Specialist Says Over Half Of The Teams Used in The 2023 Pokémon World Championship Were Hacked
On August 11th, the news broke that competitors were getting disqualified from Worlds for the use of illegal Pokémon. Ever since the community has been embroiled in a heated discussion about the use of these types of Pokémon.
One of the most utilized third-party tools used to generate hacked Pokémon is called PKHex, mentions of this tool have surfaced the web for over 10 years but its most famous publication is the one currently posted to the Project Pokémon forum by the user Kaphotics. This version of PKHex has been downloaded more than 7 million times according to the file information provided by the website.
PKHex original publication on the Project Pokémon forum
Method used
Kaphotics is the creator of PKHex and has recently come out on Twitter claiming over 50% of all teams utilized on the 2023 VGC Pokémon World Championship had at least one hacked Pokémon. All of his findings and data mentioned in this article can be found on his thread and document:
In his report, he analyzed more than 850 rental teams, these teams were put available by the players themselves and can be found in known depositories. Ironically enough his core analysis comes through the use of PKHex where Kaphotics was able to identify some characteristics that are commonly seen in genned Pokémon.
A new hack check was implemented by The Pokémon Company in the World Championship which looked into Pokémon’s “HOME Tracker”, a 63-number utilized to track the upload and movement of Pokémon through the many Pokémon HOME cloud servers. For example, if a player had Urshifu, a Pokémon only acquired in previous titles, and its HOME Tracker was set to 0 this meant the Pokémon was generated within Pokémon Scarlet and Violet which is not possible.
Other more obvious flaws were identified such as Pokémon with illegitimate EV amounts, missing RNG correlations, and also overkill usage of PP up, the latter cannot be directly correlated to an illegal Pokémon however, as mentioned by Kaphotics in his documentation, it can be seen as an enormous red flag.
Allegations
In his findings, Kaphotics noted that Regulation D was the regulation with the most number of rental teams uploaded. Even so, the split between legal and illegal teams has kept relatively the same as previous Pokémon competitions.
Two of the teams dissected by him were Shohei Kimura’s, this year’s first-place team, as well as Tang Shiliang, the player who beat famous player Wolfe Glick in the deciding final round of Day 01. Both teams displayed Pokémon with incorrect RNG correlations meaning they were not generated through normal means.
Conclusion
With each iteration of the Pokémon mainline games, it has become increasingly more difficult to capture and train tournament-ready Pokémon, either because the process is painstakingly long or because you are forced to actually buy previous titles of the game.
Players obviously should not go against official rules and those who break them will get punished however it is on TPC as well as Game Freak to level the playing field for all competitors if esports is something they are interested in. Both in 2022 as well as in his latest Twitter thread Kaphotics ended his report with the following message:
“In closing, nothing has changed, and I’m not optimistic for things changing going forward. At Worlds, GameFreak could have revealed new features with massive changes to accessibility, but they did not. Scarlet & Violet continue to have the same hurdles, and cheaters gonna cheat.”
