As many readers should already be aware, Pokemon Diamond and Pearl are only a few months away from an American release.
This makes me wonder... There are many websites on the net where you can buy items for use in MMO games, will this soon follow with Pokemon?
The new Pokemon games will have a wi-fi element added to them for online play and online trading.
This makes me think that we may soon see a large number of websites pop up allowing people to purchase Pokemon and/or items that will then be transfered over via the Internet.
The easiest way for a reseller to get items would be to use a GBA pack and a cheat unti, but that leads to a problem.
How do you get the stuff from the GBA game into the DS game?
Diamond and Pearl allow for up to 6 Pokemon trades between DS and GBA per day. This means you could move up to 6 items from the GBA game to the DS game for selling.
In order to for an e-tailer to make any money at this they would need to own multiple copies of the DS games and have either a good sized staff or a lot of free time.
Lots of free time?
Yes, even trading between GBA games takes about a minnute per trade. You also need to catch the Pokemon traded into the DS games so I would expect a large number of Wurmples being used as carriers of these items.
What about Pokemon?
Yes, strong Pokemon would also be traded.
However, the ability scores of the Pokemon would need to be made evident before a sale could go through. Any Pokemon that were substandard due to an overuse of Rare Candy would quickly become obvious. This means hand raised Pokemon would fetch a premium.
There is also the case of breeders who prefer to acquire level 5 freshly hatched Pokemon in trades.
I don't know how much people will be willing to pay to buy a freshly hatched Pokemon but it can take a good ten minutes of real time to hatch an egg.
What about unique Pokemon?
Uniques could sell for a high price, especialy if they have optimal scores.
The thing about the GBA games and the cheat packs that go with them is that it is very easy for someone to save their save game data on their PC and then trade away their uniques.
After the uniques are gone they can restore the save game and repeat!
One potential way to avoid this would be to tell the seller to change the Pokemon's name to a name of your choice prior to trading. Depending on which Pokemon you are buying this could stop some sellers in their tracks if they have a large "Farming" community behind them.
It will be interesting to see if Nintendo has thought of this and built in some sort of "clone checker" into their online play system.
I have mixed emotions about this. As a player I want to battle against people who have trained their Pokemon on their own. I do not want to fight against "farm raised" Pokemon who have been cloned and sold. I also see the revenue potential in running a Pokemon farm...
Time will tell.