Newbie Question

[canadianhero]

Hey guys,

I'm new to the Smogon community and to the concept of competitive pokemon.

This may be a stupid question, and I hope noone takes offense to it: does everyone legitimately breed their pokemon from scratch for competitive/tournament play? Or is it standard practice to use cheats/hacks with regards to IV/EV training, learning certain movesets etc.?

This is by no means a slight to the community, the reason I'm wondering about this is because of two things:

1.) the amount of effort, time, and ingame money it would take to experiment with different IV/EV combinations, movesets, rare pokemon, and all the other factors I figure a competitive player would want to simulate before going into a tournament,

2.) a YouTube video I was watching where Marriland was issuing an open invitation for people to WiFi battle him, and he said he didn't care if people used cheats to modify their stats or something along that line, which made me wonder whether or not that was the norm among competitive players.

My guess is that people do it legitimately but use the simulator on the website to play around with things.

Thanks in advance for your time.

 

[Lee]

Welcome to Smogon,

This may be a stupid question, and I hope noone takes offense to it: does everyone legitimately breed their pokemon from scratch for competitive/tournament play? Or is it standard practice to use cheats/hacks with regards to IV/EV training, learning certain movesets etc.?

There's a bit of both really...a lot of players choose to use AR to speed up the process a little and nobody has a problem with that provided they tell any battling/trading partners what codes they may have used. On the other hand, some players choose to do it the old fashioned way.

My guess is that people do it legitimately but use the simulator on the website to play around with things.

Yeah, people either do that or just go with the Pokemon listed in the analysis on site...they're tried and tested.

Repost this in the 'Ask a Simple Question' thread if you'd like more opinions. This kind of question has come up many times before so I don't think there's enough here to warrant at thread of it's own.