What is botting?
I was goin through the Q&A's and saw multiple people discussing about how botters take down the gyms. what exactly are botters and how does this botting work?
Answers
One thing is spoofing, where you fake the GPS location but this isn't botting. Botting is if a computer is doing all the action like hatching, catching and spinning pokestops. I think that botting isn't possible anymore and a lot of them got banned, but spoofing is still possible.
Note: Be careful with accusing someone as botter/spoofer, sometimes I enter a gym fight, turn of my GPS and then continue the battle from a warm place. It looks like spoofing but isn't.
Easy, other players will see you, suspect that you are taking down the gym and wait for you to leave to retake the gym and place a mon there, or go to other gym close, take it and then come back, try to make your gym battles harder, if you are not there no one knows when you can start taking it down or up, so you have an advantage over the rest of players ;)
And about the gps working bad it is not an excuse, it has happened to me a LOT, and now they have quite fixed it, if you get an error just relog and you can continue the battle in a minute, some months ago you were not allowed to go back to that gym in a lot more time.
I don't know the difference but personally I don't care for people that fake GPS and go to any place in the world to complete their pokédex, it does not affect me, what I wanted Niantic to do is ban everyone that takes gyms without being there, from a computer at home, I have been dealing with this on my town since the beggining of the game, reported 3 known cheaters and still waiting for Niantic to ban those people...And I know they are hackers because I stay on the gym some minutes after taking it down and no one is around.
NOTE: if they are gonna implement trading then I do realize that actually it affects me, just ban all hackers do what they do ;)
Niantic seem to be taking some action against spoofers - we had a problem in my town, all playing for Instinct (btw, there are clean Instinct players in my town who I respect as gym opponents). They would take gyms without being around, sometimes jumping between two gyms where there is only one physical route. I'm not sure what they got out of it other than fun - they never put great Pokes down, and would do it multiple times a day, so it wasn't just for coins/dust.
Suddenly they vanished...
Everyone hates bots. Everyone hates spoofers. I don't understand why tracking is generally accepted, it gives a massive advantage.
Players on here use trackers and say "yea you don't have to spend money on incubators to have a good lineup, I have tons of top tiers, just be patient and keep looking!" Neglecting to mention they are using a tracker.
I really wish they would shut that down. The argument that the in-game tracker sucks just adds to the fact they have even more advantage over regular players.
Yes, trackers are still around and much better than FPM, they tell you moveset and IV's too. They are shared between few people are not public though. Excluding some Twitter accounts that post the most important finds.
These people generally have their Pokédex full of powered up Dragonite etc.
I think it's lame and boring, personally.