Players who use hacked Pokémon will be restricted from using the online features in Pokémon Sword & Shield and prevented from using Pokémon Home, as part of a ban wave issued by The Pokémon Company. The Pokémon franchise has seen the effects of cheating since day one, due to a number of different factors.

The mainline Pokémon games have seen players resort to cheating in order to breed competitive Pokémon without wasting hundreds of hours actually breeding them. Finding a Pokémon with perfect stats and the correct Nature can take days of monotonous work, so it’s not surprising that fans would want to save themselves time by just writing that Pokémon into existence. Hacking has also extended to the spin-off games, with the creators of Pokémon GO recently winning a $5 million lawsuit against notorious cheat-makers.

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Pokémon cheaters will soon find themselves unable to use online features related to the games. According to Serebii, The Pokémon Company has announced that a new ban wave is incoming, and that it will affect players who have altered their save data. These types of ban waves will become a regular occurrence in the future, as a preventative measure against cheaters.

Those who receive bans will temporarily or permanently lose access to the online features in Pokémon Sword & Shield, which means that they won’t be able to battle online or trade with other players. The fact that all local tournaments have been shut down due to the ongoing pandemic means that this ban will prevent cheating in the short-term. Banned players will also be prevented from using Pokémon Home, which will make it a lot harder for them to trade Pokémon. This is all made more devastating for hackers and would-be cheaters by the fact that banned players will be refused refunds. The Pokémon Company might expand these measures in the future, though it’s unclear how it might proceed.

Cheating has been a thorn in the side of the competitive Pokémon Sword & Shield scene since day one. This issue isn’t just restricted to hacked Pokémon, as some people were exploiting bugs to try and avoid taking losses. The developer has since made it easier than ever to breed competitive Pokémon in the Galar region, but it can still be a lengthy endeavor, and not everyone has the patience for mass-breeding. A big part of the post-game experience for Pokémon Sword & Shield is taking part in online competitions against other players, and these ban waves will be a major component in keeping these events fair.

Pokémon Sword & Shield is available on Nintendo Switch.

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Source: Serebii

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Scott Baird
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Scott has been writing for Screen Rant since 2016 and regularly contributes to The Gamer. He has previously written articles and video scripts for websites like Cracked, Dorkly, Topless Robot, and TopTenz.
A graduate of Edge Hill University in the UK, Scott started out as a film student before moving into journalism. It turned out that wasting a childhood playing video games, reading comic books, and watching movies could be used for finding employment, regardless of what any career advisor might tell you. Scott specializes in gaming and has loved the medium since the early ‘90s when his first console was a ZX Spectrum that used to take 40 minutes to load a game from a tape cassette player to a black and white TV set. Scott now writes game reviews for Screen Rant and The Gamer, as well as news reports, opinion pieces, and game guides. He can be contacted on LinkedIn.

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