When the ISO was leaked Sabresite said that they are not sharing the memory cards for two reasons that he thinks are good.
1st - The research is not done. We are missing two memory cards with important information.
Ok so what if you never find them? Will the community never have access to this simply because you can't find it?
It's been THREE years and no update has been given! We understand this things take time but a simple little update would make the difference.
At this point you should really think that you may never find them and share what you have.
2st - We don't want people creating effectively really expensive and rare pokemon as fakes to sell on ebay or whatever.
They already are doing that! So giving more supply and making it available to everyone would make the problem go away.
Of course that there are always two ways of looking at this problem but by that logic you would delete every event Pokémon on PP...
People give all of you stuff on the hopes that you preserve and share it so that everyone can enjoy it, you've done it so well in the past so why stop now?
He proceeded to delete his message, which makes it all more weird. We understand you have your reasons but a little communication would go a long way, talk and explain so that we can understand.
I understand and highly respect all the work you guy have done for this community. You ask us to "let the geniuses ponder what to do" but you keep it to yourselves when we function so much better as a community.
Me and I believe that many others would like to help but we don't even know where to start.
Stuff like the Pokémon Data Structure page on Bulbapedia are wonderful and should be more praised. If everything was documented then more people could learn and help. You can be a genius but two heads think better than just one.
Just look at the amazing decompilation projects. We can do so much better as a community!
If you guys are facing a blocking point then communicate and share so that we can all help!
So yeah, after three years we would expect at least a little update and not the attitude of what looks like you're just keeping things to yourselves. Transparency would be key in understanding what is happening here.
Sorry for the delayed reply on this, I have been on vacation the past few weeks and didn't see this comment chain until last night. I will try my best to provide a “little communication,” and hopefully provide some insight. For what it is worth, we all do still intend for all of this to be published – the same way that every other distribution that we’ve ever acquired in the past has been published.
Firstly, I will say that lots of progress has been made, although at a pace much slower than any of us were hoping for. Some of our main bottlenecks right now are obviously related to the custom hardware piece; one of which has been scheduling times to travel and meet with the necessary people to check out the hardware in-person. There have been some other concerns brought up privately about some legal matters with the physical hardware. At the risk of sounding like a dickhead, I would say I cannot talk about these at this time. Just to let you know that the silence on this matter hasn’t been a deliberate reason to keep people in the dark, more of a concern to cover the appropriate risks for the people involved.
Sabresite’s concerns that you mentioned are still valid in my opinion (in addition to other concerns that you didn’t mention); but I don’t entirely disagree with your stance on the matter either. Sabresite talked more about his concerns a bit in the cancerous “/ppg/” discord a while ago, I’m not going to try and paraphrase them or speak for him or anything, but if you are in that discord, you are more than welcome to search back through and see his/our messages on the matter. One thing I will try and clear up is that while we are concerned about people selling fake event Pokémon/Distribution devices on eBay to unsuspecting buyers, some degree of that will never be preventable (unfortunately) no matter how many PSAs or warning are published. What is of larger concern, at least regarding preservation, are
extremely convincing fakes that are pawned off privately to collectors and preservationists alike. This isn’t some boogeyman or theoretical idea of something that
could happen; this is something that actively happens and has had a hindrance to preservation (which is insane to think about when you really think about how small this niche community is, but I digress lol). As you may or may not know, there has been at least one person on Instagram who has managed to create some form of a fake 10 ANNIV Celebi distribution cartridge. This person has also created a fake GBA distribution device, with a seemingly metallic bracket and security tape. They have claimed to have made deals with other people regarding both of these things. We are fortunate enough to have people in the community that were able to spot the discrepancies of both of these things, but this person very easily could have attempted to present both of these as genuine. A different malicious user in Japan successfully scammed an event collector with a modified wondercard from the gigaleak. We helped this user in preserving their data (in the hopes that it was an event we had not preserved yet), and it wasn’t until then that we realized they had been scammed. The last thing any of us would want to do is end up presenting something like this as authentic.
In terms of working with people like Goppier and Undead, I am actually pretty close with both of them, and I know they would both be more than willing to help out if our current endeavors reach more roadblocks.The very last thing I’ll mention is that as a “team,” we have spent many tens of thousands of dollars on acquisition, preservation, and research efforts for event and distribution related things. Heck, myself alone I have spent thousands, and I’ve spent nowhere near as much as others involved; all while we have collectively recouped nearly $0 in return. Hopefully our track record speaks for itself, but we have no interest in being “hoarders” or anything like that. Sorry again about the delay on this, but if you have any other questions (even anything privately), feel free to reach out to me here or on discord or something. Merry Christmas Eve.
Hopefully more updates to come in the next few months, and ideally a video to share about it as well.
