Question regarding AR Legality

[genius94d]

I have a question regarding the usage of ARs. As I have come to understand it, some people believe that there are "soft" and "hard" codes for Pokemon. When I say soft and hard, I mean for example a soft code would be something like 1 step egg hatch or a IV/EV checker and remains within the concept of being "legal". Whereas, a hard code would be something like changing a pokemon's stats to 999 (or even the usage of Pokegen/Pokesav) that is totally extreme.

The thng is that I have recently acquired an Action Replay for the first time in my life. Now before you go telling me "cheating is bad" I will tell you that I've been playing pokemon ever since Gen I, and all those times up until now have been Legitimate.

I don't fully approve of the Action Replay myself, but I felt a need of a reward for playing a game for so long. Actually, I rarely use it even after I acquired it. My question is this:

If I only use the wild shiny code/100% catch rate for example, Virizion, although I'd still spend countless hours of resetting for a specific nature and good IVs, can I still use it without being looked down upon? Simply because even though a shiny pokemon is extremely rare, in my opinion it should not matter in battles (whereas the main focus is to win). It doesn't affect the pokemon's stats in any way, and serves only for asthetic purposes. If I like the shiny sprite of a pokemon, I use shiny, if I like normal, I use normal. The other case is 100% catch rate. Again, asthetic purposes. If I want to see my Virizion captured in a Premier ball. It would be the same as using a 999 masterball code which is still within the confines of being 'legit'.

Note, these along some others (Victini, items, money, etc.) are the only codes I use.

[Shiny Sheimi]

The 100% catch rate code for Virizion would be 100% fine as far as legality is concerned. Many people (including myself) believe that a Pokémon is only illegal if you can tell it was hacked in some way (yeah I'm going to pimp myself out and point you to this page on my website), and there isn't any stored data on the PKM file OR on any part of the save file that records how the Pokémon was caught or what AR codes were activated when you caught it, so that would be totally fine. However, wild shiny codes might not be as clean as they might seem.

I don't know if you're familiar with the term PID - you might be, but just in case you're not, I'll explain what it is. It stands for Personality ID and it's a hidden eight digit number that was generated when you first encountered the Pokémon. Normally, when you encounter a Pokémon, the species is generated and then the PID is generated totally at random after that. The game then reads the PID and allocates the Pokémon's nature, gender, ability and shininess based on the PID. Now, I don't know very much about AR codes, but my suspicion is that the shiny wild Pokémon AR code doesn't change the PID to make it shiny, but rather tells the game to ignore the PID and make the Pokémon shiny anyway. (Like I said, I don't know for certain, but this seems to be the more likely option.) If my suspicions are correct, then with a wild shiny Pokémon code, it's likely that the Pokémon you catch will have a shininess status that does not match its PID, which would render it illegal because the shininess will not match the PID. This is such a tiny bit of invalid information that it won't matter on online tournaments or on random matchup, so you don't need to worry about that.

In terms of morality, though, which is what you seem to be worried about, I don't see any problem with making the Virizion shiny (or whatever other Pokémon you wanted to catch). I personally don't like to use AR codes because almost all of them create invalid values in a Pokémon that make them unclean (for example, Pokémon Modifiers will usually get you a Pokémon that has totally false encounter location data). If you don't worry too much about this kind of thing then don't worry - make your Pokémon shiny. The unmatching PID and shininess is a piece of data that won't be obvious in-game and it won't be detected by online tournaments (at the moment - don't quote me on it for the future in case they change things, which they probably won't). The only way you'd be able to tell was if you extracted the Pokémon from the game and looked at its data via something like PokéGen or PokéSav, and even then you'd have to do some extensive maths problems to find out whether or not the PID was a shiny one or not. Although, you might be at risk of being found out if your Pokémon turns up on Pokécheck.org, which has a legality checker for users to see. But again, you'd have to extract the Pokémon or trade it away or upload it yourself to Pokécheck to see this data anyway, so if you intend to keep it for yourself, then don't worry about it. If you want to see whether or not my theory about the matching PID is correct, then you could always upload the Pokémon to Pokécheck and have a look at the data. If the PID doesn't match the shininess then it'll tell you, in big bold red letters, too (but you have to click "show legality analysis" at the bottom).

Good luck, and if you have any more questions about legality, don't hesitate to PM me. I happen to be a legality boffin.

[evandixon]

Those codes should be perfectly legal. There used to be a great flowchart on this topic, which looked like this:

Legit: made using in-game methods

Legal: made without using in-game methods, but given the right circumstances could be.

Illegal: can't possibly exist without outside methods.

[Shiny Sheimi]

Those codes should be perfectly legal. There used to be a great flowchart on this topic, which looked like this:

Legit: made using in-game methods

Legal: made without using in-game methods, but given the right circumstances could be.

Illegal: can't possibly exist without outside methods.

I would make a slight alteration to that theory, with "legal" meaning anything that could have been made using in-game methods, whether it's legitimate or not.

Anyway, despite this flowchart, the Pokémon could still become illegal when the shiny code is used. I mentioned something in my earlier post: just because the Pokémon would not behave differently in battle due to it being shiny, that doesn't mean it's not illegal. There could be hidden values in its data that appear when you use the shiny wild encounter code that would be proof of it being obtained in a less-than-legitimate way. I wrote about this on my site - see the section at the bottom regarding relevant and irrelevant values.