Consider isolating Korean Pokémon on the GenIV GTS

[mm201]

It seems that on the original GenIV GTS, Korean games connected to their own isolated sandbox GTS. However, we have a much smaller player base than Game Freak did and it would be nice to keep them together if it can be done safely.

What this calls for is a fact-finding mission:

1. How does a Korean Pokémon behave on a foreign game? I've looked at them in GTS search results on an English game but never actually traded for one. Their names are question marks. I see no reason for them to be unstable but we should really check.
2. How do Korean games react to foreign Pokémon?
3. What happens if you evolve a Korean Pokémon on a foreign game and send it back?
4. What happens when a Korean Pokémon on a foreign game is brought into GenV? Does it perfectly match what a Korean Pokémon is supposed to look like on GenV if it were brought in via normal means?
5. I would like to see packet captures of Korean GTS use. Especially doing a search and uploading a Pokémon. The meaning of byte 5 in a search request is still unknown to me and it could be relevant.
6. What about Battle Tower, Battle Videos, etc? I would like to keep these together, especially with there being no risk of invalid Pokémon getting shared around.

[Araylea]

So I did end up with a Korean Magmortar trade evolution during my semi-recent playthrough of NTSC-U Platinum. Its name changed correctly from ??? to Magmortar during evolution. Didn't end up using it on my team, but nothing catastrophic seemed to happen when using it in battle, had no issues beating the game and completing the Sinnoh Dex, etc.

Since I already had Poke Transfer set up, I went ahead and picked up a Korean Magikarp from the GTS on my copy of HeartGold and sent it up to my copy of Black. Included some (low quality) phone photos taken of the process. What I did see was promising: the Pokemon/OT names transferred correctly and I even received the Korean dex entry. I didn't move it up to Gen VI, but Poke Transporter didn't flag it as a problematic Pokemon.

magikarp transfer.zip
original GTS listing

[Atrius97]

Korean copies of Gen 4 were originally isolated from other language games when the official servers were still active, and were incapable of connecting to Non-KOR games locally either.
The issue lied with the Korean copies being developed afterwards, so other language copies didn't have any Hangul characters programmed into the game.

Pal Park in KOR copies allows transfers from Gen 3 foreign games, because there wasn't any Gen 3 KOR games, so the Gen 4 KOR copies have "support" for any other language Pokemon, it's just that non-KOR Gen 4 games have no compatibility with KOR.

Emulators and fan servers tend to ignore this and permit KOR to non-KOR trades regardless, but this can cause issues for legality, as that transfer was never legitimately possible on official retail games/servers.

While nothing catastrophic will happen if the games manage to trade via third party tools (you may have visual glitches for the characters in Non-KOR copies), if the goal is to emulate the official servers as close as possible, KOR copies should indeed be isolated from other Gen 4 games with their own GTS instance.