GTS sabotaged by greed
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| This is an editorial by Argy. |
About the author
 Argy is the former editor in chief of Bulbanews, a style editor at Bulbapedia, and an administrator at Bulbagarden forums. |
The Global Trade Station (GTS), the innovative feature of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl that allows players to connect to Nintendo's Wi-Fi network and request and submit Pokémon for trade, is exciting and useful at first glance. However, once one delves deeper, one finds the novel premise has been ruined by a myriad of players making unreasonable and often impossible requests. Nintendo could be doing more to curb such greed.
GTS could be useful for making more-or-less equal trades, such as those involving version exclusives, such as Mime Jr. and Bonsly. However, offers like this are surprisingly scarce. Instead, searchers are met with impossible and thoroughly unreasonable requests for low-level, fairly common Pokémon.
When one searches for a Pokémon on GTS, a group of up to seven offers appears on screen. Each offer comes from someone almost anywhere on Earth. A quick survey reveals the downfall of the system.
For example, when searching for an Aipom, with no restrictions on gender or levels, I received these requests:
Who would trade such rare Pokémon as Palkia and Celebi for an Aipom? On top of that, Skuntank is not even available until it evolves from Stunky at Lv. 34. Nintendo should set proper limits so impossible requests such as this one cannot be made. They are a waste of the Wi-Fi network's resources and a waste of every player's time.
Of course, impossible requests such as a Lv. 9 Skuntank are not so impossible with the "help" of cheating devices. On GTS it has become extremely difficult to determine whether one is trading for a legitimate Pokémon or one that has been hacked. If only Nintendo could include a detector of some sort that weeds out hacked Pokémon, we would be better off and would feel better about trading on GTS. At the very least, the company should do more to educate players on how GTS works and encourage fair trading. A Palkia for a Dialga is fine, but for an Aipom?