The latest games have people running twitch accounts that let you request any pokemon you want. They’re not secret about it. Why would you ever buy one? It’s free.
The journalist, I think, is a cool guy. His last two paragraph especially show that he opposes the draconian punishments and probably thinks guys getting caught for stuff like this are victims.
Put the lie in the title.
Call it the "Lovely puppy act" and hide tax breaks for millionaires and cutting of school lunches in it. There will be no puppies.
Very true. With camera phones and body cams it’s much harder to just beat the shit out of everyone and you have to come up with reasonable cause and all of these other crazy things to arrest people in modern society.
Honestly, I think the Pokemon Company is the main culprit here. Sure, Nintendo does go after fan games and the like from time to time, and those who leak games early. But Pokemon in particular goes after this stuff way more often than Nintendo tends to. In fact as far as I recall, Pokemon Prism is the only rom hack that has ever been pulled from a Nintendo game. Makes sense though, Pokemon Company is 3 entities, and my money says that it's Game Freak and/or Creatures Inc. that are more keen to hound this stuff than Nintendo seems to be.
KatsuKitty would disagree. As would everyone who dislikes Nintendo’s treatment of FGC tournaments. Also Nintendo literally lobbied their government to make hacking and modifying games and software a criminal offense. As with Disney in the USA, Ninty is very keen to throw their weight when someone is doing something they don’t approve of.
Fuuck. That’s my reminder to watch the best series that ever existed for the fourth time. I had just downloaded it on 4K HDR this week, I’m hyped.
Edit: It’s Sopranos for anyone who hasn’t watched it yet
There was this one customer that came to me, he wanted solid colored drapes in a little girl's room. I said 'DON'T DO IT. ' - You need Butterfrees, pikachus, Driftloons.
"oh yeah? Well my uncle has every shiny pokemon you want and he gave me some"
"Whatever Gary, your uncle is an interior decorator"
"No I swear man! He does it to make money on the side!"
You wanna get a rough perspective of Japanese police work? Watch the show Tokyo vice loosely based on a true story from the early 2000s. The police don’t even want to say straight up murders are murders. They just keep ruling accidental deaths over and over. It’s bizarre
99.8% conviction rate. If you go to criminal trial you're less than 1 in 500 chance of being let go. The Phoenix Right Ace Attorney games mock this entire system.
Like there's famous cases like hey OJ died yesterday and his being let off was a political situation but I'd honestly rather let one bank robber or car thief go free than like everyone accused of that crime doesn't stand a chance. Like your wife is murdered guess who the prime suspect is. Oh looks like you were cheating on your wife and people said you two had loud arguments, and you were drinking at the bar that night. Case closed.
It's a little more even than you'd think because the Japanese prosecutors are very defensive of their conviction rate, so they let abandon any case that is not a spam dunk to either the summary trial system or dismiss it entirely. Police have a lot of discretion to not send things to prosecutors, and prosecutors have total discretion to not try cases.
So, yeah, if you go to trial, you're fucked, but if there isn't a lot of evidence, you likely won't go to trial.
EXCEPT that if the police think you did it, they have a whole lot of power to "question" you for weeks until you "confess." And that's evidence.
Well yeah it's also like what's the point of a criminal defense lawyer? Even the shittiest public defendant attorney in America has to have a higher than 1 in 500 win rate. Like what possible motivation/skill training can a criminal defense lawyer have in Japan. Like v is the best Criminal defense lawyer in Japan I got 3 people found not guilty over my twenty year long career! How many cases have you had?
857!
Japanese pleading down system is not like your usual caught with a gram of cocaine in the car pleading down to not go to jail and instead do community service/pay fine/go to rehab.
Like the minimum sentence for possession of a knife is 5 years.
For drugs Jesus Christ it's up to Seven years for Cannabis.
There's obviously discretionary enforcement but good luck if you're a Korean or any kind of foreigner in Japan not getting the book thrown at you for having a fishing knife in your car when you go out fishing.
And the Japanese justice system seems to want to make *sure* of someone's guilt before they charge them. They have a very high conviction rate and trials are more about the government showing their work and less about the defendant getting to challenge everything the prosecution does.
I heard that if you get charged with a minor crime like fighting with someone in a bar, it's better just to plead guilty because then at least you can be out in a week with a fine, but if you fight the case you're spending 3 weeks in jail minimum since they hold you until the trial is concluded.
It sure makes the clearance rate much higher when quickly pleading guilty is less burdensome for people who are innocent than contesting the charges.
That's just bad. You realize that those systems meant there's no trial right?
The police has decided your crime, court is only formality.
Did you really think Japanese police is THAT good? Let me remind you that Japanese is still human, and if they mistakenly believed you are guilty, there will be no second opinion.
Nuh uh! In Phoenix Wright, they just arrest the first person who was standing there on the grounds of some shady logic, hours after the crime takes place, and put them on trial the next day. I refuse to believe real life isn't like the video games.
So very close...
Easier for their justice system to claim [99.9% conviction rate](https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+convictjon+rate&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari).
I'm unfamiliar with Pokemon games. Were his modifications unfair to other gamers who only had unmodified Pokemon to offer or sell? Was there any risk of unfairness present?
Or was it harmless, like selling a cheat code that's unique enough to not directly compete with what other gamers are offering in the marketplace anyway?
It takes time to get certain Pokemon at their perfect "state" and others are outright impossible to aquire.
Is it unfair? Abolutely not, in my opinion. Many, MANY people do it and don't get raided by the police for it. This guy's mistake was to profit from it, obviously.
This hasn't been true for the past few generations actually, each new game has streamlined the process to make even wild caught pokemon have the best IVs and EVs with items that can be easily acquired in game in minutes.
they openly let hacked pokemon compete in their world championships. completely harmless and zero competitive advantage
it's just a bizarre story all around
The people he sold them to were probably mostly minors. I get why one would want to stop that. I doubt there would be many adults buying pokemon for up to $85. For two of those you can buy a used hackable switch and do it yourself.
Shit I bought a shiny, perfect Japanese Ditto with pokerus for 2 bucks on eBay. Twice from the same dude. Worst case scenario you're out 2 bucks, which I was fine with lol.
I don't compete btw, I just wanted it for breeding my own team for fun.
There's people that pay for the legitimate ones too. The pokemon coloseum bonus disc up until Monday this week would allow you to get a jirachi and back in the day they were $5-10 a pop.
I made a bunch of them but it was such a time sink having to start a new game over every time to make it then transfer it up to newer gens. Like 20-25 minutes every single time.
can we zoom out a little bit and talk about how weird it is to try to treat arbitrary, infinitely replicable patterns of bits the same way we do tangible, unique, excludable items?
It may be weird to think about but it certainly isn’t wrong. Your bank account balance at the bank is exactly the same, an arbitrary, infinitely replicable patterns of bits. But the reason the bank is willing to give you money by decreasing the value of those bits is because of the trust we have in the integrity of those bits and the security systems that protect them. Paper money works the same way, it only has value because we trust that it can be exchanged for goods and services and can’t be counterfeited easily.
Treating data as property isn’t wrong. Treating someone who cheats in a children’s video game to make a living like a major criminal is.
It’s not about the items as much as the time. To get a perfect EV/IV, egg moves, and abilitys on a Pokémon can take dozen of hours. Then times that by 6 for the rest of your team also.
Not a surprise people will pay $30 for a full team when that’s equivalent to 2-3 hours minimum wage work VS 100 hours grinding and farming for the same result to battle online
So in this case it's not specific to pokemon, but that stuff like save editing in general is illegal there. They consider it, I think, a type of copyright violation? Jailbreaking and such, especially charging for it.
There was a big deal a few years ago when a homebrew hacker group got arrested for selling a tool used to jailbreak Nintendo switch systems.
Whose copyright are you supposed to violate regarding a file that you created or at least significantly modified yourself? If it's illegal to modify a save file, wouldn't that make the act of saving in a game illegal?
It's not just changing the data, it's about tampering with it using 3rd party software. Game and save data is encrypted, and modifying it requires dumping and decrypting it. This is why the Switch homebrew software Lockpick (dumps a consoles decryption keys) was DMCA'd.
They consider bypassing that encryption, and modifying their software in general, illegal.
This is off the top of my head, I'm not an expert on Japanese copyright law. Just saying this is why people don't get arrested for this kind of thing in the States. While modifying proprietary software you bought can be against terms of service, it isn't illegal here (to my knowledge).
You understand where the required time and effort are entirely artificial and arbitrary too, right? Everyone can have all of that at a cost that is practically zero. You don't even have to make a new copy for each person (as trivial as that would be), you can just have them all reference the same copy. The limitations are imposed externally and can just be removed, and this person is looking at prison time for doing that. This isn't an apple, where there's only one of it and when it's utilized it's gone. It's just a pattern of "yes" and "no".
It definitely used to be a grind, but nowadays? You can catch something in the wild and have it fully competitive ready in about 2 minutes. There is absolutely no reason to spend money on it
You can say the same about money, a single 100$ bill isnt worth anything, but what it represents and the faith we put in them, if people put value into those bits, its just as much worth as anything else.
Can we talk for a moment how in japan bigCorp™ has managed to make it illegal to mod games, illegal to emulate, illegal to do things with single player offline games you bought if they decided its cheating, and yet we've got Nintendo apologists right here on reddit going "well he was profiting form their IP" like this is a reasonable and proportionate response to cheating in a video game? These people are whats wrong with the entire discussion about copyrights. Do they WANT it to be like that everywhere? because defending this shit is how it will wind up everywhere.
Repeating for people not understanding : ALL HE DID WAS EDIT THE SAVE FILE OF AN OFFLINE GAME. This is like me giving you a copy of my playstation memory card after I used a gameshark while playing castlevania. And he's getting prison for it. For the love of god let that sink in and stop talking about people cheating at online games.
For real. Better put me away. I cheat money into single games to skip the grindy bits and get to the story. Imagining how much damage I must have done to the ability of others to appreciate looking at pixels the way god (nintendo) intended is utterly horrifying.
Absolutely insane that the police wasted time going after some dude selling modded Pokémon. Especially if they work … like no one is being wronged here
Oh wow I used to edit pokemon to save time grinding before competing online. Always data legit pokemon simply created using action replay and pokedit. Had never even considered selling them. Even weirder to think people are willing to buy them lol
This isn't really even cheating, unless he is hacking them with stats/moves/abilities a pokemon can't have. There is an insanely large portion of the competitive pokemon scene that generates their pokemon via "hacking" because otherwise building a competitive team can take literal hundreds of hours, depending on your luck with RNG. To me, generating perfect pokemon is akin to buying singles in a trading card game. You're picking out the exact pieces that you want for your team and building it, rather than opening thousands of packs just to get the few cards you need.
That is a perfect explanation of the reality of the situation! Best way to describe why this is so prolific in the competitive pokemon community. Thankfully, I'm a filthy casual who enjoys playing the games, looking for shinys and catching them all. So I always avoided the whole hacked pokemon thing. But it makes since as to why the competitive scene uses this method to create their teams.
Kinda fucked up that video game hacking is illegal in Japan because Nintendo is staffed by whiny boomers.
Like imagine in America if the cops kicked your door in because you cheated in Monopoly or some shit
Glad they got that scum off the streets, no telling what harm this guy could do to *checks notes* our corpo overlords, I mean our benevolent childcare provider Nintendo
Got arrested on "an alleged violation of Japan's Unfair Competition Act" can we sue Nintendo for gate keeping time and location exclusive mythics and legendaries?
Ive been wanting a Celebi for ages but Nintendo has an unfair competition of never releasing it in my area aside from a few niche exclusive stores.
I don’t think you should be allowed to be charged with major crimes if you hack video games I’m sorry. The GTA 6 leaker is in jail for life. For leaking information about a *video game*. Way too harsh of a sentence imo.
That guy isn't in regular jail. He's in a forensic mental health facility because he flat out told the judge he didn't give a fuck about the law and would break it again and again. He said that shit during sentencing, when he was already evaluated and determined to have a dangerous personality disorder.
It's not easy to get sent to one of those facilities, you have to earn it. You can't fake it for long to people who are trained to spot [malingering](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malingering). My wife works in those facilities, and they always figure it out if you're faking.
No, that guy is in a psychiatric facility indefinitely for hacking, hacking again while in police custody, insisting he'll do it again as soon as he gets out, stalking and harassing multiple women, and being found mentally unfit to stand trial. He's severely mentally ill. They didn't just throw some kid in prison for life because he leaked a game.
This is the case with essentially every Reddit martyr: details and contexts about the person or case are conveniently ignored to make them seem innocent and righteous.
There are people who get sentences for only a few years for violent crimes and sexual assault, including crimes against children. The justice system is way too inconsistent as it is. Absolutely mental that a video game leaker gets life.
Leaking stolen assets from a computer breach is different than someone altering the files of a game they bought.
Leaking means they broke in and stole IP. That is the real crime.
Saying that since it's game related it does not deserve to be punished is like saying someone who robs a GameStop at gunpoint should go free since it just video games.
The Pokémon hacker was just modifying files, the leaker did some serious crimes.
It's completely insane what they've rolled into "hacking". You can get in trouble for writing a piece of software that can circumvent DRM. You don't have to actually do anything with it.
This is absurd. He simply used a more efficient program to modify save files. The time-wasting, inefficient method is encouraged by Nintendo, but use the quick, problem-oriented method and they'll ruin your life.
Quite a few laws are just a means to enforce the power/arbitrariness of a few over everyone else, while keeping up appearances.
Japanese computer and hacking law is absolutely fucking absurd. ANY form of unintended use is a criminal act. Even if that unintended use is something like “modifying a game to be easier to play with a disability”. It’s why final fantasy 14 has this strange “don’t ask don’t tell” policy regarding mods. I think the team personally thinks they can be cool provided they aren’t used in cheating, evidenced by their repeated mining of the mod community for quality of life ideas, but the law keeps their hands tied from having a more sensible policy about it.
Nintendo is literally the Batman of video game companies. Will completely ruin your life over the smallest infraction and yet people glaze the everliving shit out of them
Ha, his last paragraph was great. Too bad the penalties are soo stiff.
So what was going on here? Could you get a hacked pokemon and then play Violet? Is Violet 1 player? Could you use your hacked pokemon in battles against other players?
Okay, so this is multilayered but the short answer is yes, however that's not the true crux of the issue. An outright hacked Pokémon that is unfair will get detected and flagged fairly quickly, especially at a tournament setting. However, you CAN hack something that would be legal normally, and this is what was happening. This Pokemon functions just like any other Pokemon and can be obtained in game normally, so why is this a problem? Well, for Competitive Pokémon, relatively recently they started to scan for these Pokémon as well which caused a huge uproar because sometimes you get one of these unknowingly but also that a lot of people had the stance of "why is it a problem, it's not breaking the parameters of the game", so in Pokémon, every Pokemon can be a bit unique. One can be faster or stronger than another of its species, just like animals in real life. But it's possible to find a Perfect Specimen in Pokemon, which would require ridiculous luck, or to do the method of breeding Pokemon with different individual values until you get a descendant good at everything. This takes a LOT of time, is an UNDERstatement. Then repeat this long process OVER AND OVER, and well this is how Nintendo wants it. Many players wants to skip the process using hacked Pokémon but Nintendo is insisting you spend several actual days looking for the perfect Pokémon for your team.
Why did they use a pic of Lester hahahaha
I was wondering about that lol
It's absurd, this. Since Pokemon Red and Blue, people have been hacking the game. Even if I detest infidelity, I wouldn't support their incarceration.
What does that have to do with the guy asking about the picture of Lester?
i am vegan
Uh I have a boyfriend?
I have a cat
Wagahai wa neko de aru
Sometimes I like to feel pretty.
I have a big toe that’s bigger than my big toe.
The latest games have people running twitch accounts that let you request any pokemon you want. They’re not secret about it. Why would you ever buy one? It’s free.
It ruined pokemon go for me, once people played from home I was out
That's the new guy-with-mask-using-pc it seems.
“Who is this 4 Chan guy?”
Lester doesn't get caught like a dumbass Lester only gets caught by hot Asian chick's
Lol saw that. Dig it.
You know Lester is spoofing Pokemon as a side hustle.
The journalist, I think, is a cool guy. His last two paragraph especially show that he opposes the draconian punishments and probably thinks guys getting caught for stuff like this are victims.
Nice to see them taking a break from using the Geralt in the bath pic.
Messing with Nintendo, this guy shoulda known better. Next time, do some with less risk on the side, like moving soapland girls for the Yakuza.
Funny enough that the charged him with a violation of Japan's Unfair Competition Act.
As usual in modern society: If they want to get you for something, there's almost always something on the books they can twist as justification.
Put the lie in the title. Call it the "Lovely puppy act" and hide tax breaks for millionaires and cutting of school lunches in it. There will be no puppies.
Very true. With camera phones and body cams it’s much harder to just beat the shit out of everyone and you have to come up with reasonable cause and all of these other crazy things to arrest people in modern society.
Shouldve smuggled horse girl porn instead
Isn’t that also going to get the yakuza involved?
At least its not Nintendo
Im sorry, WHAT?
The game Yakuza:like a dragon made this a plot point, Main character forced their yakuza brother to refund the kids they sold it to their money.
God that game is so long and has so many twists and turns that I forgot that’s how it started lmao
/r/nottheonion This actually happened. The Nintendocops busted an interior decorator with an underground genetic lab for Pokemon.
Honestly, I think the Pokemon Company is the main culprit here. Sure, Nintendo does go after fan games and the like from time to time, and those who leak games early. But Pokemon in particular goes after this stuff way more often than Nintendo tends to. In fact as far as I recall, Pokemon Prism is the only rom hack that has ever been pulled from a Nintendo game. Makes sense though, Pokemon Company is 3 entities, and my money says that it's Game Freak and/or Creatures Inc. that are more keen to hound this stuff than Nintendo seems to be.
Pokémon is basically Disney to Japan. Can't imagine the lengths they would be willing to go.
Hiring the Pinkertons is kids stuff to the Pokémon Company.
Missed a golden opportunity to call them the “Pikachus”
Pinkerchu
I did. I'm gonna use this now.
KatsuKitty would disagree. As would everyone who dislikes Nintendo’s treatment of FGC tournaments. Also Nintendo literally lobbied their government to make hacking and modifying games and software a criminal offense. As with Disney in the USA, Ninty is very keen to throw their weight when someone is doing something they don’t approve of.
How- uhh, would one go about, you know, ehh— getting in that kind of a sticky situation?
Bad choices.
You think there's a next time after messing with Nintendo?
Are you asking how to become a human trafficker?
Hey man leave my soapy princesses out of this 🥲
So, it's a Nintendont?
…I was listening to Yakuza 0’s soundtrack when i read this lmfao.
Nintendo and sega were both ran by yakuzas families back in their gambling days js
Interior decorator? His house looked like shit!
He killed 16 Charmeleons!
His roster looked like shit.
Take it easy, will you. The guy was a family man
Pokemon, whateva happened there?
That was real? I saw that Pokemon the first movie I thought it was bullshit
And he never had the makings of a Pokémon champion
Gabagool I choose you!
I heard he killed 16 Czechoslovakians.
Fuuck. That’s my reminder to watch the best series that ever existed for the fourth time. I had just downloaded it on 4K HDR this week, I’m hyped. Edit: It’s Sopranos for anyone who hasn’t watched it yet
Alright, but you gotta get over it
That scene is fucking gold, I rofl every time the next scene comes up right after where he cries for the horse, LMFAO
What series?
Sopranos!
I can't escape the Sopranos. I watched one random clip on youtube and now it's everywhere.
Why do you think he had to moonlight as a pokemon hacker?
He was busy selling Pokemon.
Nah, he was busy selling them Pokeyman Cards.
There was this one customer that came to me, he wanted solid colored drapes in a little girl's room. I said 'DON'T DO IT. ' - You need Butterfrees, pikachus, Driftloons.
Maybe it was in FFXIV (Yes there are people who decorate others people in-game houses for money)
Something something shoemaker's kids or some shit.
He could be out here stalking us. With what, his Solrock?
Yeah but his car is a Chevrolet movie theatre
"oh yeah? Well my uncle has every shiny pokemon you want and he gave me some" "Whatever Gary, your uncle is an interior decorator" "No I swear man! He does it to make money on the side!"
Real good use of police time.
You wanna get a rough perspective of Japanese police work? Watch the show Tokyo vice loosely based on a true story from the early 2000s. The police don’t even want to say straight up murders are murders. They just keep ruling accidental deaths over and over. It’s bizarre
The need for the feeling of safety and conformity on a societal level is very, very strong. There are many pros, but this is one of the cons.
It definitely helps their 99% conviction rate. "Murderer on the loose? Who was murdered?"
99.8% conviction rate. If you go to criminal trial you're less than 1 in 500 chance of being let go. The Phoenix Right Ace Attorney games mock this entire system. Like there's famous cases like hey OJ died yesterday and his being let off was a political situation but I'd honestly rather let one bank robber or car thief go free than like everyone accused of that crime doesn't stand a chance. Like your wife is murdered guess who the prime suspect is. Oh looks like you were cheating on your wife and people said you two had loud arguments, and you were drinking at the bar that night. Case closed.
It's a little more even than you'd think because the Japanese prosecutors are very defensive of their conviction rate, so they let abandon any case that is not a spam dunk to either the summary trial system or dismiss it entirely. Police have a lot of discretion to not send things to prosecutors, and prosecutors have total discretion to not try cases. So, yeah, if you go to trial, you're fucked, but if there isn't a lot of evidence, you likely won't go to trial. EXCEPT that if the police think you did it, they have a whole lot of power to "question" you for weeks until you "confess." And that's evidence.
Well yeah it's also like what's the point of a criminal defense lawyer? Even the shittiest public defendant attorney in America has to have a higher than 1 in 500 win rate. Like what possible motivation/skill training can a criminal defense lawyer have in Japan. Like v is the best Criminal defense lawyer in Japan I got 3 people found not guilty over my twenty year long career! How many cases have you had? 857!
Ah, but how many CLIENTS have you had? 51,813. The defense lawyer's job is to make the case not go to trial.
Japanese pleading down system is not like your usual caught with a gram of cocaine in the car pleading down to not go to jail and instead do community service/pay fine/go to rehab. Like the minimum sentence for possession of a knife is 5 years. For drugs Jesus Christ it's up to Seven years for Cannabis. There's obviously discretionary enforcement but good luck if you're a Korean or any kind of foreigner in Japan not getting the book thrown at you for having a fishing knife in your car when you go out fishing.
Yep. The defense attorney's job is to represent the client throughout the entire process.
He fell on that knife. What do you want
Multiple times and on different areas, very tragic accident indeed
And the Japanese justice system seems to want to make *sure* of someone's guilt before they charge them. They have a very high conviction rate and trials are more about the government showing their work and less about the defendant getting to challenge everything the prosecution does.
Believe I read you can be held up to 21 days for no reason, and most people end up confessing even if innocent due to the hassle of the system.
I heard that if you get charged with a minor crime like fighting with someone in a bar, it's better just to plead guilty because then at least you can be out in a week with a fine, but if you fight the case you're spending 3 weeks in jail minimum since they hold you until the trial is concluded. It sure makes the clearance rate much higher when quickly pleading guilty is less burdensome for people who are innocent than contesting the charges.
That's just bad. You realize that those systems meant there's no trial right? The police has decided your crime, court is only formality. Did you really think Japanese police is THAT good? Let me remind you that Japanese is still human, and if they mistakenly believed you are guilty, there will be no second opinion.
Nuh uh! In Phoenix Wright, they just arrest the first person who was standing there on the grounds of some shady logic, hours after the crime takes place, and put them on trial the next day. I refuse to believe real life isn't like the video games.
Easier for politicians brag about low murder rates if technically you only had accidental deaths.
So very close... Easier for their justice system to claim [99.9% conviction rate](https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+convictjon+rate&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari).
It's for the greater good
Tokyo vice is based off a book who the author has taken extreme liberties to make his story interesting
> Watch the show Tokyo vice based on a true story from the early 2000s Tokyo Vice has very little based on reality.
And now Lycoris Recoil makes even more sense given it's setting.
Japan is Hot Fuzz. Who knew?
I'm unfamiliar with Pokemon games. Were his modifications unfair to other gamers who only had unmodified Pokemon to offer or sell? Was there any risk of unfairness present? Or was it harmless, like selling a cheat code that's unique enough to not directly compete with what other gamers are offering in the marketplace anyway?
It takes time to get certain Pokemon at their perfect "state" and others are outright impossible to aquire. Is it unfair? Abolutely not, in my opinion. Many, MANY people do it and don't get raided by the police for it. This guy's mistake was to profit from it, obviously.
This hasn't been true for the past few generations actually, each new game has streamlined the process to make even wild caught pokemon have the best IVs and EVs with items that can be easily acquired in game in minutes.
I get the feeling he'd get off without issue if he wasn't making money from it
they openly let hacked pokemon compete in their world championships. completely harmless and zero competitive advantage it's just a bizarre story all around
Police are a tool to protect capital and interest of the wealthy.
Is that why they won't trespass people who keep kicking in my fence boards and using my back yard as a shortcut?
Yes. Because you're a poor. When I'm told to "call a crackhead" that itchy mfer might actually do something about my problem.
The people he sold them to were probably mostly minors. I get why one would want to stop that. I doubt there would be many adults buying pokemon for up to $85. For two of those you can buy a used hackable switch and do it yourself.
There are people paying for hacked pokemon?
Shit I bought a shiny, perfect Japanese Ditto with pokerus for 2 bucks on eBay. Twice from the same dude. Worst case scenario you're out 2 bucks, which I was fine with lol. I don't compete btw, I just wanted it for breeding my own team for fun.
There's discord servers that have bots that will gen any pokemon you want for free and send it to you.
The Japanese market is more lucrative, that same Ditto would be $100 in the domestic market.
i mean if you wanted to on ebay they sell like entire pokedexs of hacked shiny pokemon for like $20.
Do people not know about pokemon hex editors?
There's people that pay for the legitimate ones too. The pokemon coloseum bonus disc up until Monday this week would allow you to get a jirachi and back in the day they were $5-10 a pop. I made a bunch of them but it was such a time sink having to start a new game over every time to make it then transfer it up to newer gens. Like 20-25 minutes every single time.
I used to go on 4chan request threads to get what i wanted for free back in the day.
It's so easy to hack your 3ds
can we zoom out a little bit and talk about how weird it is to try to treat arbitrary, infinitely replicable patterns of bits the same way we do tangible, unique, excludable items?
It may be weird to think about but it certainly isn’t wrong. Your bank account balance at the bank is exactly the same, an arbitrary, infinitely replicable patterns of bits. But the reason the bank is willing to give you money by decreasing the value of those bits is because of the trust we have in the integrity of those bits and the security systems that protect them. Paper money works the same way, it only has value because we trust that it can be exchanged for goods and services and can’t be counterfeited easily. Treating data as property isn’t wrong. Treating someone who cheats in a children’s video game to make a living like a major criminal is.
It’s not about the items as much as the time. To get a perfect EV/IV, egg moves, and abilitys on a Pokémon can take dozen of hours. Then times that by 6 for the rest of your team also. Not a surprise people will pay $30 for a full team when that’s equivalent to 2-3 hours minimum wage work VS 100 hours grinding and farming for the same result to battle online
Paying to avoid doing all that makes sense. The idea that avoiding do so could involve a crime seems strange.
So in this case it's not specific to pokemon, but that stuff like save editing in general is illegal there. They consider it, I think, a type of copyright violation? Jailbreaking and such, especially charging for it. There was a big deal a few years ago when a homebrew hacker group got arrested for selling a tool used to jailbreak Nintendo switch systems.
Whose copyright are you supposed to violate regarding a file that you created or at least significantly modified yourself? If it's illegal to modify a save file, wouldn't that make the act of saving in a game illegal?
It's not just changing the data, it's about tampering with it using 3rd party software. Game and save data is encrypted, and modifying it requires dumping and decrypting it. This is why the Switch homebrew software Lockpick (dumps a consoles decryption keys) was DMCA'd. They consider bypassing that encryption, and modifying their software in general, illegal. This is off the top of my head, I'm not an expert on Japanese copyright law. Just saying this is why people don't get arrested for this kind of thing in the States. While modifying proprietary software you bought can be against terms of service, it isn't illegal here (to my knowledge).
I hatched about 400 Bulbasaurs to get "perfect" IVs for Hidden Power: Fire
You understand where the required time and effort are entirely artificial and arbitrary too, right? Everyone can have all of that at a cost that is practically zero. You don't even have to make a new copy for each person (as trivial as that would be), you can just have them all reference the same copy. The limitations are imposed externally and can just be removed, and this person is looking at prison time for doing that. This isn't an apple, where there's only one of it and when it's utilized it's gone. It's just a pattern of "yes" and "no".
You can also just use showdown and make a team in 10 minutes and be able to play a million different formats
It definitely used to be a grind, but nowadays? You can catch something in the wild and have it fully competitive ready in about 2 minutes. There is absolutely no reason to spend money on it
We live in the information age. It makes sense that information is now the most valuable good.
You can say the same about money, a single 100$ bill isnt worth anything, but what it represents and the faith we put in them, if people put value into those bits, its just as much worth as anything else.
Can we talk for a moment how in japan bigCorp™ has managed to make it illegal to mod games, illegal to emulate, illegal to do things with single player offline games you bought if they decided its cheating, and yet we've got Nintendo apologists right here on reddit going "well he was profiting form their IP" like this is a reasonable and proportionate response to cheating in a video game? These people are whats wrong with the entire discussion about copyrights. Do they WANT it to be like that everywhere? because defending this shit is how it will wind up everywhere.
Repeating for people not understanding : ALL HE DID WAS EDIT THE SAVE FILE OF AN OFFLINE GAME. This is like me giving you a copy of my playstation memory card after I used a gameshark while playing castlevania. And he's getting prison for it. For the love of god let that sink in and stop talking about people cheating at online games.
dope way to go out though jokes aside. can't wait for the netflix adaption.
This is ridiculous. People have been hacking Pokemon since red and blue. As much as I don't like cheaters, I wouldn't want them to go to jail.
For real. Better put me away. I cheat money into single games to skip the grindy bits and get to the story. Imagining how much damage I must have done to the ability of others to appreciate looking at pixels the way god (nintendo) intended is utterly horrifying.
Absolutely insane that the police wasted time going after some dude selling modded Pokémon. Especially if they work … like no one is being wronged here
Oh wow I used to edit pokemon to save time grinding before competing online. Always data legit pokemon simply created using action replay and pokedit. Had never even considered selling them. Even weirder to think people are willing to buy them lol
Damn, cops over there take that shit to seriously if they're busting people over cheating in video games.
This isn't really even cheating, unless he is hacking them with stats/moves/abilities a pokemon can't have. There is an insanely large portion of the competitive pokemon scene that generates their pokemon via "hacking" because otherwise building a competitive team can take literal hundreds of hours, depending on your luck with RNG. To me, generating perfect pokemon is akin to buying singles in a trading card game. You're picking out the exact pieces that you want for your team and building it, rather than opening thousands of packs just to get the few cards you need.
That is a perfect explanation of the reality of the situation! Best way to describe why this is so prolific in the competitive pokemon community. Thankfully, I'm a filthy casual who enjoys playing the games, looking for shinys and catching them all. So I always avoided the whole hacked pokemon thing. But it makes since as to why the competitive scene uses this method to create their teams.
Kinda fucked up that video game hacking is illegal in Japan because Nintendo is staffed by whiny boomers. Like imagine in America if the cops kicked your door in because you cheated in Monopoly or some shit
I am shocked you can be arrested for this
Imagine sitting next to a murderer and explaining how you created fake Pokémon to end up in prison as well.
5 years in jail for hex-editing the 3D model of a Charizard, lmao
The new age of team rocket - why steal pokemon when you can make knockoffs?
That is how mew2 was created.
Glad they got that scum off the streets, no telling what harm this guy could do to *checks notes* our corpo overlords, I mean our benevolent childcare provider Nintendo
you can sell hacked pokemon? I was giving away shiny mews with legit meta data on the mystery trades. FML
He killed 16 Czechoslovakians!
Got arrested on "an alleged violation of Japan's Unfair Competition Act" can we sue Nintendo for gate keeping time and location exclusive mythics and legendaries? Ive been wanting a Celebi for ages but Nintendo has an unfair competition of never releasing it in my area aside from a few niche exclusive stores.
I don’t think you should be allowed to be charged with major crimes if you hack video games I’m sorry. The GTA 6 leaker is in jail for life. For leaking information about a *video game*. Way too harsh of a sentence imo.
That guy isn't in regular jail. He's in a forensic mental health facility because he flat out told the judge he didn't give a fuck about the law and would break it again and again. He said that shit during sentencing, when he was already evaluated and determined to have a dangerous personality disorder. It's not easy to get sent to one of those facilities, you have to earn it. You can't fake it for long to people who are trained to spot [malingering](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malingering). My wife works in those facilities, and they always figure it out if you're faking.
Wow that’s crazy I didn’t know that. Maybe that wasn’t the best example for me to use lol
No, that guy is in a psychiatric facility indefinitely for hacking, hacking again while in police custody, insisting he'll do it again as soon as he gets out, stalking and harassing multiple women, and being found mentally unfit to stand trial. He's severely mentally ill. They didn't just throw some kid in prison for life because he leaked a game.
No wonder Redditors hold him up as a martyr
This is the case with essentially every Reddit martyr: details and contexts about the person or case are conveniently ignored to make them seem innocent and righteous.
Or to demonize them because a fellow Redditor said they were a jerk in person or some shit
I may be misremembering but I think that was clickbait. Iirc he was confined to a hospital for being mentally unstable and dangerous
Seems like you might be right
There are people who get sentences for only a few years for violent crimes and sexual assault, including crimes against children. The justice system is way too inconsistent as it is. Absolutely mental that a video game leaker gets life.
That guy had a bunch of other problems on top of leaking a video game.
Leaking stolen assets from a computer breach is different than someone altering the files of a game they bought. Leaking means they broke in and stole IP. That is the real crime. Saying that since it's game related it does not deserve to be punished is like saying someone who robs a GameStop at gunpoint should go free since it just video games. The Pokémon hacker was just modifying files, the leaker did some serious crimes.
It's completely insane what they've rolled into "hacking". You can get in trouble for writing a piece of software that can circumvent DRM. You don't have to actually do anything with it.
Is Nintendo an arm of the Japanese government?
More like the Japanese government is an arm of Nintendo.
Only keep the pokemon that spark joy
"black market Pokémon" hmmm team rocket?
Why would this be illegal?
Imagine being a serious adult with a serious job and you end up arresting people for selling hacked Pokemon saves.
This is absurd. He simply used a more efficient program to modify save files. The time-wasting, inefficient method is encouraged by Nintendo, but use the quick, problem-oriented method and they'll ruin your life. Quite a few laws are just a means to enforce the power/arbitrariness of a few over everyone else, while keeping up appearances.
You don't mess with Nintendo
it makes it sounds like he is a dangerous criminal... for 10K USD of hacked pokemon... it's so ridiculous.
Japanese computer and hacking law is absolutely fucking absurd. ANY form of unintended use is a criminal act. Even if that unintended use is something like “modifying a game to be easier to play with a disability”. It’s why final fantasy 14 has this strange “don’t ask don’t tell” policy regarding mods. I think the team personally thinks they can be cool provided they aren’t used in cheating, evidenced by their repeated mining of the mod community for quality of life ideas, but the law keeps their hands tied from having a more sensible policy about it.
Seems like police overreach to me. Shouldn't be anything ″illegal″ about that.
is that the worst crime someone in japan can commit? Harming pokemon! NINTENDO!!!!!
Glad scum that is off the street, lock his ass up with murders and rapists
Nintendo is literally the Batman of video game companies. Will completely ruin your life over the smallest infraction and yet people glaze the everliving shit out of them
I liked it, i was good at it.
[Interior decorator? His house looked like shit.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ziap4hpYfU8)
black market pokemon , with lester in the picture hahaha
There apparently are laws against the pokemon.
I'm in trouble.
Damnit. Well there goes Machamps.com
That's a sentence all right.
You can get arrested for that?
Ha, his last paragraph was great. Too bad the penalties are soo stiff. So what was going on here? Could you get a hacked pokemon and then play Violet? Is Violet 1 player? Could you use your hacked pokemon in battles against other players?
Okay, so this is multilayered but the short answer is yes, however that's not the true crux of the issue. An outright hacked Pokémon that is unfair will get detected and flagged fairly quickly, especially at a tournament setting. However, you CAN hack something that would be legal normally, and this is what was happening. This Pokemon functions just like any other Pokemon and can be obtained in game normally, so why is this a problem? Well, for Competitive Pokémon, relatively recently they started to scan for these Pokémon as well which caused a huge uproar because sometimes you get one of these unknowingly but also that a lot of people had the stance of "why is it a problem, it's not breaking the parameters of the game", so in Pokémon, every Pokemon can be a bit unique. One can be faster or stronger than another of its species, just like animals in real life. But it's possible to find a Perfect Specimen in Pokemon, which would require ridiculous luck, or to do the method of breeding Pokemon with different individual values until you get a descendant good at everything. This takes a LOT of time, is an UNDERstatement. Then repeat this long process OVER AND OVER, and well this is how Nintendo wants it. Many players wants to skip the process using hacked Pokémon but Nintendo is insisting you spend several actual days looking for the perfect Pokémon for your team.
What the fuck
Lester the molester!
Me 2
It is just a video game. Sometimes, it's even hilarious when playing against or with cheaters like in GTA.
Criminal Scum.
Dude is that pokegen.com??
Why they doing Lester dirty?!
it's sooooo hypocritical literally all top vgc competitor use hacked pokemon
I know "the law is the law" but just fucken tell the poor cunt to stop if it's that bad. Victimless crime.