Really? My position is straightforward: things that have no effect on the outcome of a match, and make the game more accessible to new players, should be allowed.

The pie is a metaphor for the match being played. Buying a pre-made pie is like swapping in a different player.

No, and it’s incredibly weird that you came to that conclusion from my comment.

I’m all in favor of allowing proxies in competitive play.

Morally I don’t see a difference between hacked pokemon and traded pokemon, but the fact that they allow traded pokemon proves that they don’t actually consider catching and breeding part of the competition.

To keep the metaphor going, they’re ok with someone who was gifted strawberries by a friend. Those strawberries are legal. However, if it’s later revealed that the friend bought those strawberries at the grocery store and lied about where they came from, then the baker is disqualified despite doing nothing wrong.

The argument is stupid, and I was using the metaphor to point that out.

Hacked pokemon provide ZERO competitive advantage, so no, it’s not at all like doping.

If that were true, then they would also be banning anyone who had someone else do the grinding for them.

It’s more like disqualifying someone for buying strawberries at the store instead of growing them from seed, even though the competition is about baking and not gardening.

No, hacking pokemon is editing save data.

I agree, it is against the rules. Arbitrary, counterproductive rules that force people to waste time doing something unrelated to the competition, which is both disrespectful to the players’ time and raises the barrier of entry for new players.

It’s cheating to use a tool to create pokemon, but not cheating to pay someone else to do the grind for you?

They don’t consider it part of the competition, though. Someone could pay a dozen middle schoolers to do the grind for them and TPC would be fine with that.

Hatching a hundred eggs to get perfect IVs does not make you better at the game.

The rules also prohibit competing naked, but if you did so that isn’t cheating. At best, you could argue that it’s unsportsmanlike conduct, but it isn’t cheating if it doesn’t give you an advantage.

Cheating would be manipulating the RNG seed so your Fissure always hits. Because hacked pokemon perform identically to caught/bred pokemon, this is only eliminating grind that has nothing to do with the competition.

Never heard of Linus Torvalds, the guy who maintains the Linux kernel and had the OS named after him?

You can grind

I think a better analogy would be a chess match, but the players need to carve their own pieces, even though they’re not being scored on the carving.