Cheating for Competitive Pokémon is PATHETIC (In Sword and Shield...)

[@CambriaBold]

It'll forever frustrate me that the only games that had full Battle Frontiers were in generations where getting competitively viable Pokemon was a nightmare.

[@imablisy]

yeah it's cool lol

[@DkKobaADV]

At least emerald had cloning glitch which alleviated on cart only teams, access to metagross/salamence/latios wasnt terrible

[@juicyjack3331]

@@DkKobaADV is latios better than latias? Never given it thought but assumed they were the same guy essentially

[@DkKobaADV]

@@juicyjack3331 latios has better offensive stats (130 base SpA vs 110)

[@SuperSSSSooonniicccc]

I've just been using PKhex to give me a proper team so I can tackle them on emulator. As imablisy has showcased...its a lot of pointless grinding for no reason. ...especially when AI trainers in these games also use banned strategies like accuracy affecting moves.

[@corvidaeae]

Sword and Shield are definitely a massive improvement, but that was still a 30 hour team with the help of RNG manipulation and friends. And that was knowing the exact team you wanted. The grind's still not reasonable for people with lives outside of Pokemon unless they're getting all their battle practice on Showdown and only assembling actual teams for big events.

[@kartiksaraf4676]

A major part of that was the PP increasing items. If you are just testing out teams you can reasonably skip them until you are happy with the team. Plus if you are using other games, PLA is super fast to get mints with. I agree however, it still needs to be faster. Let's see how SV do in this regard

[@corvidaeae]

@@kartiksaraf4676 Legends Arceus didn't come out until 2022, the majority of SwSh's lifespan didn't have it as an option. And it still took 17 hours and 40 minutes before he went into PP items, which *still* isn't a reasonable grind for team testing. ~18 hours is kind of sort of (not really) reasonable if that was your actual team you're for sure committing to.

[@crazzluz1702]

@@corvidaeae This is so true. People that are JUST getting into competitive/VGC Pokemon battling for the first time aren't going to just make one team of 6 and never change anything. They're going to want to experiment and test stuff and, you know, have fun. And this is still way too long. Things like the ability patch, mints and uncapped vitamins seem super convenient on paper, but they still take hours of mindless grinding to actually get.

[@megalowpokemonomania9146]

wait theres life outside of pokemon ?

[@iron9217]

30 hours is fine i.m.o for a "perfect" team that you want, too long for ME to bother, but short enough to not be a great excuse. The thing that gets me is the " I had to take a break from day skipping for the health of my hands " "Pathetic" for not bumping dates one-by-one? like that's a skill or something First of all, I'm avoiding things that give me RSI, secondly that sounds too boring of a grind for me. I don't play competitive, but RSI + hours of skipping days in the switch menu would absolutely keep me from playing.

[@Drakenwild]

30-ish hours to build a team is still a lot and if you consider a player who is a casual with no knowledge of Pokemon Showdown existing, it still creates a massive barrier to entry cause new competitive players will need to change up their Pokemon frequently to learn. Native Showdown would be the solution but Game Freak is unlikely to implement it, so.

[@trueMCGRaven]

it is a lot yes but 30 hours is still more reasonable than 47 hours before even getting to the important parts of the actual build.

[@Drakenwild]

@@trueMCGRaven it is a massive improvement, yeah, there's no denying it. Being better than the time other builds took is a very low bar to clear though and saying that this is completely acceptable and that no one should hack when they can get a team within 30 hours is not okay in my opinion. You are grabbing things for online play on a near completed save file, this shouldn't take more than an hour or two at most.

[@Rikhard9]

@@internetguy7319 the average joe doesnt watch pokemon videos on youtube

[@amiablereaper]

@@trueMCGRaven only he didn't spend 47 hours, he used a speedup exploit to speed things up, one that doesn't work anymore. In reality, the 29 real hours the gen V run took is actually SHORTER than the gen viii run.

[@amiablereaper]

@@Rikhard9 the average joe doesn't play competitive Pokemon either

[@pointynives]

The issue is you spent 30 hours making a specific team using specialist knowledge, glitches and outside tools, but what happens when you're testing and decide the team doesn't work as you wanted, or there's a shift in the meta, or any other thing that can happen? Now it's back to hours of sorting stuff out to get a team that would be no better or worse than a team that was cheated in. I mean this is a lot better than back in gen 4 when I spent over 100 hours just breeding one Starmie but it's a still a big ass time investment and a silly barrier to entry for playing what is a childrens game at a competitive level.

[@imablisy]

Yeah I mean I agree lol.

[@TheGoldenBoot-cz1do]

If you've already beat the game it doesn't take 30 hours you can make a team in a day

[@aprinnyonbreak1290]

Also, consider that the knowledge required to make a viable pokemon in game is useful only in the context of pokemon, while the knowledge required to get something like injection working is actually much more useful at gaining computer skill, a much more professionally viable skill than playing pokemon well. By playing legit, you're only cheating yourself.

[@Lonewulf321]

@@TheGoldenBoot-cz1do lol that’s still 24 hours

[@TheGoldenBoot-cz1do]

@@Lonewulf321 obviously the implication of "in a day" isn't a full day, you can still sleep eat shit all that fun stuff

[@MoxieBoosted]

Loved this vid. As a player who likes to build teams legit only for sentimental reasons, accessibility has always been something I advocate for. I've always had the opinion that I really don't care how anyone else gets their teams cause when we're playing it doesn't ever become a factor. But I will say that SwSh has made some huge improvements to getting teams quickly. At the start of the game when there were no 3rd party tools and everyone had to work together I was still able to crank out a team in less than a day. There's really no reason to use third party tools this gen, but still, I'd never judge someone for needing to save time. Between work and other IRL things, everyone should be able to play a game they like online.

[@imablisy]

Thanks so much! Love your competitive content! I don't really judge people for hacking, I tend to put the onus on gamefreak for not doing enough. I do think SWSH is pretty accessible and cheating isn't really nessecarily like it used to be, but I'd prefer if showdown was just built into the game lol.

[@MoxieBoosted]

@@imablisy there's some rumors that Gen 9 DLC has a pkhex-esque training feature

[@AndrewH1994]

@@MoxieBoosted that would be really cool if true! I would just hope there would be a separate set of boxes or teams so that you couldn’t just make the perfect pokemon and use it in a play through or any kind of content. if you really wanted that pokemon for offline use, then you actually have to go through the steps to get it the way you want, but if you only care about battling online with it, then use the feature you mentioned is rumoured to exist in the next games to make the pokemon

[@SpectreXS]

Pretty good, healthy take! I hope more VGC players become more forward when talking about the barrier of entry in the games, rather than sweeping things under the rug just like TPCI has been doing for more than a decade. In my opinion the final step should be done, which would be a full on team builder.

[@sam7559]

@@imablisy not necessary for one, but other people can have commitments like jobs and/or families that would leave them very little time per day to do everything you did. Sure maybe it took you a few days but for the parent that wants to go to a tournament after getting the weekend approved, they might only have a few hours a week to get their team ready and make the decision that hacking in their team is the only way they're going to get their 27 hour team ready in a few weeks.

[@adriantillman8203]

Until they add a Showdown-type system, cheating will persist. Personally I know I don’t have a casual 30h to spend on a team build, let alone the hours added for trying out other teams and learning rngmanip/time skip strats

[@raphchelly3413]

You know that if you decide to take on something in a competitive setting you will more than likely have to spend way more than 30h right? It doesn't give you the right to cheat still.

[@adriantillman8203]

@@raphchelly3413 you’ll likely have to, but 30 hours BEFORE UNDERTAKING A BATTLE every time you decide to test out a new combination of 6 Pokémon is unreasonable

[@raphchelly3413]

@@adriantillman8203 I'm pretty sure that's why showdown exist. You test out different teams and then you build the one you settled on. I play yugioh, I don't buy and make every meta decks then pick one. I go online, try them on simulators then I build it irl if I'm good with it. The only reason ppl think they need perfect pokemon all the time is bc cheating is so prevalent. Without it most ppl wouldn't go through the grind and would settle for less optimized mons.

[@raphchelly3413]

That's why showdown is for. You theory craft and test your teams. Then you build them legit. You are not forced to grind a full team every time you want to try something that's just a lie. I play yugioh, I'm not buying every meta decks, I test them in online simulators then decide what I want to play irl. Also 30h hours isn't that much for any competitive setting.

[@munchrai6396]

The ability to use Pokemon from previous generations by checking their compatibility in Sword and Shield creates some really interesting routes to increase teambuilding for those that have the games and the RNG knowhow for it. Like gens 3-5 are the easiest for RNG manipulate, ORAS is the fastest game to level up your Pokemon, which can then make them ready for bottle capping in gen 7/8. The only real hiccup with this is that Bottle Caps and Ability Patches are still hard to obtain, with the best option being using an older version of Sun and Moon to dateskip the Pokepelago. (an older version of SM can actually still participate in Infrared trading with another system, so you never have to update said game)

[@imablisy]

I avoided it not because I was worried about lack of knowledge, but because I doubt newer players will have access to as many games as a hardcore player does

[@slotholopolis2314]

If you play any of a couple different modes in SwSh, leveling is incredibly easy with the candies. I make teams way more often than I actually battle but my standard is to just vitamin up and candy to 100 and finish with a bottle cap if needed at the end. The whole process takes like 5 minutes because I play regularly and have the resources already. I love that things can be brought up from other gens but I think if you fully invest in SwSh, it's better all around for just about everything in team building.

[@BIGBENBOMBNATION]

@@imablisy I have just liked your video BRO

[@tachi4808]

@@slotholopolis2314 Definitey agreed. I've bred around 300-400 Pokemon throughout Sword and Shield throughout, and its insane how self-sustaining all the resources are. Just by doing Delibird Raids semi-often, leveling, maxing PPs and Dynamax Level Raising are insanely easy

[@Solaceon]

@@slotholopolis2314 Shiny raid hunters definitely have an advantage here

[@thechristopherous789]

This is way better than previous generations for sure, but when you consider that actually if you want to do well you are going to have to constantly tweak this team swap members, moves, evs, etc Its still way to long for the majority of casual players to get into. You pretty much need to start either copying someone else's team or borrowing one

[@AndrewH1994]

yup! or use pokemon showdown to test on their ladder before you even begin to make your team in game

[@NataliaNeeSama]

Thats why I think Game Freak need to make their in-game Pokemon Showdown for casuals, so players can test teams, synergy and strategies on the fly before commiting a team to the whole breeding process and optimazation.

[@RageInducedGamer]

The only reason people would have to do all of this to begin with, is due to cheaters/genners. Otherwise, you'd just fight each other with whatever you have and whoever put the time, deserved the better Pokemon/advantage. That's the whole fucking point of the system.

[@TwilightMistress]

@@RageInducedGamer Unless you want to create a competitive environment. The existence of a competitive means people will play the best sets possible, and they will test a lot of things to make it the best. But the game is made for casual players, not tryhards competitive players that will play showdown to test the 100 possible combinations they have in their head. Cheat is inevitable when pros need to dedicate more time to theorycrafting and casuals having battles for fun instead of a 30h boring shit. So no, the problem is not cheaters/genners, the problem is a system with a really shit design, bad for casuals and bad for a healthy competitive environment

[@TheGoldenBoot-cz1do]

@@TwilightMistress making competitive pokemon isn't even hard in this gen, ev training is quick and the game practically throws bottle caps at you

[@AiEbihara]

I think aiming for using a "new player" experience and then using rng manips don't really line up to me. I feel that most people just getting into vgc will start with other methods first before going onto that. Video is still great and understand why you did manipulate or else we would just be watching you do normal stuff the whole time.

[@imablisy]

rng is controlling the luck. You could just get lucky and have had the ditto show up first try.

[@AiEbihara]

@@imablisy True good point. Times would vary alot

[@MononymousM]

@@AiEbihara I don't think it affects your point at all, though; it still definitely stands. As blisy says in his vids, there's a reason he uses RNGmanip, and it's not because it's accurate to the 'first time experience', it's because on average, it would still take a ludicrously longer time even if he got relatively lucky. Edit: RNGmanip, not RNG

[@shanedeiley6671]

This was a highly balanced video and i respect it. I bred my team legitimately using hacked dittos for tournaments and otherwise hacked for online laddering. Im a father, husband and overworked SDE so it was that or i don't play. I feel very comfortable with my decisions overall

[@Supersonic1014]

Glad to be a part of that legendary Zygarde fight! Actually insane that we were able to pull that off :)

[@imablisy]

It was dope!

[@NoSignalBrassworks]

Watching that on stream was INSANE!

[@munchrai6396]

Hearing Dr. Claw Kurt share his in-depth stance on genning and game modification was really enlightening even if the voice made it a little hard to understand/take seriously

[@shreym03]

I agree. It's a bit too loud as well

[@imablisy]

Had no other way to do it unfort

[@wisdomeel]

i think the issue is, its not about making a team, its about having the top 50 Pokémon in the meta trained and ready to team build and test, along with each one having variants with slightly different builds and making sure you can make it to a random event to get a rayquzua that randomly know v create( its just an example i know it was in gen 5)

[@PapaJefeYT]

A+ 10/10 5 Stars 11 out of 10 viewers agree, still the #1 best showcase of how deep the rabbit hole really goes.

[@imablisy]

thanks bud

[@GarlyleWilds]

It's so weird to me that there's a time investment at all for competitive Pokemon that isn't *playing* competitive Pokemon. Like it didn't strike me till recently, but if you are grinding in other competitive games, you are playing them in their competitive mode. In Pokemon you spend a big chunk of time just as a prerequisitie to trying it.

[@emmetstanevich2121]

@reality8793 Showdown is also a community-run simulator with no endorsement from GameFreak, just like how the cloning glitch wasn't intended by GameFreak. If you want to build a team "as GameFreak intended," then you'll need to build the team in its entirety, from scratch, before you can even start practicing with it.

[@TheTaquitoProject]

Or if there is grinding that isn't the competitive mode, it isn't nearly as bad and includes at least some transferrable skills.

[@raphchelly3413]

​@@TheTaquitoProjectif they made it easier and easier to build a team but if they still didn't completely remove it they probably consider it as a part of the competition. In most sports you are not required by the rules to be in good physical shape but 100% of competitions will ban you if you are on ped. And most competitive sports or games have you spend an insane amount of time on boring shit that will almost never come up.

[@frickinfrick8488]

I would love to see an overview or ranking of RNG manipulation strats for each generation. It’d be a really cool introduction into how RNG differs between gens and how hard or easy it is to manipulate it.

[@zeemgeem]

Until legitimately getting a pokemon ready for competitive is as fast as cheating, cheating will still exist - and the people who cheat are right to do so, considering this is still hours of mindless grind just to be able to actually play the game. If I was making the games, I would make bottle caps let you set the IV from 0 to 31, and rework EVs entirely so you assign them yourself as you level, getting all of them around level 50.

[@efrengonzalez5638]

I mean you're playing the game competitively a bit of grinding is to be expected. You would have most of the needed things if you actually played the game after you beat it.

[@theabsurdityseries5597]

@@efrengonzalez5638 the video shows him taking dozens of hours (boring ones) grinding after beating the game

[@raymondzhang6941]

@@efrengonzalez5638 It's not just "a bit of grinding" it can takes hours upon hours for just one pokemon and then it becomes extremely tedious and boring when you wanna use different pokemon, change sets, etc. Besides, there's a lot of gatekeeping with special moves from previous generations, needing previous games, devices, and more to speed up grinding, etc

[@waltlock8805]

You don't need any of that in order to play the game. You only need that if you want to be the best. Expecting a bit of work and preparation to reach the highest levels of a sport isn't "gatekeeping", it's common sense.

[@doctorunicorn5550]

@@efrengonzalez5638 no, that doesn't make sense. you don't have to play counterstrike for twenty hours to unlock the awp to use in a tournament. you can just use the awp. competitive pokemon needs a showdown-esque teambuilder. otherwise it's always going to have this baggage, because ultimately pokemon is designed as a singleplayer rpg and those mechanics do NOT translate well to a competitive environment.

[@Jamieiscool]

i love these videos. i’ve seen such horrible takes from non-competitive players like, “if you don’t have enough time to spend breeding a team, maybe you shouldn’t be competing in tournaments?” which is an insane gatekeep. i usually like to get my pokémon legit for tournaments like worlds, just because of sentimentality, but that’s a choice. from what i know, the only pokémon edu got everything 100% legit except calyrex which was traded to him. i just think people love to hate. also it would have only saved you maybe like 10 minutes max but because of the way they’ve updated how ev’s are applied, you get 2 free evs. because you cap at 510 but 508 is the most that does anything. so on stuff like the zacian spread where you had 28 def, you could have used 3 iron and saved yourself like 8 battles.

[@nousername191]

For that insane gatekeeping idea, they want to spend more than 20 hours EVERY time you want to build a team?! You know how long it takes before people settle on a team. Yes, rentals help a LOT but someone still has to build legitimately. That's why people experiment on showdown.

[@Jamieiscool]

@@nousername191 exactly, there is so much that goes into this that isn’t just as simple as putting together the mons. do you think edu just had that zacian spread from the get go? hell no, he had to play hundreds of games to figure out what was really needed. imo that’s where pokémon is really lacking. yeah you make a team much quicker, but god forbid it’s not perfect right from the start. it just shows off how little people understand about competitive when they make takes like this.

[@AndrewH1994]

@@Jamieiscool yup! I find the most time consuming part is when I’m tinkering a good team to min/max everything about. the EXACT stats I need for extremely specific hits or to outspeed something extremely specific while not dying to a faster mirror pokemon. which is why I feel like Showdown is almost necessary to use just to quickly make and test teams and quickly tinker with them before even testing them in an online battle

[@TheDarcaneify]

@@AndrewH1994 My opinion on this is That it SHOULD Take Time to tinker a team. That you Should invest in breeding your Pokemon, find the best way to play them. in USUM i breeded 3 Diffrent VF Shiny Rowlet trying to get it the best way it could be played and it was the most fun i had. Every Time i breed a Team i pre created on Showdown i get bored realy fast with it, becous its what, 50 Min for a non Shiny Team and 40 h for a Full shiny Team that i know will slap? I dont have 2000+ Hours on my Sword becous i wanted to cut the Fun Part out of the Building a team aspect, and if the Breeding realy Got killed in S/V, i dont know how much Time i will sink in it.

[@waltlock8805]

Expecting professionals to put in a month or two of prep time before a big tournament isn't unreasonable. Gatekeeping isn't bad so long as everyone has a chance to make it through the gate.

[@trevorkroon2163]

30 hours is still a very large barrier for someone first entering VGC for a couple of reasons. 1. They still have to beat the main story, even rushing through this could easily take 20+ hours. 2. New players wouldn't know about RNG manipulation, and even if they followed guides, a lot of them are pretty daunting at first and may be scary to new players. 3. You had the end goal laid out, EVs, IVs, natures, moves, etc. A new VGC player wouldn't know what end goal to go for and would likely make multiple different teams, even doubling up on some species to test different EV spreads. 4. Your average player won't have a chat to help them, and even having a group of maybe 5 friends helping is more than most people have access to. 5. Even if they have a full comp ready team, a new player can't just walk into a VGC event, they'll need to practice in online battles for a long time to even have the game knowledge to compete. All in all, a brand new player with no prior VGC experience would be lucky if they could compete at any decent level with even 100 hours of gameplay. Great vid btw

[@aprinnyonbreak1290]

Just think. In the time it takes to learn and execute RNG manipulation, you could just learn how to inject.

[@LunarWingCloud]

You can also use the Feather items for 1 EV each. Not sure how long it would take to farm them if you hypothetically had 0 to begin with, but I found it not too difficult in normal gameplay to have a bunch

[@TheGoldenBoot-cz1do]

Ev training isn't even hard the power items make it easy. The feathers would be even slower imo

[@stonalisa3729]

@@TheGoldenBoot-cz1do you need the feathers for specific numbers in VGC. They usually don’t Min max in doubles. Evs serve a purpose.

[@TheGoldenBoot-cz1do]

@Stona Lisa yeah ik, you can get specific amounts without them tho. Your ev spread on each should always be divisible by 4 so

[@EJPBDK]

That whole conversation in the video made me realize how similar are RNG manipulation in video games to counting cards In Blackjack. Both are general exploits present in the games themselves, and both are discouraged by their hosts (videogame companies and casinos) for providing an unfair advantage, when it's the game themselves that have such flaws present, and therefore since there's no external influence involved (like doping in sports), they are virtually legal.

[@OMalleyTheMaggot]

>no external influence involved Oh, so can you RNG manipulate with nothing but your switch and no third party programs? You can't. Embrace cheating. Grinding is super ghey.

[@EJPBDK]

@@OMalleyTheMaggot technically yes, but it's next to imposible. Even if someone has the knowledge and reflexes to actually pull it off, it still is one of the most difficult things to do. Also, to clarify (which I didn't do, my mistake) the third party programs I was talking about were the R4 cartridges, GameShark codes and the like.

[@segafreak2000]

Yeah no, I think even 29 hours is still way too much. Depending on how busy your schedule is, that might still take you a while to get ready. As long as everything is legal, I don't mind cheated teams at all - only drawing the line at stuff that isn't available legitimately in the games. We don't have infinite time, and 29h is enough to get a lot of other stuff done (not to mention that this is rather streamlined, for the average player it's gonna be even longer than this).

[@TheAceOfSpades8877]

Absolutely, if a competitive magic the gathering, yugioh, or some other card game player can order the cards they need online people aren’t going to say that it’s unfair for them to use them because they still have to have the skill to design a good deck and the know-how to use it, so why would we vilify people who do essentially that in pokemon

[@Gazoney]

Agreed, we have to keep in mind that some people don't really have the freedom to put in much more than 1 hour a day, meaning with 0 mistakes that's going to take this person a whole month just to get a single team, not to mention needing the time to practice and also trying to keep up with the ever shifting meta of VGC. I also think the scope is backwards because people are seeing this and thinking "oh wow it used to take 85 hours, it's so much better now that it only takes 29 hours", when really it just shows that it's not good now and was just unbearably bad in the past, especially since mistakes were not as forgiving as they are now.

[@TheDarcaneify]

@@TheAceOfSpades8877 Becous in CARDGAMES, its about that, having the Cards, but the Pokemon Games are about CATCHING the Pokemon and TRAINING them, so... Geting them from Thin Air somehow is against the intend the game has. And little Fun Fact: YGO Players Cryed for what, half a Year that Broken Tournament Price cards Like Crush cards should be banned becous the average player couldnt use them. And thats in my Eyes the Same then Cheating the Pokemon.

[@TheAceOfSpades8877]

@@TheDarcaneify Competitive pokemon has nothing requiring you to catch them or train them, if somebody else gives them to you they’re still allowed to be used in tournaments, because in the end what it’s about is the strategy not catching and training. People asking for cards to be banned because they are completely inaccessible to people who are not in the top tiers of play is completely legitimate. What we’re talking about here is cards that you literally cannot get without winning a tournament but are still legal for some reason vs generating Pokémon, which anybody can do very inexpensively and it isn’t the same at all

[@415east]

@@Gazoneythen worry about creating freedom in your life and not cheating on pokemon

[@jooje2]

I was surprised you said hacking is unacceptable if it takes 29 hours. I did win $500 ($350 post-tax) playing SwSh VGC tournaments. I used 2 hacked max IV dittos, one max speed one min speed. I had also spent a few weeks wonder trading for most HAs cutting my team training time to about 6 hours, 1 hour once I had accumulated BP via online tournaments. However I did have to resume hacking after Crown Tundra DLC was released. If even 1 Pokémon required an unobtainable HA that would be 10 hours of grinding Dynamax Adventures. They also made the game pay to win, with those having 2 copies of the game able to obtain both exclusive Pokémon, so I had to hack myself a Spectrier too. I also want to note that the start of the Sword and Shield VGC metagame had monthly rotating formats. You required a new team every month, and when Hidden Ability Incinerator was shadowdropped during bank every team in existence suddenly became obsolete. 29 hours once off would be ok, but having to repeat that over and over, once every 2-4 weeks is a bit much.

[@andresraffler]

I don't like how gamefreak's philosophy is "Baby game first, competitive game last"

[@jackread2544]

Looking back on sword and shield after scarlet and violet came out makes you appreciate how fast you can train a team up in the newest gen. Getting money isn’t too hard, almost all the items can be purchased and because you can farm money easily you can just buy vitamins to ev train. Bottle caps are pretty easy to get from raids and the ability to craft tms is nice too. After afk money grinding it probably takes less than 10 hours to make a full team. Still not ideal but way better than every other game. Rental codes also make using teams super accessible.

[@xdxangeloxbx]

It's still too much time/too many hours. Other games outside of pokemon allow you to play competitively immediately. With Pokemon you have to EV train, improve IVs and grind for items which are important to have. You can't just jump in and play the game. You will just be at a disadvantage if you don't do all the above (God forbid if the team you crafted is bad or just doesn't work out, restart everything). It's so much unnecessary wasted time.

[@superhoodie14]

I think a step game freak can take in regards to pp increasing items is make one called PP All and make it boost every move to the max. Outside of that they could automatically set an entire teams moves to the max possible points by default when battling online.

[@TwilightMistress]

Or they can just delete every PP related item and put the PPs to the max by base

[@spencerdennis3148]

That ending convo could be its own video. Glad I hung on until the end to see that part

[@stevkong]

'I'm going to build this entire team the way game freak deems acceptable' ... proceeds to RNG manip

[@troydurham4411]

Forreal, dude is RNG manipulating and getting his viewers to host raids for him while also abusing day skip glitches to get good IV Dittos

[@Ephra_wangai]

And he still only gets it down to 30 hrs, gamefreak is afraid to just let us build a team. Like they don't even have to let us have free reign before end of story. Like we can deal with a good system being locked to post-game but they won't even do that.

[@johnmadden6521]

rng manip is legal brother

[@gerrynava981]

Rng is legal lol

[@TheTundraTerror]

Literally all RNG manipulation does is save time and keeps you from wearing out your power button.

[@verrine_s]

Really enjoyed the video and loved the perspectives shown. I was really surprised by the perspective that external battle simulators could be seen as cheating. As for me for many competitive games simulators are often the only reliable way to gain competition or access to the game due to budget or access to other people who play the game. Think chess, I never owned a chess board but that has never stopped me from finding a passion in the game and developing in it. If Pokemon did not have a battle simulator I would find it hard to even judge if I wanted to buy the game an invest in the online subscriptions to play within it. I think they make things more accessible to all players, not just "illegitimate ones" as your requirements are just a device that can load the web page.

[@hmaster0973]

As someone who is just starting to get into VGC EV training, and getting items feel so tedious, I always feel like why the fuck am I so much time into this, I could be improving my combos in Smash, Guilty Gear. You have tools to check the everything of a Pokémon immediately after catching it, those of us without said resource have to jump to hoops to do so.

[@sock-]

I really just wish they made competitive more like showdown. I really love playing the game competitively but I don’t have the time or patience to teambuild like this in a main game. They’ve made tons of improvements in swsh but it still has been such a barrier for me, where I end up either just playing showdown or I rent a team to play ranked battles which is just really disappointing. Even if Pokémon went down the radical red route of team building (you can buy iv’s) that alone would make the game so much more fun and less grindy for me personally.

[@jackghoststone5055]

Now imagine doing this again every time they change the rules. Reminder, they did this 13 times this year

[@aprinnyonbreak1290]

Oh, shit, did the meta shift and a different egg move is now mandatory?

[@furiouscorgi6614]

​@@aprinnyonbreak1290no, oh shit, half your team is outclassed of power diffed

[@nathans6872]

Thank you for this! Which I know our opinions differ on this topic rather greatly, but really can't say enough how much I appreciate you giving visibility to this. That said I do want to talk about my opinion on the topic as someone who has played VGC for over a decade now. I do think the advantage of being able to acquire teams through genning is a bit overrated. Though it is mainly thanks to tools like pokemon showdown that this is the case. With how breeding works in swsh, youre both able to get teams in a reasonable amount of time and fulfill most of the effort with very little mental math required or tracking to make sure you have all the small things right. Which to an extent that even when you're breeding you have more than enough ability to be practicing simultaneously. To say it simply not doing so is just being lazy is true, but saying theres a big difference in ability is absolutely not true (frankly I think the Japanese playerbase is a good example of this since practically all play fully legit there, and they are constantly at the forefront of competitive) though admittedly im a bit different on this cause ive got legit mons gen 5-7 without knowledge or really any glitches to make it faster at all, and especially gen 5 I would end up playing events at a legitimate competitive disadvantage, as I'd constantly play with incorrect sets. (i started learning how stuff works more through tools like super training added in gen 6, and really just increased visibility of comp features which would culminate in a lot better performances at the National, and Regional levels.) Though when it comes to gen 8 I think what makes hacking so much more prevalent, and frankly why I view it to be reasonable is, because breeding has evolved to the point where any semblance of an advantage you could get from hacking is very muted, and honestly close to nonexistent not to mention trade bots making hacking so effortless certainly has been a big factor. (also small thing, but youd be surprised how some people go into events with 0 prep with a team, and still have really good placements. Though ofc theyre a minority just funny to bring up, especially cause it is a bit ironic cause most of those people are people who use genning.) TLDR the biggest advantage is friends, and understanding how the game works. Not in game team construction. Don't fear VGC!

[@nathans6872]

Also that was a lot more long winded than I wouldve wanted lol. Just wanted to say I dont think VGC is something anyone should fear doing anymore, and to everyone give it a shot in scarlet and violet it is just really fun, and a completely unique experience!

[@NinthSettler]

To me, there's no issue as long as the pokemon are obtainable in an identical state through gameplay, regardless of how much grinding is required. I don't think it's cheating if the only tradeoff is how much grinding you want to submit yourself to.

[@imablisy]

I think the issue is there is a big advantage via time saving.

[@SyphistPrime]

One thing this didn't account for is some people loved to grind raids and hoard items. I personally did this with my copy of Sword so building a VGC team was trivial. Saying this is a worst case scenario though is correct imo. And the fact that it beats the best case scenarios from older gens is a true testament to what GF has done to make competitive even more accessible.

[@fasimba1]

This is a big nope for me - Between work and life, I have like 1 hour at most per day, and not everyday, so I won't waste my life doing allll of that, when I can just hack the pokemon, perform 3 clicks tip tap, clink clunk clank and done, competitive pokemon ready

[@yuumijungle548]

the thing is tho: not everyone is actually playing the game competetively, most people just enjoy playing through the story and doing silly challenges like nutzlocke or 1 pokemon only runs, i just wish that they would focus more on something like bringing back the battle frontier that we had in emerald, i enjoy actually playing the games if they are done right, in my opinion the focus has turned into the wrong direction, right now the mentality seems to be: the less time the consumer spends on actually playing the games, the better, just because of competetive players existing, im all for anti cheat, but it needs to be completely seperated from the actual games to not hurt the experience for the majority of players, basically like the dude suggested, whoever they are.

[@rpgfanatic9719]

While not having the battle frontier, the 3DS era of Pokemon had plenty of mini games and other detailed features. Gen 6's ORAS had contests, the secret bases returned with insane customization, there's also amie. In USUM, we got mantine surf, worm hole ride, refresh, and scouting in the battle tree. For online, there's also more ways to express your character because of battle styles. Most competitive games I've seen don't even offer half as many features as one of these games, and other rpgs in terms of extras are just super dungeons, super bosses with one or 2 mini games between all of it and they're not not even remotely long lasting as Pokemon's are. Look at shin megami tensei, the game that inspired the Pokemon series, it just doesn't even try anymore, there's literally nothing to do in all of these games but run around and recruit monsters in bleak environments, it's a complete joke. SMT 4 had nothing, 5 has even less than 4 does, SMT 3 just had puzzle boy, lmao.

[@serpentmaster1323]

My perspective! In gen 5 I have more hours on the battle subway than I do in any other aspect of that game. I fell in love with the game back then, As someone who found out about competitive Pokémon and making optimal teams in gen 6, I loved theory crafting teams and playing them at the battle mansion. I spent a lot of time crafting teams in terms of synergy, but never made optimal Pokémon. The first time I ever tried breeding for perfect IVs was in gen 7 with Maggie and Mancer. Those where the only two I ever tried it on but I had just so many points from battling at the tree the time such that the breeding was the hassle, and nothing else(its worth mentioning I didn’t PP max them completely, but my policy on pp maxing is this if a move has less than 10pp then I start to care). In gen 8 I tried the battle tower, and beat it in singles and doubles(without legends), but it somehow felt so much harder than it used to, and less fun that I didn’t play it nearly as much as I did the DS or 3DS. Of corse, another factor is I have less time to play games nowadays. So I tried breeding perfect Pokémon again, but I didn’t commit, and never finished a team. So the point of this? If your goal is to get a perfect team before you hit online then the grind is a grind. But, If you play the battle tower for love of the game, the way I had with the subway, Then it’s possible you’ve already done a lot of the grind before you start to breed for online. And If you’re like me, and you use those perfect Pokémon to do the tower again, then you have more points for the next time. So I think it’s supposed to be a gameplay cycle. So, I feel like there are two different new player perspectives, and that you’re playing like one, but game freak designed it for the other. Someone who fell in love with the game they bought, or felt like being creative and not spamming overpowered doggo and fought many times to get confident in their knowledge against npcs before hitting online and therefore already did the grind. While you’re looking in from someone who is already confident in their abilities because they’ve been killing it on Pokémon showdown and now they want to translate their success to be seen in the official medium. While I think that more people fall into this second category and ergo it makes complete sense and is meaningful to be annoyed that the game doesn’t accommodate this type of beginner, I think it should be said somewhere that most people in that first category are gamefreak’s target audience: kids. And if gamefreak wanted to design a system that would translate their players into vgc, I don’t think it doesn’t make sense for them to focus on their target audience and majority customer. They have Junior and senior divisions for a reason. Getting those points that we call grinding is part of a gameplay loop that is not built for you, and that you’re not engaging with. Adding an option that allows knowledgeable players to break the loop without having the naïve players fall out of the loop, might be tricky? (They should have tried tho) I also think that grinding for that long is dumb, and I will never not think that, and I also believe that it’s possible for gamefreak to focus on one audience without screwing over the other. But it’s also at least somewhat difficult.

[@Shin3y]

I love swsh from a competitive (VGC) standpoint, because it’s super easy to make teams, and the meta has managed to stay fun throughout. For singles the meta has been really bad in my opinion but team building is the best it’s ever been, these videos really show that. I hope gamefreak continues on the right path they’re going, competitive and gameplay wise alike.

[@tamtamvgc7824]

Interesting video. Like a few other commenters, I'm also a VGC player, so I'd like to offer a perspective that I think hasn't been discussed a lot: The vast majority VGC players will mess around with little bits and pieces of their teams in the days leading up to a tournament. It can be things like trying out very slightly different EV spreads to changing an entire mon. Many players will have several whole teams they're deciding between for a tournament, even. Because of this, they tend to delay actually creating the team in-game for as long as possible to ensure they don't end up wasting their time on Pokémon they don't even end up using. That's valuable time that could be spent on getting in actual games! Yeah, it's procrastination, but I'd argue it's procrastination with at least some reasoning behind it. So when obtaining their mons, many players only give themselves 1-2 days (if that) leading up to a tour to do it all. In that time, they have to handle their studies/job, any other life situations that arise, planning the trip to the tournament (often in a different country or state), and getting in competitive prep (ladder games and whatnot) before finally getting the team ready in-game. The fact that it's the "final step" in the tour prep process makes a big difference. Is it possible to do it legit in that amount of time? Yes, of course. Is it stressful? Also yes. (And, speaking from personal experience, it often comes at the expense of my sleep schedule...)

[@Villain_Killin_Dylan]

'Having a life but wanting to compete and have fun in a game is PATHETIC'

[@nuehoujuu7503]

The moment I learned I needed 50 shards in Scarlet and Violet to change just one of my Pokemon's Tera types and how much I'd need to grind to get that... Yeah, GF still hasn't done enough for me to not resort to hacking in the items I need to get the team I want. Why can't they make getting competitive Pokemon easier in the post game? Make the vitamins and Bottlecaps cheaper, make ability capsules and patches easier to get, make all these items you need for them easier and not so expensive to get. As long as things remain as is, I'm still not gonna feel bad about hacking in the items that I need.

[@MajinEvelyn]

29 hours is a reasonable amount of time to build ONE VERSION of a team??? Yeah it's faster than it used to be but wow gamefreak has really set a low bar for y'all. I completely agree with the guy you interviewed that there is no reason for there not to be a functional in game showdown for pvp specifically, completely divorced from the rest of the game

[@AndrewH1994]

absolutely agree with you! something in the post game, divorced from the rest of the game, and makes it easy to change a set on a pokemon, have multiple teams, and change items freely would be ideal for online competitive, and gives a fair playing ground for anyone who wants to play competitively

[@MajinEvelyn]

@@AndrewH1994 the sad part is this has been the obvious solution for several generations and they just do this instead. Oh wow, so cool! At least it only takes a work week of my own free time of pointless, skill-less grinding instead of 800 hours 😮‍💨

[@jonathanlanglois2742]

You make it sound easy, but the reality is that there's a very high density of knowledge here. It takes a lot of time to research all of this. The vast majority of that isn't explained in the game, and indeed, the game does not expose you to the judge feature until you are at the end of it. RNG manipulation is definitely getting into the weeds and not something that most players would know how to do. There's also the elephant in the room, one of the reasons why hacking is so prevalent in this game. There's a heck of a lot of event only pokemon which are not accessible through normal gameplay that peoples want to have fun with. If you missed that event, you are out of luck. Once somebody learns how to do that, it isn't all that big of a leap to just hack in the rest of what they need to get straight to the multiplayer battles. Gamefreak needs to stop theses stupid events. They need to make theses pokemon accessible through the normal gameplay loop.

[@rttrtt1374]

event pokemon is the most stupid idea ever

[@luigiff3431]

Game freak and the pokemon company aren't willing to make a complete games these days, much less actually care about cheating at the competitive side

[@jonathangubbrud8748]

As someone who has been playing VGC for a while now while also being a shiny hunter, I couldn’t care less about having hacked mons as long as they ARE NOT shiny. Knowing that somebody can just hack in a shiny mon feels so cheap when I had to grind forever to find mine just to show them off in a competitive battle. Shiny hunting is like collecting to me so legitness matters.

[@imablisy]

this is so stupid LOL

[@jonathangubbrud8748]

@@imablisy my comment is stupid?

[@imablisy]

@@jonathangubbrud8748 yes

[@jonathangubbrud8748]

@@imablisy care to explain?

[@jonathangubbrud8748]

@@imablisy like let me be clear I think there’s no reason to hack in the first place and I don’t. I wouldn’t judge someone who does, but I just think it ruins the value of shiny Pokémon.

[@beatsbyadmiralz5915]

Was preparing for terrible takes when this video suddently get recommended to me and boy I didn’t get disappointed Who wants to spend 29 hours to build a team only to realize that it’s not good afterwards and start the whole process again? If you’re actually having fun with that much grinding, fair enough, but don’t go around critizising players for not wanting to go through all that grinding, especially when hacking literally gives you 0 benefits compared to the grinding except for saving time

[@imablisy]

Someone didn’t watch the video!!! Especially the whole section at the end where it could be better! If you agree to the rules, you agree to not hack. It’s pretty simple. You gain a definite advantage over players who do not hack out of adherence to the rules. Sword and shields team building is acceptable enough where you probably shouldn’t be cheating. Should it be better? Of course. Of course it should.

[@wwbcwp]

I don't see the distinction between rng, bug exploits, and editing savefiles.

[@imablisy]

Ur stupid then

[@Flamingsitar]

There is none, anyone willing to use bug exploits and RNG manipulation but not genning is just looking to vindicate spending vast amounts of time by ripping down other people who either don’t have that time available to spend or value their time differently. It’s a problem very common with most neckbeard communities, of which Pokémon is full of.

[@UtsuhoTheSun]

The Kaphotics part was really interesting. Imo, SwSh definitively made most of the things already simple enough (if you don't start from 0 and use glitches, you can do the VGC team in such a super short time, legit a few hours) that you don't need a ingame built simulator just... make online battle make you swim in bp and be able to buy most of what is needed in it in a few battle. However, there is few changes they really need to do to finish up. 0) God sake, juste make iv/ev more readable ingame with actual values... 1) It is more of a personnal issue, but I would like that mints change the nature of the pokémon, it is cleaner to see it in storage and all. 2) the ability patch need to have its price crashed... it probably will, since the ability capsule did it after the gen which it was introduced. 3) Ability patch should be able to return you out of hidden ability, just for the sake of it. 4) We need a rusty cap to drop iv to 0, even, we would need fragment of caps to increase/decrease by one 5) PP should be automatically be at max in pvp (or I miss a reason why you won't want it maxxed?). Farming pp is just one of the most annoying things ever. 6) QoL added recently, like cheaper vitamines, cram-o-matics (or anything to get these rares items easily), aromats farm from Legends Arceus, ev reset need to stay and be here immediatly in game and not in dlc. 7) After 3 years of SwSh... they kinda need to keep timeskip glitch? Or a way to easily do what we did with it... Have fun getting a Delibird raid without time skip for exemple.

[@KamonXV]

Question: how much of this would still be possible without the DLC? Because while past gens were a huge time sync you weren't locked behind a $60 paywall to play competitive at a high level. most of what you would need would theoretically be on 1 game or the active trading community at the time would help with version exclusives

[@imablisy]

I mean none of it. Calyrex wouldn't be obtainable lol.

[@KamonXV]

@@imablisy Oh right that I forgot about lol

[@tachi4808]

Speaking as someone who regularly bred Pokemon throughout all of SwSh, I do think a lot of people in the comments are overestimating how that 30 hour mark looks like Generally speaking, after you set up all the Dittoes and buy the items, the process of making a new Pokemon takes about an hour at max. Delibird Raids do give you extra money, and if you're willing to go through multiple days/timeskip, you can use PokeJobs to skip the Vitamins. Combined with the stock of EXP Candies and TRs you likely have by then, this means you can fully optimize a Pokemon the moment the perfect IV'd Egg hatches. Breeding and optimizing Pokemon gets easier the longer you play the game for. And while the initial 30 hour period might take a while to get set up, I do think the expectation that you shouldn't have to spend any time at all to get the Pokemon you want to use is a bit of an entitled POV

[@imablisy]

Yeah I agree. Grooky and Litten both took under an hour to breed for lol.

[@senjutsumode962]

its my video and im allowing it made my day great content you're a real pkmn master

[@chipsdonut1]

Man I love that thumbnail the glasses anime thing always gets me lol

[@withoutfeartheman7539]

To be fair playing VGC and competing in big event such as Worlds is already a full-time job, with or without hacking. Watch Wolfey's latest video about his journey to Worlds and you will see what i mean. For a competitive player, the time spent on learning the meta, team building and practicing takes a lot more time than building a team in-game with a given paste. If you know someone who hacks, cut them some slacks, because team building alone is already superduper time-consuming. Beside, hacking doesn't give people any in-game advantage.

[@withoutfeartheman7539]

Not to mention the RNG manip. Not every competitive player have the time to learn how to perform them! Learning the meta is already difficult as you have to watch every event to get a good grasp of what people are using. Without Raid RNG manip, it's near impossible to get, say a 0 speed 0 atk hatterene or something similar. 6 IV ditto alone is already challenging without it. It's true that SWSH has made some massive improvements but they aren't enough! Don't blame the players blame the game. It's not cool to label people as pathetic that way.

[@Triqkshot]

There’s absolutely zero difference integrity wise between RNG manipulation and spawning pokemon using hacks. RNG manipulation itself is nothing but using math to bypass the game, which is exactly what hacks are meant to do. The only difference is you use math for one and a program created from math for the other.

[@redskeith4737]

I feel I've gotten really lucky with 0 IVs I typically have random 0 speed iv pokémon I can chain breed down to unrelated egg group pokémon

[@erickozfkay458]

Neat to see the evolution of making competitive teams with these videos, especially from the developers adding things over time to make it a bit easier

[@jitox]

I mean i like your videos. I hope the approach and the hate for "illegal hacking" (quotes cause is perfectly legal, nintendo allows it and it doesnt change competitive results if the pokemon have legal stats) is just for clickbait and content. But i like that those who want to have their pokemon all legal can see how to do it. Ive had thousands of hours of legal breeding and now im just over it, but still. It bogles my mind that for worlds players dont take a legal team (you can even hack the abilty capsules and the items neccesary). Another good point to include is that even if you want a 100% legal team, you should consider getting a full iv ditto just to get eggs more easily. Btw you should do some follow up video to show the time it takes when you have everything alredy set up (like for example i took a random mewtwo from x/y to competitive standard in like 20 mins just by hyper training , mint, abilty patch and vitamins)

[@imablisy]

Yes I’m click baiting of course lol. If I wasn’t I’d be flaming people or something. I never even bring up edus one illegal mon

[@themidnightaristocrat]

"Analyse what gamefreak thought was acceptable" *Proceeds to day skip crypto ubermega manip an unholy Ditto*

[@enjoyerofcake2123]

Great video as always, I love seeing the teams get put together like this through the game mechanics because nobody really does it. I disagree on your end take though. Why are glitches like time-skip and duplication allowed but cheated pokemon frowned upon? It seems like an arbitrary line, but I will admit there is a noted difference between shoddy code and 3rd party tools. I would've preferred you going all out on glitches this time though, to really hammer the best case scenario without 3rd party tools. Assuming a luckier run would take around 20 hours to put a team of six together, it doesn't even take into consideration the idea of testing the team and getting familiar, rule changes, or meta changes. You took a finalized and intricately finished team comp and just built it in-game. Of course if use of Showdown is to be assumed and promoted, then the idea is just doing this once before the tournament with the team you're confident in. Which is perfectly fine in that case to not account for it. But 20 hours (after beating the game no less as seen on your run here) is still a massive time sink with the added time of the research you did in your preparation. The research needed makes these videos even more impressive, but in turn it makes the idea that each competitor do this simply ridiculous.

[@imablisy]

Because glitches are accessible to everyone where hacks arentb

[@nattalete]

My idea to improve bottle caps: " What I think would be better than a bottle cap as it is now is one where you'd choose what the IV is when the bottle cap is used. Maybe how it would work would be the Super Trainer asks, "how many marks do you want on your bottle cap?", and then, that number of marks, 0-31, determines the IV. "

[@nattalete]

Alternatively, there can be 3 kinds of bottle caps: 1 for 31 IVs, 1 for 0 IVs, and 1 for custom IVs from 1 to 30.

[@FinalShadowZX]

Seeing improvement is really good for everyone, but Also, I still get why people use PkHex. 20+ hours ain't bad, but those people are trying to understand their team ASAP, if one Pokémon doesn't work really well, they have to go back to the drawing board and spend a few minutes to hours to check what's wrong. Instead of doing that, they go to PkHex and that's it, start learning again (And that's really huge advantage) Possible Spoilers from SV. We need to take this leak info with a grain of Salt, but the DLC will contain a PkHex type mechanic. So training Pokémon will get easier, with a price, but easy nonetheless.

[@imablisy]

Yeah the big issue is showdown is probably not a good enough testing ladder for vgc

[@06twar]

With scarlet and violet out I think they did fix a lot, ability patches are still a bit tricky to get but now it's even easier to build Shiny teams to battle online with, I still think a pokemon showdown is needed though. With no in-game testing thing outside the ranked ladder, having a place you can test teams would be nice.

[@HahaHaha-gy2xe]

Ain’t nobody got 20 hours to spare for 1 team

[@netdeath]

okay, in my opinion there should be a sandbox mode and that should be what is used for official tournament play. this will make cheating almost irrelevant in the competitive scene. also, we have to take into account that this game is an RPG on top of being competitive, and it really shouldn't be warped around a small percentage of the playerbase. i agree, competitive needs to be as accessible as possible, and GF should follow in the steps of modern competitive games.

[@GordKeen]

I think it still needs to be faster. Shouldn't need to be level 100 for hyper training and reduce the cost of vitamins by a significant amount. I don't mind some grinding, but without day skip glitch or holding delibird hostage, getting money is a nightmare imo.

[@imablisy]

I agree

[@dislexyc]

>Spend 29 hours >Team Sucks >Start over

[@griffin8762]

VGC: NOOOOO DONT HACK!!!! PLS ITS CHEATING!!! smogon: honestly why even play on console lmfao

[@imablisy]

These videos would be so much more fucked if I had to get a clefable from gen 3 every god damn time lol

[@randomguy6415]

Good why cheat to play the same format like vgc on a 18 to 30 hours needed grind for a team when you can have a team in less than 30 minutes on showdown where the meta just advances faster because even if we have less players playing competitively is way easier to get in and also improve or change a team member you only use the original game for a real life tournament the day where competitive players will cry of happiness is when showdown is implemented in the game and used for oficial tournaments and i will be happy too because finally it is worth it buying a game for competitive play because of the extra stuff you get with it

[@munchrai6396]

@@randomguy6415 The big advantage of Showdown over in-game play is its lack of any barriers to entry. Even genning still requires some previous outside knowledge of the software you're using to mod your system. Mind you, I am a little hesitant when it comes to an in-game simulator because there are a lot more natural ways to unmask the mysteries of Competitive Pokemon than a simple stat slider. Maybe some sort of minigame like a more efficient Super Training would work, but I don't mind too much either way. At the very least, I won't have to deal with dumb choices like banning King's Rock in the generation where Beat Up became a TM.

[@aprinnyonbreak1290]

@@munchrai6396 Showdown even helps new players by the way they sort moves and items. New player thinks goddamn Absorb Bulb, Incinerate Camerupt sounds like a good idea, Showdown throws that shit at the bottom of the "you are beyond help, my child" pit. Imagine spending 30 hours to learn that Rock Polish, Absorb Bulb Camerupt is a bad idea, then hearing somebody say "Yeah, that was a low tier, using things Showdown said were ass, so I didn't bother, how'd it go?"

[@munchrai6396]

@@aprinnyonbreak1290 I do like how they categorize that sort of stuff as USUALLY useless because you do often find moves such as Bug Bite on Technician Pokemon or Beat Up on fast Dark types in said section, despite the fact that they can be quite useful on said Pokemon

[@abdelali9279]

TBH, I think hacked mons are okay first, they are inside the realm of possibility and second, you don't go preaching you are a dedicated trainer. And yes, that's why I find a RPG as an esport because these games favour grinding, in action games (unless it's a freemium game) you have all characters and items you need (maybe there would be new ones added but all you need is to get the battle pass and they unlock), and each match is completely separated from the next, it's the skill and gamesense of the individual that makes the difference. But with Pokemon, it's not a matter of going to the Pokedex, choose some mons and going into casual battles to see if they are worthy or not, I mean even the most legit players are most likely play testing showdown, then once they nail a team, they build it in the game, so nothing is this 100% legit I am using just what the official devs made, so that's why I think, that TPCi or whoever is in charge of managing VGC doesn't crack all that much because in the end what matter is skill, strategy and synergy, if someone is using some hack to mess up with their opponent and basically like "seeing the cards on their hand" or they have mons with impossible stats, then screw them, if not, let them be. That's why I believe we should have a dedicated Pokemon Stadium game, let people just build a team, test it in quickplay and then once they nail their team, go into ranked, and hell they can even like make it a paid addon for players, you either finish 100% the game and unlock it or pay upfront to just play rank and forget about the story mode, sorta like GTA Online operates, it's a part of the whole GTA V package, or it can be its own thing purchased separatedly completely apart of story mode, just like the hacker guy said, but there has to be a way for competetive focused players to just get their teams without the tedium of RPG story mode grinding and then (in a hopeful way) there won't be any valid excuses to do any kind of hacking at all.

[@ediblemandibles]

Disagree. SwSh is the best we've had for competitive team building, but there are a lot of desirable moves on Pokémon that aren't learnable in SwSh; such as Knock Off on Weavile. So you're forced to spend a fair bit of additional time transferring up from a previous generation or, in a worst-case scenario, you're forced to forgo the move entirely. There's also no way to set an IV for a Pokémon to 0; which can be important for Speed and Attack. Meaning you're playing the Breeding lotto unless you have a Ditto with an IV of 0 in a specific stat. We're pretty much just having every relevant move being learnable and Red Bottle Caps away from hacking being "pathetic" and, even then, hacking saves so much time with team-building and testing (unless you test solely on Showdown) that it's not really that big of a deal.

[@imablisy]

Your first point is meaningless. They balance for VGC, so removing Knock off from Weavile was an intentional nerf to that format. How difficult it is to build for and play the fan made metagame is not a design decision I can critique gamefreak for.

[@leonseuropeanislandadventu7398]

L

[@CameronsVideo]

When Wolfe made that video talking about how he didn't even finalize his team with his friends until they were already in Japan for World's it was hilarious to me how he didn't bring up you could only procrastinate selling on a team to that point if you planned to use hacks to make your teams.

[@peekay120]

Honestly, I think that people genning pokemon for competetive play is a non-issue. as long as the pokemon are 100% legal, who cares whether you made a team legit and your opponent didnt, at the end of the day, its still a level playing field, and the better player with the better team will come out on top. To me, it just sounds like gatekeeping. The availability of genning means that way more people get into competetive battling than if such things didnt exist, which should be a good thing, and people who begin their competetive journey by genning, might end up doing it "legit" in future because they enjoy competetive. The whole genning debate is really just so stupid, and in my opinion, the people that i see that are the most vocally against it, tend to be bad faith actors anyway.

[@j_kilowatt_2181]

One thing to consider is that if you finish a month in masterball rank you get a ton of BP, armorite ore, dynite ore, bottle caps, and gold bottle caps, so you rarely ever have to grind for those once you’ve made it to masterball rank. And it definitely doesn’t take a perfect team to make it to masterball.

[@imablisy]

yeah getting to masterball isn't that hard, but I don't really know how in the scope of the challenge it was, so I just avoided it.

[@j_kilowatt_2181]

@@imablisy Yeah, I think the video is great how it is. I was just adding that once you’ve made it to masterball, it’s even faster. Keep up the great content!

[@-AveryRust-]

Apparently there is a leak from Khu that which states that there will be now a pkhex like system in Scarlet and Violet, which will be used in competitive only iirc, so I guess gamefreak is finally taking stance to help competitive players with team building. I love your videos since they show so much new information (at least for non competitive players like myself) and how hard it usually is for players who want good teams. Not to mention how entertaining they are! I agree with your stance on how RNG isn't cheating, because if not RNG, I am sure most of such teams wouldn't be made lol. It takes YEARS to get a LEGIT perfect pokemon. Anywho, I hope gen 9 has more good upgrades for competitive play!

[@imablisy]

Very cool. Hope that’s the case

[@-AveryRust-]

@@imablisy Khu's a very reliable leaker so I can easily say it's true

[@imablisy]

@@-AveryRust- the reason I have doubts is they’ve shown talking about obtaining rare Pokémon and farming for tms. My thoughts are the ingame showdown is probably only for like online Pokémon matches or something

[@AndrewDevourer]

I don't really trust khu. He is so vague at times that I think a lot of things he has gotten "correct" is just people filling in the blanks after the fact to prove instead of khu actually being an insider.

[@-AveryRust-]

@@AndrewDevourer I guess that's true too. Never thought of it this way, but I guess you're right lol. Still the pkhex has been sort confirmed by other leakers, so all I oughta do is hope they're honest lol

[@Bailey-yt1jl]

9:53 "first i put a litten in the ditto" fucking gold. i dont know how i missed that watching it before

[@Duffy_SSBM]

Love how these videos are supposed to be from the perspective of a player just getting into VGC, but after watching them I know that if I ever DO get into VGC I will go straight to hacking because it seems way easier to learn than all this RNG manipulation

[@tearzofthefallen6586]

Any amount of time spent making team that could be spent beating another game with some side content is too much. Making a team should take about 2 hours. They really need to encourage it. Besides making ateam externally and importing it shouldnt matter if the stats are all legit. The end result is the same, so in execution is doesnt matter. Its the principle that someone could make your team in 1/100th of the time. I dont play competitive anymore. Stopped doing it seriously after gen 5. But I was there back in the day with gen 3-5. As a new comer I spent 50-100 hours making trash teams each time. I even banned pokesav on my yt page ( anyone old enough to remember when pokemon players on yt had their ruleset in their channel description?). During gen 5 I gave it a shot because I didnt have the time for it anymore, and I realized that I saved hundreds of hours making unviable teams through experimentation by just making them quickly. Sure its better now, but if you wanna make a team and it takes 3-4 iterations thats still 90-120 hours if its a completely new team. You could beat the entire Mass Effect trilogy in the same time. So, its still too much.

[@MikeyNissan]

Found your channel recently and been enjoying your content a lot (except for glitch videos). Pokémon is easy at first look, but the more you get into competitive, the more you discover the true difficulty of the game. I like it about Pokémon and I accept it. You don’t have to create your competitive team in one session, and you don’t need your mons to be shiny at all. But if you want your team, the way you want it, put in the work and grind. That’s what makes everything even more rewarding for me. Keep up the good work, I would love to see more vids like this.

[@LordVex47]

If you could have made it legally, and you're saving time...that speaks more about how Nintendo needs to make training/EV'ing/IV'ING/egg-moving/etc. More accessible and less time absorbing.

[@lionheart4424]

On the topic of Gen8, I would love if you try to replicate that Wolfe team that featured a Galarian Moltres with a Mark (which he swears is legit without having caught it himself). Thanks for making this video. I honestly feel very lucky for starting VGC in Gen8. I spent over 999 hours doing raids and shiny hunting, so I had plenty of resources for when I entered ranked battles. But since I had so many mons I wanted to try, I built so many teams and resources burnt FAST. I do hope that with upcoming titles time is shortened further, specially since they realize that VGC is becoming more popular.

[@xExotic]

Yikes. I can’t imagine how frustrating and annoying this would be without any RNG manipulation, just playing super casually

[@Blitzbrie]

These pokemon purists are on a whole other level. I've legit seen people like verlisify compare hacking pokemon to aimbots, which is just funny. Unlike aimbots, people who gen their mons do not have any actual advantage over those who build from scratch considering the battles are always on a level playing field when you're following a certain ruleset. Like, let people do whatever they want, who fuckin cares. Such a weird thing to care so much about. A lot of us don't have 30 hours to spend building a team. I still enjoy competitive pokemon, especially on console, so I don't see why it matters as long as the pokemon are legal.

[@mortsaidmort]

Love the video, small note of constructive feedback: the voice scrambler used for the interview with Kaphotics seemed to be randomly balanced, a la his voice moved around the "room" in a way that felt fatiguing to me. A possible fix would be to take the scrambler output and convert it to mono audio so that the origin of the voice didn't move around so much. Just my two cents. Love your content and especially enjoyed the interview with Kaphotics at the end, it's nice to have some level-headed perspective and context on the spectrum of playing vanilla v glitching v hacking

[@robertoalexandermendezmore408]

RNG manipulation is certainly not cheating, but it is not accessible to players either, it is a lot of technical knowledge that depends on specialized programs, you can say in this video that "there is no excuse because sword and shield has made an enormous effort to facilitate competitive players ... compete" no, it wasn't great, in fact I can say that the effort was minimal, sorry you can NOT use RNG manipulation as an excuse to justify those training times simply because it IS NOT normal gamplay, it is an exploid and should be treated as such.

[@imablisy]

meh, no different than not knowing what evs or whatever are.

[@munchrai6396]

You could also say the same thing about genning Pokemon. Not everyone knows how to gen their Pokemon and it comes with the added moral dilemma ontop of that

[@NataliaNeeSama]

I'm glad stuff like Pokemon Showdown exist, that make testing teams much easier than trial and error on the ingame Battle Spot.

[@picheal_scarn9255]

Very good video Bliss! Imo, game freak should do a new pokemon stadium only oriented for battles with differents formats, kinda like smogon.

[@imablisy]

Yes

[@mariorivera7969]

You've really upped the quality of these videos man. Gratz, enjoyed this one loads as well

[@imablisy]

Thanks so much

[@erics802]

The quality of life features they added in the DLC such as lady clear for resetting effort values, and the new ability patches was definitely an improvement Most efficient way to get money is to talk to digging pa, my record is 530,000 W then find a wild area vendor, purchase a stack of luxury balls, then sell until your capped out to $9.9 million

[@NekuZX]

29 hours acceptable????? have we gone insane already?? I will advocate for hacking for as long as having a competitively viable pokemon takes any longer than 1 single hour. Pokemon showdown exists because of hour unreasonable the pokemon mechanics are for team building. The fanbase has been so mistreated over the decades that people are thinking that 29 hours of tedious busy work just to start playing is acceptable.

[@jimmyh2137]

i 100% Disagree with what you say. 29 Hours is NOT even remotely close to a reasonable amount of time for building a team. Even 3 hours is too much. The ONLY reasonable amount of time is to give players an in-game "showdown" mode to make a competitive team instantly. And you're blatantly glossing over what a realistic competitive player has to do. It's NEVER just "make a team of 6 and done". - You have to try a lot of team compositions before finalizing the one ready for a tournament, and even then the team will change for every single tournament. The meta is always adapting to the biggest threats and counters. - The EVs are constantly being tweeked. To survive this move, to guarantee KO that opponent, to outspeed this threat. - The natures, especially those of your legendaries, can also change a lot of times. And you can only have 1 copy of a given legend. Are you sure the [random pkmn] is best used Modest? Or Timid? What if you change 1 member of the team and need to adjust to new threats? What if you change it but find out it was better before? Gotta swap back. Also, when changing nature you might need to rework the EV spread. - What happens if you find out your counter for X doesn't work or it's not enough to stop some strategy? What if you find something unexpected? Back to the drawing board all over again. - What if your strategy is just bad? You can never test something before building the entire team. 30 hours down the drain. So much fun, so very reasonable, gg. - Even if you copy-paste a random team it doesn't mean you can use it to the full potential. You have to find something that works for YOU. - keep in mind in all of this we forgot the time spent theory-crafting. There are TONS of micro adjustment and member swapping for finalizing ONE single team. And suddenly your 30h time is now 250h+. Hours wasted on the "Character selection" screen. Literally. This can never be acceptable/reasonable, never. IMO.

[@Marz776]

I wish they improve this in gen 9, making most of the new cool stuff more accessible. It would be really cool to give people the option to slread IVs and EVs how they like or like an option to make it less grindy

[@rumiyano]

This is it, the SnS video. Where training and stuff becomes super trivial. Let's see how it goes! E: 29 hours, disgusting. And that's with broken systems for training and catching.

[@aprinnyonbreak1290]

Just think if you spent 30 hours learning the computer skill to just inject your pokemon instead.

[@000aj]

Great video. As a VGC player, I see genning as a necessary evil. Spending almost 30 hours to make a team is still a lot of time, and while most of that does get faster the more teams you make, it's still a bunch of time spent on doing mindless grinding instead of literally anything else. In the end, tournaments are about the gameplay of the tournament itself, and not "who has the most time to breed, soft reset and max raid adventure". The comparison I like to make is if chess were to introduce a rule that you'd have to hand carve all your pieces out of wood for every tournament. It has very little to do with the competitive gameplay itself, and in the end, most top players will probably either have someone else do it for them, or use a 3D printer. Sure, it's against the rules, but it doesn't take away anything from the parts of the competitive game that actually matter.

[@imablisy]

Who said this chess analogy? Like 50 of you have said it lol.

[@000aj]

@@imablisy idk, lol, it's an easy analogy to make

[@imablisy]

@@000aj no, this is a parrot from someone

[@aprinnyonbreak1290]

Also you can only castle 3 times in your life, and if you want to castle any more, you either spend 200 hours grinding a special castle token, or else buy the additional DLC castle token chisel to reduce that to 15 hours per castle.

[@thekbx]

I didnt know you could use 26 vitamins. I always used 25 and then train the Pokémon to gain the 2 extra EVs. Good to know I was wasting time lol

[@imablisy]

Yep it’s super handy. It’s always kinda worked this way. Like in old gens if a Pokémon had 98 evs and you gave it a vitamin, it’d stop at 100

[@thekbx]

@@imablisy Oh ok, didnt know that! I always thought Id overshoot to 255 for some reason lol

[@Jeshiae]

@@thekbx You're not missing something! They changed the max EVs allowed per stat in Gen 7 so you no longer had to worry about accidentally getting 255 instead of 252 EVs. So where before that 26th vitamin would take you from 250 to 255, it now only goes from 250 to 252. If there were only 2 available EVs left (so 508/510), then it would just add the last 2.

[@DESMal]

why do we need Stats to be flat 0?? never understood why people would want flat 0 in stats unless speed for trickroom

[@BDAShadow1]

Waste as much time as you want, it's incredibly irresponsible for normal people.

[@imablisy]

it's not LOL

[@BDAShadow1]

@@imablisy Normal people have responsibilities, we don't have 30 hours to kill for one team, god forbid multiple. And you know that number is ambitious for an average person anyways. Go do something productive instead of pointless grinding.

[@imablisy]

@@BDAShadow1 30 hours isn't that long lol, and would definitely be faster for most.

[@BDAShadow1]

@@imablisy Go work full time, workout, walk the dog, clean the house, do landscaping, cook, eat, sleep, have some sort of social life, maybe learn some new things to build your career, and tell me where you find 30 spare hours. You want a normal person to spend weeks building a single team without ever getting to actually play the game for fun.

[@imablisy]

@@BDAShadow1 I do those things lol

[@lucasmaxvargassilveira853]

Since there are already means to change EVs, Natures and Abilities without just getting a diferent pokemon altogether and Hidden power is no longer a factor, Simply introducing an item that changes IVs of your pokemon, that is obtainable the same way the Nature/Ability changing Items is would make team building WAY easier, without entirely replacing breeding, since inherited moves are still a thing. Either that or replace IVs with the Grit sistem from Legends Arceus. This way you could keep the Pokemon you've met in your journey and became attached to, rather than just replacing it with a genetically superior one as soon as possible.

[@imablisy]

Yeah I agree, it could be better

[@BigDaddySlug]

So rng manipulation is soft cheating and pkhex is hard cheating ? I mean why not just flat out cheat. Or are you ok with one form of manipulation but not another ?

[@imablisy]

My line is modifying the game with an external device which this doesn’t do

[@BigDaddySlug]

@@imablisy right but your making up your own definition of cheating. Exploits are cheating. Game freak is lazy though they get no big incentive from patching things. If you looked at mmo’s or any other major online game that crackdown on cheating. if you exploit the game doing something that was obviously not intentional your characters get rolled back or you get banned. So your just kinda cheating right ?

[@Kota-sk8sl]

“Cheating” in Pokémon is fine tbh. Online won’t let Pokémon through with impossible stats through to begin with and I could not care less whether you genned your team or grinded it.

[@realfishu]

30 hours, also account for the fact that you need to PAY EXTRA $ for the DLC in order to get mons like urshifu and calyrex-shadow (which are coincidentally top-usage mons)