Pokemon Bank and Transfer

I was discussing it with my Egyptian friend and he pointed out that illegally generated Pokémon could not be transferred, and naturally this worried both of us - me because I have a lot of Pokémon made in Pokegen and him because he uses AR codes to get certain Pokémon.

I can't blame Gamefreak at all, because cheated Pokémon are a thorn in the sides of anyone who battles competitively, unless they use cheated Pokémon themselves, but mostly it's a pain for people who work hard to get to the competitive tier. I'm also impressed that they've implemented a system that can filter out the "Pokémon that were created using software not licensed by Gamefreak", to give a direct quote.

But despite it, my friend and I figured out a way to get past it. Sooner or later, third-party GTS services like PokeGTS and PokeEdit will become compatible with X and Y, and those services aren't screened by Gamefreak. By using a copy of a 5th generation game on an R4, an SD card reader and PokeGen, you can transfer all your Pokémon onto a computer, and then use the GTS services to distribute them onto your X and Y game.

I'm also interested in the idea of a cloud based subscription service, like what Adobe has done with its products and the Adobe Creative Cloud. Poketransfer is free, and that's a good thing too, although it necessitates internet access. Normally this would be a problem for me because my DSi doesn't work with my house's internet settings, but then I remembered that a 3DS does so this won't cause any heartache. I'm glad that Gamefreak chose to implement a system that didn't require two consoles, as transferring between two consoles (especially in bulk) can be really time consuming.

As for PokeBank, you're paying for the privilege of the unique, one-console method of moving Pokémon between games with relative ease. 500 Yen per year isn't much, although I usually avoid payment services anyway. One question about the bank I'd like to ask is if using it to transfer Pokémon between two games counts as 'trading' a Pokémon, and can you use it to evolve certain Pokémon?

 

I'm cool with the system locking out hacked Pokémon, there's too much hack-fucking going on with Pokémon right now and I'm not a fan of it at all. Small fee is okay, I'm just curious if it will be the only possible way to transfer old Pokémon or not. I'm thinking it might be. I'd still like to see them keep IR transfer and battle around, but I imagine the IR stuff will be solely from Gen 6 to another Gen 6 game.

 

I don't really care about hacked Pokémon not being able to be transferred, it's not like someone worked hard for them like people do for legit Pokémon. Although there are many intricate ways to make a Pokémon look perfectly legit when you hack them, I wonder if it'll still pick up on that? Maybe as long as a Pokémon has legal IVs/EVs/Attacks/Everything, they can still be transferred? Who knows at this point. I hacked a shiny Axew for my boyfriend on Black 2; the only thing that I hacked for was its shininess, it'll be a little sad if it's not able to be brought to X and Y.

And I don't care about the fee, as it's very small and optional; I just hope they don't pile more fees on us for more features of the game...

 

I think the system is great. It makes it easy to transfer Pokémon fast. The problem for me is the fact that there will be a yearly fee. Depending on how much it costs that will bother my dad.

 

I've been waiting for something like this for as long as I can remember playing Pokémon.

 

Woo. I'd predicted Nintendo would do something like this sometime even before Gen V had been announced. And I think it's great. I remember transferring every Pokémon from Soul Silver to Platinum, and to Platinum to Black 2. It took time. Lots. Of. Time.
And I mean it. About 300 Pokémon the first time, then about 500 the second time (Although the gen 4>5 transferring game was much faster than standard trading). But being able to transfer entire boxes at a time, or even more? Yes, please.
Besides, I'm fairly sure Pokémon Bank will stick around for generations to come, at least for the rest of the Gen VI games and Gen VII. Maybe they'll keep it up to date instead of just releasing a new one, and even if they DID release a new one, you'd be able to transfer all your Pokémon, just like that.

Currently on Black 2, I'm having trouble keeping all my Pokémon. The boxes just weren't enough. You have all ~650 Pokémon, plus some repeats for breeding, and legendaries you caught in more than one game, and if you want a box for Dittos and a Pokémon with synchronize, you're done. That's it, no more space for you. If you keep one of each species of Pokémon, you only have space for less than 100 extra Pokémon. And even then, it sucks to have Pokémon cramped and not being able to find the one you need because you had to put it in a box where it "didn't belong" (I like to keep my PC veeery organized...)

Well, the only solution is, of course, something like this. And it'll reduce saving times, having, what, 10 boxes? It's more than enough for standard play. Imagine having to save a game with 100 PC boxes...

What I am wondering is what will happen to items. Will we be able to have the Pokémon hold them before sending them over to Pokémon Bank? And will we be able to access PBank in-game?

 

One thing I had just thought of, will this replace PCs completely? If so, that is bullshit and would actually make me not want Gen 6 any more. Imagine being forced to pay and being forced to have Wifi access (which not everyone has) just to store Pokémon you catch after 6.

I like to think I can't see it happening, but..

 

Oh my god, please no! That has to never happen!! I can see them reducing the number of in game boxes, so that there'll be a higher chance of people using the thing, but actually erasing it completely the in game boxes completely?! That'll ruin the game for me for sure! Not everyone has wifi connection and/or the money for such a thing. If they do this, what's stopping them from adding other fees to the 5 USD to make your wallet bleed?

Damn, Mr. Doima, such a terrible scenario you suggested.

 

Hopefully what Doima said wont happen even if it is a very low annual fee. I just realized that it would make starting a new playthrough so much easier though!!! all you have to do is put your Pokémon in the bank boxes and you can start over! Now I dont have to find friends that have a 3ds! This will make it so much quicker! Honestly I think they're sorta making up for their trademark one file per game with this so you can restart without having to find a friend and trading over sooooooo many Pokémon.

 

Yeah, overall it has so many positives, the (potential) negatives mean very little. Except one unknown: what happens if say, a year elapses and you haven't renewed your annual fee? Either way you will be locked out of your bank, which is awful, but the question remains: does the bank stay inactive in a frozen state, or does it and everything in it simply get deleted forever if you don't re-pay, to save server space? With such a small fee it's not a big deal but..what a terrible thought.

Also another reason why I hope there's still plenty of box space is that storing your beloved and valuable Pokémon in a server in someone else's hands comes with a risk. The server can go down, get stolen, get corupted, and your Pokémon along with it. It's great to store extras and transfer, absolutely, but the real keepers we need space for in game, where we know where they are.

I'm seriously not trying to ruin this for people, folks. I'm just rolling this idea and the particulars over in my head, and these terrible posibilities are what come out here and there.

 

I was thinking that if you have Pokémon in there and don't pay your annual fee, maybe they will let you take Pokémon out but not put anything in until you pay again. Then again, the annual fee is apparently needed for storage space, so they could delete your Pokémon. Although they seem to understand that our Pokémon mean a lot to us, so I would think they would make more of an effort to preserve them.

And yeah, the possibility of servers going down/corrupted/etc and such is very scary.

 

I'm pretty sure they'd give you some buffer time to renew your membership or at least take out your Pokémon if the year stops and you haven't renewed payment. Say, six months? 100 days? Hell, I dunno. But I seriously doubt they'd just go and delete your Pokémon. And if that happens they'd warn you like a month beforehand so you have time to take them out I guess. I can imagine somebody sueing nintendo for erasing that one Pokémon they've had since Emerald or something, hah.


Edit:
I've thought about it, and I think the annual fee is mostly an income. I doubt keeping the servers up would be so expensive, not with so many players paying, especially considering how each Pokémon file "weights" less than 1kb. Anybody who's ever dealt with hacked Pokémon knows a .pkm file size is of about... 200 bytes. BYTES. Nintendo probably has a different way of storing them, they might not use .pkm files, I don't know much about that, but, they can't possibly be larger than 1kb. And that'd mean each player could have 1mb of memory, tops. About every thousand players they'd have 1Gb. Say a million people get bank, and each has 1mb of memory, that'd be about 977Gb, not even a Terabyte of memory. And yet they'd be getting five million dollars per year for hosting (And doing maintenance and transfers, of course) a 1Tb server.

 

I'm not going to use it. I never needed all PC boxes provided ingame to have fun. Although i do support poke-transfer. Good job Gamefreak!

 

What sucks is that I have my Pokémon white game on an R4DS, so there's no way I can transfer my Pokémon :/ if only there was a work-around

 

Took me a short while to figure out how PokeBank worked - after a few minutes, it was too easy..

The only thing that disappoints for me a bit is that I can't transfer any items, I could have used an extra lucky egg or two, or the amulet coin. Have not tried transfering eggs, but I heard that isn't possible either, have a few I want to transfer over.
[my greatest joy has been accomplished - my shiny Mienshao (level 100) is now safe in it's new Kalos home].

 

I accidentally left my hacked Victini in the box, and it somehow got through. But for some reason, it wouldn't transfer my 100% legit Seismitoad and Breloom??? So yeah. I'm sort of mixed on the filter, there. On one hand, I appreciate that they're filtering stuff like that. One two other hands...1: if they didn't want people hacking event Pokémon, then they shouldn't make them so hard to obtain. (I can't drive 2 hours to the nearest Toys r Us just to get a Pokémon) and 2: The filtering goes all over the place. I'd like to transfer my legit Pokémon, plz.

Otherwise, it's an okay system I guess. I probably won't be using it beyond the trial, but it served its purpose well enough.

 

I think most people know this already, but I'll just say it now: the hack check is absolute shit. It let me get through a bunch of hacked shinies (okay, okay I AR'd them but I updated my DSi so now I can't) and a few I wasn't so surprised about. Shiny Mewtwo encountered at Cerulean Cave, hacked for shininess only, shiny Kyogre at that tower place in HG and Aerodactyl that I revived at the Pewter City Museum.

Either way, though, I'm just glad it's finally here.