Question about Cheating for current Pokemon Go players

The Game Room
1

tl/dr: Has Niantic specifically stated exactly why some of the things they have said are cheating, and am I going to get banned for having a second account, among other things?

Niantic has announced recently that they are going to be taking a more active stance on punishing cheaters within the game, with said punishments to include warnings, temporary suspensions and banning. Their announcements about such actions have included a link to their terms of service, to which we all agreed, which includes, among other things, cheating being a Very Bad Thing.

They’re starting with punishing people for spoofing, specifically using hacks, 3rd party clients & other techniques to tell Pokemon you’re in, say, Athens, so you can catch local pokemon and and fight gyms without having to pay for remote raid passes. This is apparently considered cheating because it gives the cheaters an unfair advantage over people who can’t get to Athens to catch the local pokemon, which may be awesome in PVP. It’s also considered cheating to fight distant gyms as if you were standing there because you don’t have to pay for a remote raid pass, which cheats Niantic out of their $.60, or however much they cost these days, and obviously fraud is bad for their bottom line.

One general assumption people seem to have had in online fora, Discord & Facebook is that they’re next going to punish people for cheating Niantic out of money, because that’s fraud, and is an obvious segue from banning spoofers as detailed above.

However.

The list of things Niantic considers cheating includes having multiple accounts. I’ve asked around and haven’t been able to find a specific example of why Niantic considers this cheating, except for a vague reference to a practice of using two accounts on one device giving someone the ability to break the game somehow. Niantic has, however, specifically made us all agree that having multiple accounts is cheating.

Other things that Niantic has indicated, over the past six years, count as cheating in their eyes include sharing trainer codes on Facebook and Discord (rather than going out into the world and meeting other trainers and getting their codes in meatspace), using apps that overlay the game and give you information not available in-game (such as PokeGenie), and non-Niantic auto-catchers such as a GotCha!.

Awkwardly, I have two accounts, a GotCha!, use PokeGenie daily, and have about 150 friends I’ve added from Facebook and Discord, which makes me some degree of Cheaty McCheaterson in their eyes.

So, my question for all of you who who have read this far, are still playing, and have been keeping track of some of these things:

Has Niantic specifically explained why any of the above (not counting spoofing or cheating them out of money) count as cheating? I don’t really see it. I have some theories, but they’re just that, and I’d like to have some more traceable facts to work with before I decide how much of my money I’m going to be giving Niantic before I find out whether or not they’re going to ban me for having too many friends.

2

Presumably, cheating includes anything that’s not part of the game itself that gives an advantage to those using it over those not using it. In any game with a competitive element, there needs to be clear limits on what is and is not allowed, and there will be some people who attempt to go beyond those limits in order to get an edge.

I am a little surprised that they put one of those clear boundaries on sharing friend codes online as opposed to face-to-face, but having done that, that’s now a rule, and anyone breaking that rule is cheating.

Think of it like regulations on what kinds of bats you can use in baseball. The game would be very similar if you could use corked bats or metal bats or whatever, so long as everyone was allowed to use them. But when nobody’s allowed to use them but some do anyway, that gives the rulebreakers an edge over the rule-followers, which is not a good thing for the health of the game.

3

I’ve never seen anything like that. Do you have a cite? That wouldn’t make sense seeing as you can directly send invites to Facebook friends through the Go app.

4

I’m posting from work, where I can’t get to the vast majority of sites. I’ll take a look when I get home tonight and see if I can find anything substantive. That said, the cite I found earlier was from a couple years ago, and Niantic may have retracted the statement. I was hoping someone would have been playing at the time and remembered the interchange (I’ve only been playing for a year & a half).

5

Just speculating, but maybe they intend for friend codes to be shared among people that actually know each other, and not just advertised to strangers.

Though I see no way to really regulate that. A software company can’t (and shouldn’t) be able to tell who is a real “friend” or not. Hell, it’s hard enough for anyone to tell who their real friends are. :stuck_out_tongue:

The closest thing to “cheating” I’ve ever done in Pokemon Go is when I have been in a place with poor reception and the GPS struggles. It bounces me around a bit and I temporarily get access to things like Pokestops or Pokemon themselves that I’m not really in proximity to. But I’m not actively doing anything to cause this, it just happens. Hopefully that’s not considered cheating to take advantage of a glitch I can’t control.

(I almost never play the game anymore anyway, the only reason I have the app is because my oldest daughter still plays.)

6

Their game, their rules. But at some point you have to wonder if there’s a mismatch between what they think makes their game fun and what the players think. Wouldn’t be the first game to chase away many of their players.