IMP: I choose you!

I’ve been watching some competitive Pokémon Youtubers recently, and have come across a rule concept that is very strange to me: Illegally Manipulated Pokémon (IMP).

The official tournament rules on IMPs state that:

“The use of external devices, such as a mobile app, to modify or create items or Pokémon in a competitor’s Battle Team is expressly forbidden. Competitors found to have Pokémon or items that have been tampered with may receive a Disqualification, regardless of whether the Pokémon or items belong to that competitor or were traded for.”

Despite looking into it for a while, I don’t understand why this rule exists! Why should manipulated Pokémon be illegal?

Ok, so first of all, why would people want to use external device to hack Pokémon into their game in the first place? Is it like steroid use in sports, where it makes players stronger, giving them an unfair advantage?

I don’t believe so!

In the Pokémon video games, each individual Pokémon has a set of stats (IVs, Nature, etc) that determine how strong it is. We could each have a Pikachu, but if mine has bad stats, and yours has good stats, yours would win every time.

But while the stats can vary, there’s a fixed range that they can fall in, from 0 to 31 ¹.

When you catch or breed a Pokémon, these stats are randomly assigned, and it’s really rare to get a Pokémon with perfect 31s across the board. There’s in-game ways to manipulate your odds (and even change the stats directly I think?), but even with all the tricks, it’s still a long and tedious process to get a Pokémon with perfect stats.

In one video I watched, Competitive Pokémon is STILL a full time job (if you don’t cheat…), it took the Youtuber over 8 hours of boring work to create a single competitively viable team, with the right stats, moves, and items.

And he used a glitching technique called RNG Manipulation to do some of it, which appears to require a fair bit of knowledge and skill to pull off.

And then, if you want to tweak your Pokémon at all, or try a different team, you have to start over again!

So now we understand the desire to externally “modify or create items [and] Pokémon” – it saves you a lot of time!

But here’s the weird part – having an IMP doesn’t give you any actual advantage in the game!

After all, these Pokémon are ultimately represented as memory on your Nintendo Switch, and there’s a fixed range of valid memory states.

If you go through all the effort to catch/breed the perfect Pokémon, you might end up with a data structure that could be represented like this:

{
    "id": "25"
    "species": "Pikachu"
    "speed_iv": 31
    "defense_iv": 31
    "attack_iv": 31
    // ... etc
}

But if I hacked my game’s memory directly, and modified my Pikachu to have perfect stats, it would be represented in memory in the exact same way!

The IMP Pikachu is literally identitical to the non-hacked one. And you can’t hack the stats to be higher than 31 – the code would flag the Pokémon as corrupted and refuse to use it ².

So, then, why is it illegal?

The first comparison that came to mind to me is with Magic the Gathering, a game I’ve been playing for a long time. Magic is a trading card game, with tens of thousands of unique cards, each with different effects.

These cards are made by a company called Wizards of the Coast (WOTC), and are sold in “booster packs” – a random collection of 10 or so cards. For you zoomers out there, these are a kind of physical lootbox. For the boomers, this is gambling for kids.

If you want a specific card, you either need to buy lots of packs, trade with somebody, or pay some third party a potentially stupidly large amount of money.

It can cost hundreds of dollars to buy a tournament viable deck of cards, and the set of cards that’s legal in tournaments changes every few months, so you have to keep buying new cards to keep up.

Orrrrrr you could go to your local print store and print out whatever cards you want for much much cheaper. After all, it’s just cardboard!

And so naturally, using counterfeit cards is illegal at official Magic tournaments.

Unlike with Pokémon though, the reason here is plain to see. Wizards of the Coast can’t charge you $6 for a booster pack that cost them six cents to make if it was legal to play with counterfeit cards!

The clear financial incentive for Wizards is why I’m confused about IMPs in Pokémon.

With Pokémon, you only have to buy your copy of each game once. There’s no recurring payments like booster packs in order to get game pieces.

It might take you hundreds of hours to random generate the Pokémon you want to use, but you don’t have to give the company any more money.

I can see a minor financial incentive in that, in order to have access to all the Pokémon, you have to buy some of older games in addition to the newest, but that’s gotta be small potatoes for the highest grossing media francise of all time.

So, unfortunately, I’m at a loss. I don’t understand why the Pokémon company should want to make hacked-in Pokémon illegal.

I gather that over the years there’s been drama in the Pokémon scene around this, with some people trying to create controversy by accusing people of IMPing, and others actually disqualified from tournaments because of it.

From what I can tell, most people in the community as a whole think (like I do) that IMPing shouldn’t be considered cheating, but there’s definitely people that feel strongly the other way.

If you’re a competitive player and have opinions about all this, especially if you disagree with me, I’d love to hear from you!

On my end, as a newcomer to competitive Pokémon, I think it’s a shame. If I could make a competitive Pokémon team quickly, I think I might actually give tournament play a try.

I love these games, and want more people to get the chance to play them. These kinds of games are most interesting to me when there’s diverse metas, where people can try out cool new things without having to pay an arm and a leg to experiment.

I would never have gotten into Magic as a teenager if it cost as much then as it does now, and I’m choosing to not play Pokémon today because of how tedious it seems to make a competitive team.

Please Pokémon: free the IMPs!