Tracking is a much greater advantage than spoofing
If used isolated tracking beats other cheats by far, in my opinion.
When I walk my "nearby circle" has a radius of about 150m, that is 0.07 square km. I see maybe 25% of the mons in this area, if it is a dense spawn area, I can increase that by never stay put, always moving. I play a lot, probably on average 6h per day. I catch almost everything I see, on average 200 mons per day. So it is fair to say as a very effective "human scanner" that is what I get through per day.
Scanners, on the other hand, work on a completely different scale. Even a rather small city has easily 30 square km covered all time, that is about 400 times more than the human. It sees all mons in that area, and is alert 24/7. So it is fair to say using a scanner gives access to more than 1000 times more spawns than even a very dedicated human can see. You also have the valuable additional scanner information like IV, moves and time remaining.
Isolated, spoofing just makes you move around very fast. If I walk between to nearby gyms in my town it may take 20 min, a car make that 5 min and spoofer probably in seconds. But the time to take down and build up a high lvl gym is the same.
Of course, used in combination, scanners and spoofing gives an immense advantage.
Answers
Not agree at all. If you only track you have to GO to the mon, so a lot of time the mon you are seeing with the tracker may be too far away or it will have few minutes left until despawn. You have to track a small area if you want to get there in time.
If you use spoof you can teleport anywhere and catch any mon while sitting on your couch, and let's be serious, 99% of spoofers combine spoofing with trackers, while there are a lot of players that use trackers that do not spoof in anyway, they just use them to supply the bad in game tracker.
Also there are tons of players that like myself don't use a tracking or spoofing tool, but they are on FB and WhatsApp groups for their town/city or with friends and the people that shoutout the mon might be using those trackers.
Your way of thinking sounds so "Niantic", instead of taking down the real problem that are spoofers/botters we just screw trackers because we want people to get a hundred pidgey per day from our "sponsored stops" while missing a Dragonite that is 100m away.
There is no excuse for either of both, but we have not had a good tracker in game since the 3 steps one from the first weeks in my opinion it was the only that showed actually what is around you, I won't walk a km (that is where I have the nearest stop in my town) to get a pidgey while there is something good next to me, it would be stupid.
This is just my opinion but spoofing is for me way worse than tracking tools.
I agree totally that the ingame tracker is far from good and never has been.
When that is said, in my rather small town you can reach every 30 min spawn if you use a car, same as a spoofer. If you walk your reach is much less, but with a scanner you see what spawns that are "reachable" and you get alerted when they appear. I would say instead of a 150m radius (for one not using tracker) you get a 2km one, or more than 150 times the area covered without a tracker.
Practically every strong player that I meet in person uses SGPokeMap to determine where to walk (or which bus to take; driving is only for the very rich). Since the nerf to SGPokeMap (stupid icons), gym activity (which used to be sky-high) has significantly dropped and more gyms are occupied by obvious multi-accounting Instinct spoofers (with names that no local would choose). Kill SGPokeMap and most serious legit players would quit or switch to spoofing.
There are two Dratini spawns less than ten minutes' walking distance from my house but the Dratinis never show up on the in-game tracker. Nothing encourages exploring a nearby-but-unfamiliar area like seeing a Lapras there on SGPokeMap (during the Water Festival, of course).
The only feasible way to farm Machop or Shellder (for example; they rarely spawn under normal circumstances) is by making a trip to a nest. Since a nest changes every two weeks, how would you identify the nest and plan a trip to it (which some do in groups) without assistance from SGPokeMap (it would be different if a Machop nest would forever stay a Machop nest)?
Of course, the in-game tracker sucks, but the game also needs to provide us with a way to discover nests. That they change every two weeks makes crowdsourcing nest details much less feasible. After every nest migration, someone would analyse SGPokeMap and post the new nest information on the local Reddit.
spoofing, tracking, multi account shaving and stacking. they all give massive advantages. depending on the real load on the servers if someone is not playing gyms then it probably doesn't mater to much.
seeing someone with way better stuff then me for way less effort does annoy me.
seeing how much less effort it takes a spoofer to collect their coins also annoys me.
my relative weighting on these things is often dependent on recent experience, and the reality is that most people who use one cheat use many.
A lot of semi-legit players here use a tracker (A local one under Niantic's radar). I don't think it really gives an advantage which is worth the loss of karma, most of the work is catching Pidgeys to grind dust and when I talk to them they often envy me for my collection of strong maxed out and also legit mons.
My point was that the advantage of having access to a tracker is much greater than having the ability to move around quickly. Hence regarding tracking as "semi-legit" while strongly condemn spoofing is rather questionable.
Using a tracker gives a huge advantage even if you use nothing else and only walk around. As you said spoofing is rather pointless without tracker, so closing down trackers completely would be much more effective against cheating than just stop spoofing.
regarding tracking as "semi-legit" while strongly condemn spoofing is rather questionable.
The tracker users still play, they just play a totally different version: "There's a Lavitar in the park for 15 minutes" "Can we make it?" "Yup, let's go" and then they do a fast paced 2 km walk across town. You can't compare this with GPS spoofing where somebody sits at home on his sofa and plays a silly monster catching game for 8 years olds.
Every popular game has unofficial fan sites with guides, walkthroughs, answers, calculators, etc. which enrich the gaming experience. I see third-party trackers as no different. In fact, without SGPokeMap, the game would not even be worth playing; the competitive legit players would be unable to farm Machops (for example) and would quit, leaving the gyms to the spoofers. The casual players here (including my friends) already quit when the speed limit prevented spinning stops on the MRT.
But if you use a scanner you still need to move to X location in less than 5 minutes before the pokemon spawn so .. I don't use a tracker. only for checking NEST maybe.
Spoofing. If I was spoofer I could easily control 10 gyms EASY. today I have 6. Spoofers from valor took down a lvl 9 good gym today. I have duties so I can't go play all time and go again and waste like 30 minutes prestiging. not to mention the time I take going to the gym which will be another 30 minutes ... spoofing is cancer.
