Hello Pokemontrades.
You can all take this how you please. Lets talk about event farming.
It comes down to a something fairly simple we all learned while in grade school: Supply and Demand.
First let me begin with stuff like Coro Coro Garchomp, PCBCs, PC Scizor/Gengar and Coro Coro Charizard. These events were distrubted in early XY. You had to actually order the Coro Coro magazine in order to get the code for Charizard and Garchomp. Fast Foward to right now. How often do you see Coro Charizards for trade? or better yet, a Coro Garchomp? You don't, because there are very few that exist around this place because they were not mass farmed. These hold a very high value. Lets say you have a PC Froakie. Thats a 1 day event in Japan. That should be pretty rare wouldn't you think? Well not really. The time PC Froakie was given out is the time (Japanese) event farming really became a problem. Now lets compare the Froakie to the Coro Coro Garchomp. You were able to get the code for Garchomp for a month or two and the period to redeem the code was also a few months long. So why is this 1 day event less value then what seems to be a fairly easy to obtain code event? There are ~7 total Coro Garchomps on the sub while there are a good 20+ PC Froakie on the sub. I can snap my fingers and have a PC Froakie in front of me in a matter of minutes, depending on what I'm offering of course but for me to find a Coro Garchomp will be much more challanging.
Now lets see GameStop Diancie. Everyone was so happy that finally NA got an event. Some people couldn't really contain themselves. At the beginning the value of a Diancie Code was about 2-3 shinies, as time went on the value dropped and dropped and dropped. Why? Because instead of taking one or two codes and putting them up for trade, they instead advertised they had 100 codes (I'm not making this up, somebody really did have 100+ Diancie) Fast forward about a month into the distubution of Diancie. You look on the front page and all you see are threads with "FT: Diancie Codes". The value has dropped from a solid 2-3 shinies to 1 shiny. Fast foward a little more, there are EVEN MORE Diancie codes! People are literally giving them away because they don't have the time to redeem themselves. The value of a single Diancie code dropped down to about 1 5IV Breedable. The supply heavily outweighed the demand.
Hoarding: Some people don't condone this, but it can work into your advantage quite well. The perfect example of this is the Worlds Aegislash. A lot of people are aware that a large group of users from the sub all went to Worlds together with the main goal of farming this event. There are easily 50 Aegislash on this sub that have never seen a trade thread. So why does Aegislash hold such a high value still? There are so many of them! Because the people who farmed/obtained these events did not go on the sub the next day trying to trade them for anything and everything they could get their hands on. Another great example are Walmart Garchomp/Scizor. This event was given by code when you bought a copy of X or Y from Walmart in North America. North America! There will be tons of these. Wrong! In early XY when these events were active shinies were like gold. You would see a Walmart Garchomp being traded for a mere 2-5 shinies. Something that would never happen today. Fast Foward to now. How often do you see Walmart Garchomp/Scizor for trade? Not very often. The people who grabbed these for super cheap way back in the day held on to them and waited for the DEMAND to rise.
Now lets look at some events which should be rare and valuable, but really arent. Facebook Charizards is the prime example. 2000 codes in total given out, thats a really small number for the whole world right!? A handful of users made duplicate FaceBook accounts in order to get more codes. I know of one person who got 10+ codes just by themselves. So while there are only 2000 codes in the world, but lets say 400 ended up on the sub the challange for you to obtain one becomes very small. Singapore Gengar is another good example. There were 3000 codes total given out IN SINGAPORE (You actually had to be at the venue in Sinagpore to receive code paper) Myself and lots of other users thought this would be out of reach for most of us. On the day of the event 1 code showed up, people went nuts! Then another, then another, then one person had 2 codes, then 3, then 4. You get where I'm going with this. Something that was suppose to be exclusive turned into something mediocore (Mostly cause the NA Gengar was going on at the time, and the only difference was OT/ID so really only hardcore event collectors would care about that)
/r/pokemonexchange has a very very very big effect on our event values. The amount of people selling on Exchange has tripled even in just the last month or two. I had mentioned earlier in this post that when PC Froakie/Piplup and such were active is when event farming became a real problem. Now I'm not going to tell you to not buy, I'm not going to tell you to not sell. I do it myself. Just be aware of what you are doing when asking/farming these events. PC Froakie/Piplup were 1 day each. It theory these should be worth quite a bit. 1 day, In Life, Japanese. In this case there was a very large demand but the supply still outweighed it. Same goes with Coro Rayquaza codes. Sure they are free, and the period that they hand them out is fairly long but when somebody gets 10 codes just for them alone then try to trade them all at once, you're flooding the market.
In conclusion. The main reason for this post is for the upcomming VGC Pachirisus. I know you're all excited to get your hands on something other then a Wifi Event and even expand your own collection by trading these things. Just remember one thing: Supply and Demand. The more people that farm. the less demand there will be, in turn making the value lower and lower and lower. You're not only screwing yourself out of something good but also screwing your fellow traders. If you want to make the most out of this event/experience don't go and post a thread on exchange offering reservations, don't take 8 of them and put them all for trade at once. Trade your precious rodents for something you want, don't just settle.
Thats all folks. Happy trading!