bots and Niantic
I've spent quite some time, effort and money on the game, but since bots have taken over my town and Niantic does nothing to stop them (despite several reports from many players) I'm not seeing much point in playing this game apart from collecting daily bonus, the local player base is eroding as it is.
Perhaps when Niantic servers are overloaded with bots fighting each other they will start thinking. I for one am not giving a single cent to Niantic until they fix this massive problem.
Answers
ran myself raggard tonight trying to hold a 2 gyms against a ghost. Niantec doesn't seem to give a shit and i bet that none of these tools actually spend money (why do you need to when you can reliably hold so many gyms). i am going to do daily bonuses only and strongly suspect i will be quiting this game soon.
I think one of the ways to slow bots down could be limit the gyms you can be at and top tier mons you can have by now without cheating.
I have seen spoofers around the city that are on more than 40 gyms, that is crazy and insane, people that has 10 Blissey and 20 Dragonite and 20 Tyranitar all over 3300CP and that are on 40+gyms should be automatically deleted accounts, there is no need to ask, is common sense, look at the pokémon boxes of players and ban them, ask for reasons later, look at the players names, ban all of them with strange string names like "asfoeqsdaqzYsasz", give 24h to show proof they are not bots, but act first always and ask later, not the other way.
They are not approaching the problem correctly, right now there are more cheaters than legit players, if it was the other way around then yes, be careful on what you do because you can make mad legit players, but we are already mad because of the insane amount of cheaters...on my town I can see it every day, gyms don't stop during all day long, changing hands and random lures being used with string names that no legit player would ever use.
I have always think that in life, when things go bad, is when you really know how is people, and the same can be applied with companies, they are more worried about showing that 580M carps were caught during the event than asking, how many of them were caught by botters, spoofers and cheaters? I bet around 75% of them, probably even more.
Yeah, no point battling bots, with spoofers it's different as they are doing it manually on their phones, but bots is impossible to deal with. Limiting number of gyms that can be held may be a solution (say 15 max), but the problem is that the bots have multiple accounts with high level mons so they can basically cover the whole area with 4 accounts each placing 15 mons in the gyms. And, tbh, I don't even understand why Niantic is so slow with banning those accounts since they surely must have the tools that show them that these are bots. Make no mistake, we're talking about 100% certainty that these are bots, not legit players so I don't understand how banning those accounts can hurt any legit players.
The most obvious reason is probably the truth, they don't care about players not taking gyms and slowly leaving the game, they are just worried about their numbers, they want to be the most played game no matter how, it is not the same saying you have for example 1 milion players than having 200k, the same with accounts numbers, hours played, mon caught etc...
They should be embarrassed about this, don't caring at all about their legit players, I really hope that tons of people are stoping paying money to play, if we hurt their pockets probably they will realize that spoofing/boting is THE ISSUE, not another thing to care about, it is the thing and has to be fixed today, not tomorrow.
I am almost sure that if all the non legit accounts are baned they will lose like 60% of their accounts at this point, even more maybe. Pages selling accounts by bots are everywhere, the same with spoofers/hackers and multi account users.
Yeah, probably true, we don't really know the real percentage of cheaters, obviously varies by region and specific location, but I'm not quite sure how sheer numbers help Niantic, I would imagine what interests them most is the "whales" who spend a lot of money on this game - if they piss those people off and they leave Niantic are in deep trouble so I think they should really treat this botting disease as a top priority before it's too late.
I doubt executives at Starbucks and other companies who paid Niantic for "sponsored locations" know much about botting/spoofing... but I bet they were given all sorts of rosy numbers about how many "active" players there are. Bots aren't buying coffee when they spin stops though.
I wonder if the best way to finally get at the botting/spoofing problem would be to persuade companies like Starbucks to bring litigation against Niantic for misleading them about the mobile/location-based/human-player virtues of their game.
