Is PKHeX's legality checker good enough to not get banned in gen 8?

[genderneutralnoun]

Title. I'm dipping my toes into the water of pokemon genning, and for the moment I've just been using PKSM's event injector to get old mystery gifts. However, I'd like to be able to make, y'know, customized pokemon that are still within legality, like a shiny Contrary Snivy, for example. I've read that PKHeX's legality checker is "the most robust" or something like that, but I've also read some conflicting stuff on the online bans that were implemented a while back during Sword and Shield's era. Are they still in effect? What are the extents? As said in the title, is PKHeX's legality checker good enough? I know that Home won't accept any pokemon it deems illegal, but I'm mostly worried about bringing the pokemon out of Home and into the Switch games. I can't seem to find any explicit confirmations one way or the other. Thank you in advance!

[theSLAYER]

People usually get banned for other stuff, such as modification to the Switch, piracy, etc.

[SkyLink98]

In addition to what is said above, Pokemon-specific bans in Switch so far were only for Hacked raids (unobtainable species) and/or Home account sharing with tons of illegal mons (this was probably done to specifically target the Pokemon online resellers).

Even if the suggestion is to always gen something that is in the legal boundaries, they usually don't care if users have illegal stuff for their offline play. Using illegal stuff online is prevented anyways, during the Pokemon selection for the online trades/online competitions/online raids/any other online stuff. 

Of course, official legality checks are shitty at best. PKHeX does check a lot more stuff compared to the official checks. For example, the official ones doesn't check RNG feasability. Heck, they also allow some Shiny Locked mons to pass through trades and stuff.

They also have PLA save file verification, which Iirc needs to be linked to one and only one NNID simultaneously. But as far as I can tell, those were only preventing the game to connect if there was another player already connected with the same Sync ID. I could be wrong in that tho.

[genderneutralnoun]

I see, thank you for the information.

I don't have custom firmware or anything on my Switch (I usually avoid hacking current-gen consoles because of the likelihood of breaking updates, network bans, etc.; it's just my personal preference) but I do on my 3DS, so I'd be using PKSM to put pokemon made with PKHeX onto my Ultra Moon save, putting those into Pokemon Bank, and then moving those to Home. If what you say is correct, then was the announcement made back in 2021 (I think) not really what it sounded like? I'm mainly trying to understand what the reality is, because things like this can get overblown on the Internet out of fear.

From what I've heard from you guys here, my understanding is that: 1. Since PKHeX's legality checks are so robust, there's (essentially) no chance of any pokemon that passes PKHeX's checks being detected as illegal by official legality checks, 2. Actual Pokemon-specific bans have historically only been done in more extreme cases of hacking (hacked raids, home accounts with tons of illegal mons), and 3. Full NNID bans (as opposed to Pokemon-specific) have historically only been done in the cases of Switch modification and/or piracy. Please correct me if I seem to have misunderstood anything.

I'm mainly worried because most of my friends don't have any form of custom firmware for any of their Nintendo consoles, so trading with them online on 3DS games I don't think is going to be an option forever (due to the closure of the eShop, and if it hasn't already been locked out; I'm pretty out of the loop haha), and if I want to give them legal genned pokemon through trading, I want to understand what the risks are so I can prevent them. If I got myself banned for hacking, I'd figure out a way to deal with it, but I'd feel absolutely terrible if I got one of my friends banned because of my mistake.

[SkyLink98]

20 hours ago, genderneutralnoun said:

I'm mainly trying to understand what the reality is, because things like this can get overblown on the Internet out of fear.

Indeed what happened in some online communities.

20 hours ago, genderneutralnoun said:

2. Actual Pokemon-specific bans have historically only been done in more extreme cases of hacking (hacked raids, home accounts with tons of illegal mons), and 3. Full NNID bans (as opposed to Pokemon-specific) have historically only been done in the cases of Switch modification and/or piracy. Please correct me if I seem to have misunderstood anything.

Correct.

20 hours ago, genderneutralnoun said:

1. Since PKHeX's legality checks are so robust, there's (essentially) no chance of any pokemon that passes PKHeX's checks being detected as illegal by official legality checks

Not necessarily. PKHeX does a great job in legality checking the actual PKM data, but It has some limitations. For example, it can't "guess" details associated with an Home Tracker. Pokémon Home has tons of server side data added to the stored PKM data.

Let's say I were to generate a Zubat in my Brilliant Diamond game. Let's say I generate this Zubat to be originated from Pokémon Platinum. If were to deposit the Zubat in my Pokémon Home account, Gamefreak/Nintendo could easily tell it's genned/edited due to missing details related to its Home tracker, or due to a completely missing Home Tracker for a Pokémon that was supposed to have a valid Tracker since when it was first sent from Bank to Home.

Home Tracker case a part, generally if something is valid for PKHeX, then it's valid for Gamefreak/Nintendo.

[genderneutralnoun]

Thank you for the information, again!

I don't think I'll have to worry about the Home trackers since I'm putting my genned pokemon in Ultra Moon and then to Bank and then to Home, if I understood what you said correctly. Please do correct me if I'm wrong, again, haha.

[Shady Guy Jose]

7 hours ago, genderneutralnoun said:

Thank you for the information, again!

I don't think I'll have to worry about the Home trackers since I'm putting my genned pokemon in Ultra Moon and then to Bank and then to Home, if I understood what you said correctly. Please do correct me if I'm wrong, again, haha.

I believe you are correct, yes. It's always best to generate Pokémon in the game they're supposed to come from, but generating them in Gen 7 is the next best thing, precisely because of the HOME tracker, which gets added when importing them from Bank to HOME. As far as I know, there is no server-side Bank data that gets stored when you move a Pokémon from Gen 5 to Gen 6/7.

[javier_himura]

Another piece of advice is to avoid cloning or duplicating Pokemon (which PkHex or glitches) that have already been assigned a Home tracker. It is the same problem if GF detects a Pokemon without Home Tracker as detecting two Pokemon with the same Home Tracker because it is a unique value generated by GF's server.