handled at Worlds: those in favor of genning feel it was unfair to ban players that earned their right to compete through their competitive successes and traveled to Worlds at great personal😼 cost, while those against genning are upset that The Pokemon Company isn’t doing more to stop cheaters by applying the rules consistently.
The only legitimate Pokemon you can use in an official tournament are ones that have been caught or hatched in game. You can train them yourself or trade for them, but someone has to put in the work to train up a team of Pokemon with the perfect stats, which anyone who has played Pokemon competitively will tell you is no small feat. It takes hundreds of hours across many Pokemon games to develop a competitive team, and those that do take a lot of ꩵpride in the effort they put into getting their team ready. It’s easy to understand why they would be frustrated by other people using third-party software to manipulate their Pokemon’s stats, or simply generate a perfect team out of thin air. It feels unfair, and The Pokemon Company certainly agrees. Catching, breeding, and training up a powerful team to compete with is part of the Pokemon trainer journey. It goes against the spirit of the game to skip that process. Ash himself would never have taken a 🥀shortcut like that, and neither should any serious Pokemon trainer.
On the other hand, the time investment to build a competitive team really is unreasonable, and it's worth considering whether that process is an expression of a player’s skill, or just the amount of time they have available to commit to doing monotonous work. There’s a reason this is such a widespread issue in Pokemon, and it’s not because Pokemon players are lazy. There’s a significant burden placed on Pokemon players that goes above and beyond the time they need to spend practicing battles and honing their competitive skills, and I’m not convinced that it adds any real value to the competitive experience. More than anything, it seems like an arbitrary barrier that people with the privilege of time can feel good about, while those with less time, or those who might be new to the game, are excluded. Things have gotten significantly easier since Sword & Shield with the inclusion of tools like bottle caps and mints, but it’s still not an easy or quick process.
The Pokemon rearing requirements seem especially unreasonable when you consider other competitive Pokemon games. If you want to be a competitive TCG player, all you have to do is buy a strong deck. You don’t have to prove that you opened the packs yourself, or train your cards up by grinding battles with them. The monetary cost of playing the TCG is its own barrier, but at least you don’t have to sink hundreds of hours into this other, supplementary 💝experience that really has nothing to do with playing the TCG. You don’t have to sit in a room alone tapping a button endlessly before you’re allowed to play the TCG, but you do have to do that before you’re allowed to compete in the video game. The same goes for Pokemon Unite. If you want to be the best Unite player, you just need to get good at playing Unite. These are all Pokemon games, but the video game is the only one that also requires you to simulate the trainer experience too.
I have sympathy for Pokemon cheaters, and frankly, I would never consider playing the video game competitively specifically because of this barrier to entry. Some have made the argument that competitive Pokemon should use a Pokemon Showdown styl꧂e battle simulator, which would eliminate the need for catching, breeding, and training all together. While that might take away a component of competitive Pokemon that a lot of people take pride in, at least it w❀ould put all competitors on equal footing. As it stands, playing the video game competitively is a full-time job, which means a lot of people who could otherwise be greater battlers will never have an opportunity to participate.
Ultimately, the rules are the rules, and it's better if The Pokemon Company enforces them consistently rather than picking and choosing when and where to hold people accountable for cheating. If the crackdown at Worlds is a sign of things to come, players are going to need to be a lot more careful about where they get their Pokemon from, and reevaluate whether or not they have the time to develop their teams legitimately. This will likely lead to a thinning in the competitive scene, at least to some degree, as people that rely on genned Pokemon realize they don’t have the time or resources to continue playing competitively. If that happens, those who have the capacity to do things legit will celebrate, but what effect that will have on the competitive community remains to be seen.