QuentinQuonce
formerly green_typhlosion
Ah I wasn't sure if it was scrubbed or was one of those that would turn into one of the master ribbons! That's cool then, I guess it is "kept" in a sense in that case.I believe that it would be like any hacked ability: it just resets it to whatever would be the default for that Pokemon. I think it's based specifically on personality value
I'm less sure how this works, I'm not even sure you can trade or do anything with the debug copy at all.
But I assume one of 3 things:
1. if the ribbon didn't even have an image, it's probably just scrubbed on transfer
2. if the ribbon did have an image, and only the text differed, then it's probably kept
3. If the ribbon had an image, it's possible it got overwritten by another ribbon and would likely kept the text. I know at least one of the unused gen 3/4 ribbons got replaced internally, I imagine that applied to others
e: OK I did a little more digging and might have an actual answer
If this is referring to the Mystery Event that awarded ribbons, then how those worked is it paired text with a Ribbon (Gen 3 had a lot of writable stuff like this, which is interesting). There were only 7 ribbons but a lot of different text it could assign to them. Gen 4 kept those ribbons, so if you hacked them in they should keep moving forward, but Gen 5 did indeed change some of the ribbons and their associated text. Marine Ribbon turned into the Battle Champion ribbon, for example.
Ironically some of the replacements were ALSO never used, but they not only still kick around the code they even give proper titles if you apply them.
And I believe it should be possible to trade/battle/transfer from debug copies: it's basically a regular copy of the game just with a few extra bits of code available. You can activate debug mode on retail copies of various games if you know how (I'm a long-time Jak and Daxter player and a button combination activating a limited debug mode was discovered a few years ago); to the best of my knowledge it's not possible on unmodified retail cartridges but it's not really my area.