Ruining the trading economy: hacks vs. clones

[Raikou]

Kind of controversial but after many visits to the GTS and forum trading posts, and seeing all the clones and hacks, it got me to thinking.

First off, I hope Nintendo implements a cheat filter for obviously bad hacks and pokes with out of range values, they're everywhere and it's very annoying. And secondly, I am not against cloning.

But my stance is that cloning has ruined the competitive trading economy just as much as hacking, and here's why. Say you breed an awesome Gible with amazing iv's, moves and nature. Really not that hard to do if you understand the fine mechanics of breeding and have good parents. Instead of relying on your breeding luck to create the other 5 members of your team, you clone that Gible 5 times and trade it with one of the other thousands of breeders who have managed the same feat but with a different Pokemon. Instead of having to work at getting a full team of awesome competitive Pokes, cloning has effectively allowed you to do this only once. This drastically reduces the time and effort needed to get a competitive team, similar to what hacking does but without the need to buy a cheating device.

The definition of cheating in this game is cutting down the time and effort required to make your team. My premise is that by this definition alone, both cloning and hacking can be considered cheating and both have a negative impact on the trading economy. Not that I advocate banning clones, it's just interesting that depite both falling under the same category only one is truly considered cheating. The difference is really only in the degree of cheating.

Thoughts?

 

[General Tso]

The only way to stop hacks is to shut down AR imo =/

I can see where you're coming from with the clones. Although I clone myself, I don't trade for pokemon to use seeing as I breed my own anyway, I just trade for legends.

I think the effects of hacks and clones is a complete inverse of your standpoint. One of the main reasons people can trade is because they already have awesome pokes from their GBA games and clones help fuel the booming trade economy. Hacks, although they're hacks, also keep fueling the GTS and Wi-fi.

 

[adman2]

The only way to stop hacks is to shut down AR imo =/

I can see where you're coming from with the clones. Although I clone myself, I don't trade for pokemon to use seeing as I breed my own anyway, I just trade for legends.

I think the effects of hacks and clones is a complete inverse of your standpoint. One of the main reasons people can trade is because they already have awesome pokes from their GBA games and clones help fuel the booming trade economy. Hacks, although they're hacks, also keep fueling the GTS and Wi-fi.

With a clone, somebody also had to get the original as well! :)

 

[Kevin_Raven]

The definition of cheating in this game is cutting down the time and effort required to make your team. My premise is that by this definition alone, both cloning and hacking can be considered cheating and both have a negative impact on the trading economy.

I see your point, but that's a wildly arbitrary definition of cheating. It's vague and allows annoying people like me to say "does that mean that using magcargo to cut down the hatching time is cheating?"

You'd be hard pressed to find a definition of cheating that would include cloning - it's in the game, everybody knows about it - you're only screwing yourself over if you don't use it.

 

[xc_hawk]

Hacking is hacking, I don't support that.
Cloning on the other hand, I think thats a different story. Realize this isn't competitor, breeding your own team takes time, a lot of time. Not only is making your own team much more time consuming, it also severly limits the diversity of your day to day team. It could take a month to get a solid 6 member team, whereas cloning a single bred pokemon and cloning could yeild 12 member in hald the time. Just my two cents

 

[AvatarST]

feebass feebass feebass feebass feebass feebass

 

[Raikou]

I see your point, but that's a wildly arbitrary definition of cheating. It's vague and allows annoying people like me to say "does that mean that using magcargo to cut down the hatching time is cheating?"

You'd be hard pressed to find a definition of cheating that would include cloning - it's in the game, everybody knows about it - you're only screwing yourself over if you don't use it.

How about using methods not intended by the developers to reduce the time and effort needed to create a team.

Also, I agree it is necessary to keep with the competition.

 

[Synre]

Clearly thanks to users like avatarst we can't discuss this so I'm just gonna lock it.





Seriously, we had a neat little modtalk about this on IRC but it's totally fucking pointless to discuss this. There's no 'economy' to ruin, I would wager at least 90% of good non-sharked Pokemon traded are cloned and who really knows how many of them are sharked.

There's not really much to say here other than don't trade sharked Pokemon here, but with cloning running rampant everywhere and AR often not far behind there's no real economy to ruin. In many ways this will all be good and irrelevant once Competitor is finished anyway... this is a fruitless topic of discussion.