Spoofers are gunna spoof.
Hear me out, please.
If we can't stop GPS spoofing how about if niantic gives them their own mirror world for playing pokemon go.
Same spawns, same everything, except Gyms.
They populate their gyms, and we populate our gyms.
This way everyone can play but by giving spoofers their own world they don't ruin it for us non-spoofers.
A bunch (maybe around 15) of gyms near me got taken over by level 10 blue, Those gyms were never level 10 anything since the beginning of the game, then all of a sudden over night all of them level 10 blue. Yeah, sure not spoofers.
I can't prove it.
Let them play but on their own playing field.
Answers
The problem is that Niantic can't detect spoofers properly.
There's some obvious spoofers getting softbanned left and right that Niantic can easily flag, but there's also low key spoofers that play only on their city or even their neighborhood that are really hard to detect.
My guess is that when spoofing can be detect for sure, Niantic will block it totally.
Yes they could find spoof accounts very easily if they wanted to.
I could code it by the end of the day.
All mons have a location. I don't spoof so I am not sure if the location of where you find it, or where you catch it is the location recorded.
If the location it spawns is the location point listed, then running a script to find accounts that have collected mons from unrealistic distances within an unrealistic time period will instantly tell them which accounts spoofed.
That is, if the account catches a mon from Japan, a mon from Australia and a mon from Iceland in the same day, then clearly it is a spoofer.
If the location on a mon describes where it is caught and not where it spawns, then simply add another field stored server side, that describes where it spawns...and use that.
Even more accurately, you could have both fields, and if the distance between the spawn and catch location are vastly different, then spoofers could be located in real time.
This is not a difficult issue to solve, and could be done very quickly if they chose to.
If they did all of these options, it would catch the vast majority of spoofers today.
It would probably take less code than it took me to describe it.
- The information is kept recorded even when a trainer transfer the mon? This could add a lot of load for the servers if this information is not already kept, and spoofers could keep safely getting free candies from rare mons.
- This doesn't catch low key spoofers who spoof on their own city or even in a single random city on the world.
And answering your question, the information kept on the pokemon info is from where the pokemon spawned, not where it was caught.
- You said the information is based on where it spawns, and so the system is already in place to do it in real time. If the 'catch' location is vastly different to the spawn location, then you clearly have a spoofer, caught in real time - they are found BEFORE they get a chance to transfer the mon. This removes the need to run a resource intensive scan of all accounts.
It does not take massive amount of resources for a server to compare 2 fields, and it will be relieving load on the server as it locates spoofers and removes them.
Any additional load will be offset by the gains of removing spoofers.
It doesn't even need to run permanently...just do it periodically at random times so spoofers don't know when they will be 'checked'. - Just because it won't grab 100% of spoofers does not mean you should do nothing.
...also this would not be the ONLY method they utilise, but it will be very effective, in a very short period of time, with little work required to achieve a very significant outcome.
Agreed.
But I still think spoofing isn't as simple to detect as we imagine. For instance, Niantic have been combating cheaters activelly. There have already been massive ban waves for bot users and also android emulators users (today it isn't possible to play PoGo on a emulator like Nox or Bluestacks without getting banned in a week or so for example, and this method was very common in the early days).
So Niantic is doing something against cheaters and have been pretty effective against bots and emulators, but for some reason they apparently can't do much against phone spoofing. My guess is that they are trying to do something but it's a little tricky.
I was just thinking about the same thing today, and I agree this would be nice. I think to encourage them to voluntarily move to the spoofing mirror, they can bring their current account with them. But once they go there, they can't come back. I guess the only problem with this idea is that it goes against the theme of the game, but maybe they'd be willing to do it anyway.
It would be nice if there was a way for them to move about using maps in the mirror world, so they wouldn't actually have to spoof.
i dont see a technic solution to this(if the spoofer know what hes doing). PG needs location data to work, it loads the lat/lon value from your phone's sensors. and there are tools out there modify the value of those sensors. they are doing exactly the game developers do, so forget about it. the best they can do is to ban the "stupid" ones
I live in the suburbs of a big city and work in the riverside of the city. I meet trainers from all walks of life from all teams and come across open spoofers and botters. Here's my take on most of them. A lot of them are not hard core players like many of us here. Some of them don't even understand typing or gym strategies. I know a fellow teammate that I run into every now and then who has over 5 bot accounts and has multiple mobile devices. Because he spends time on each account he can't fully commit to any one of them fully thus resulting in very sub par mons and not that high of a trainer level of any of his accounts considering how much time he puts into it. He showed me the mons in his accounts and I wasn't very impressed with them. I think I had better mons. Also, I noticed that a lot of spoofers in my neighborhood are trainer levels in the mid 20's to upper 20's. They are really pathetic. I single handily give them trouble because they are in gyms basically walking distance from me. Almost every day my routine is to take them down, they come back and I keep taking them down. Eventually they stop for a while because they know that they aren't going to last long enough to collect coins. I take those gyms not to collect coins but to prevent them from become fixtures from the view of my home. It's a pride thing. Lot of cheaters don't have the patience to nurture one account which results in mutliple watered down versions and not very impressive accounts. Sure, there are some that have 100 dragonites, 20 Tyranitars and 150 snorlaxes but most of the cheaters do not have the patience or the will to grind - even from their computers. They probably don't care if any of their pathetic accounts get banned because they aren't attached to them. The tender love and care legit players like most of us here that give to ONE account is much more cherished - I would literally cry if I lost my one and only account that I grinded every single day since July. Cheaters don't give a f&ck about their accounts.
I think the detection difficulty is with spoofers who's virtual travel speed is plausible. I'm pretty sure this kind exists in large numbers. I'd hate to be banned, because I drove somewhere and was active in two different places a couple of hours apart. So, false detection is probably worse than possible spoofers not being detected.
That may be true but slow speed spoofing is like a gateway drug. They do it for a while, then the high dissipates and need something stronger. They start to go over the speed limit getting multiple soft bans. They keep pushing the limit and start teleporting a little here and there to snipe rare mons. Then they go to town and becoming full time botters/world snipers and get banned. Game over.
I'd rather have niantic invest their time in banning spoofers and creating new features to make the game interesting instead of creating an entirely same server which will bare the same amount of money to maintain. besides that would mean that we'd probably get a new gameplay update in about half a year and I cant wait that long. so instead of rewarding spoofers by giving them even less competition for gyms punish them?
