There finally taking care of cheaters!!!
Alright so in a previous post someone said there finally gonna take care of cheaters by putting an astrick (like barry bonds should have) next to the Pokémon and there gonna perform differently or something like that. But there saying it's for bots and not spoofers. Can someone explain this to me? Isn't spoofers the real problem? Isn't there a way to tell if people are catching Pokémon at the real location? Are those people gonna get the astrick to? I don't even know what bots are aren't they essentially spoofers?
Answers
A bot is a program that connects and pretends to be the game client and catches pokemon for you, unattended. Part of this process involves reporting fake GPS coordinates (spoofing) - but the system a bot runs on may well not be a phone (I'm not sure what platform the common bots run on)
Spoofing is the using various methods to convince your phone that you're in a different location than it is. There are applications that do this, some designed specifically for pogo.
There is no way to be certain that a pokemon was actually caught at the location, though there are obviously ways that they can deduce that one wasn't (for example, obvious spoofing where you're teleporting long distances)
I don't really know how they can tell if a pokemon was caught by a bot, but I imagine the reason they can't do this for spoofers, is it is impossible to tell.
For example, if I see a Dragonite on the local scanner, and ride my bike to get it, how is that any different than if someone spoofed there? I guess I don't see how they would be able to tell the difference.
There are probably some ways to detect spoofers, especially if the bot's algorithm is relatively crude:
-Obviously, as mentioned above, if your trainer is constantly jumping distances of more than a few km at a time, that should be a dead giveaway. If at 9:00 you're in New York and in LA an hour later, then either you've built your own hyperloop or you're faking your location. Even jumps of shorter distances can probably in some circumstances be flagged as questionable.
-There are probably also patterns of walking that are reliably identified with spoofers. Real humans, even if they're riding in a car or something, trace a relatively continuous and messy path across the map. If someone is walking in impossibly perfect straight lines, or almost never seems to walk at all but just is constantly hopping a few hundred meters at a time from catch to catch or gym to gym, that's pretty obviously a spoofer.
I'm sure bots have gotten sophisticated enough to avoid some detection by Niantic, but I'd be surprised if they can ape a real human's playing habits so well that Niantic's engineers can't, if they are so inclined, build anything good enough to catch them.
Right, with longer distances it is clear, but in the suburbs, where I live, it can be a lot harder to tell. I agree if the game is left open, that is also another way to tell, but I generally don't leave the game open when I drive or ride bike, so it should appear that I jumped from my house to the park.
I guess at the end of the day I don't know how it all works very well, but if I had to make a guess and use the common sense I have, I can see why it would be harder to detect spoofer's pokemon if they aren't being careless. I mean even going from gym to gym...if I were to try spoofing I would make it look at natural as possible, hitting gyms at different time intervals to make it look as if I was traveling to them. Maybe it wouldn't be that easy, I don't know.
I would be pretty surprised to learn that spoofers do most of their spoofing in the suburbs, for the simple reason that it's probably difficult to really rack up XP by doing so. Aren't pokemon (and especially pokemon that are close enough to pokestops to show up on the Nearby radar) pretty spread out out there? Seems to me that almost everyone who is determined enough to cheat that they'll go to the trouble of spoofing is going to be spoofing into urban areas, where the density of catches is much greater.
Agree if you look at it one by one, but when you see a log of catches that are seconds from each other, chaining the 200 or whatever limit they have on now on pokémon you can get per day then you can tell that it is a bot program not an actual human playing.
And for spoofers again they probably can't tell one by one, but when you see a chain of for example Blissey, Larvitar, Tyranitar, Snorlax, Lapras, Chansey, Dragonite, Snorlax, Lapras....Then you can be sure that player is a spoofer, no one could ever chain for example 4/5+ of the top tier mon without cheating and just looking at the stamp locations you can tell that no one can jump the world in a matter of minutes.
On top of that they can confirm it easily even by looking at that player box, that is what I said since a looong time ago, put a filter for example one month when a new gen hits, look at the most powerful mon of that gen, for example Tyranitar and Blissey, if the player has 20+ of them in a month, insta ban, ask for questions later, but ban that account first, chances of getting wrong and banning a legit player are soooo low.
I agree with you for the most part. You still have to consider the person's location. I was blown away when I looked at the local scanner for the first time. There is easily a minimum of 20 Snorlax a day and 10 Lapras a day. If you are doing nothing but driving around catching Snorlax, you can get 3 or 4 in a couple of hours. Obviously that is significantly less than a spoofer could get, but you get my point.
Just for a rough comparison, when my buddy first told me about the local scanner (he runs it,) he told me that he has caught over 150 Snorlax. I know for a fact he doesn't spoof, but if you are able to catch multiple Snorlax a day just by knowing their location, they can add up. Obviously that shows the advantage that scanners can give people if you are willing to put in the time...
Scanners are against the TOS so technically is cheating anyways. They access Niantic's servers and players that use them (mostly in places as you describe) have a HUGE advantage.
I am not saying it is the same, but you could be banned for using trackers the same way a spoofer does. So my points are still valid, no legal player will violate any of the conditions I stated, getting 10 Snorlax or Lapras in a row driving around and knowing where they are is not "legal" playing, so Niantic should be able to tell if you do so, no one walking will get 10 Snorlax in a row, ever.
Well, that is exactly what is being discussed below, about why they don't just ban people outright. This has been discussed before, and about a week ago someone on here posted that he found out like 85% of the players followed the local scanner. That is exactly the point. I have rarely run into a player that doesn't or hasn't used a scanner. If those people were to get banned, Niantic would be eliminating AT LEAST 85% of their player base, which are also the people that are spending the most money. They would cripple their business for the few "legit" players that can claim on the internet that they have NEVER cheated. As you said...look at their pokemon and you be the judge of it.
They still want their money. LOL
The pokemone with an asterisk won't be able to be put in gyms and may not be able to be selected to battle in gyms.
I can't believe the number of 100% pokes this one spoofer in our city has in his account. He must spoof all over the world collecting 100% perfect mons. It is sick. Hope he is banned for it but if he can't use any of those pokes in gyms that works for me too. Hopefully these people who teleport all over the world in the matter of minutes are flagged.
Probably due to the potential of a catch being misidentified as illegit.
I once got a softban, for example, because I checked my phone in a place with dodgy GPS reception (subway tunnel, in Boston MA on the east coast of the US) and as I tried spinning the stop, I'm like "wait, this doesn't look familiar", as I see the stop is called the pacific somethingorother; by all appearances, the GPS had briefly thought that I was somewhere on the pacific coast. It sorted out my location seconds later, and I was softbanned, which put the kibosh on my planned gym battles that evening.
The problem with softbans is that you can clear them by spinning a pokestop 40 times. That's how many spoofers get around the jump from California to New York. They teleport, spin a stop which checks the location and they get softbanned. Then they spin the Pokestop 40 times until it gives them items and they aren't banned, and then they continue catching Pokemon in the new location.
Also, the Pokemon snipers are a bit different. They have a 'Home' location saved on their GPS spoof application and they teleport to where a known pokemon is (usually a top tier or 100% IV pokemon) and they touch the pokemon to bring up the catch screen. At this point the Pokemon app still doesn't know they have teleported because they haven't thrown a pokeball or spun a Pokestop. Then the spoofer will teleport back to the 'Home' location while on the catch screen, then catch the pokemon. This makes it look like they caught it at the starting point and not where it was actually spawned.
If Niantic would do two things, spoofers would be screwed:
-mark GPS location of where a pokemon spawns, and if it is caught at another GPS location-BAN
-Check a player's GPS location at other random times instead of only when a pokeball is thrown or Pokestop is spun
-Don't let a soft-ban be cleared after spinning a Pokestop 40 times. Make it only be cleared after a Niantic employee has reviewed recent logs/activity.
It's bonkers that Niantic isn't doing something as basic as these already. Only explanation I can think of (besides the obvious, that they don't care and possibly because they have reason to think that many cheaters spend money on the game) is that logging the location of every spawn is just too much data to store.
