Instead of Banning Lzzy Cheaters, Pokémon Go Trolls Them

Now that the generalized Pokémon Go craze has subsided, the more captivating effort to catch ‘em all may be game developer Niantic’s ongoing battle against cheaters. Its latest evolution: Not banning bad actors, but banishing them to poké-purgatory.

As detailed by Pokémon Go enthusiast subreddit The Silph Road, a recent Pokémon Go update targets players who use bots to trawl the globe for valuable Pokémon. In case you forgot how Pokémon Go works, it's an artificial reality game that forces players to move around in the actual real physical world to find and capture Pokémon. People who automate that process with a bot suck the fun out of the game. As of last week, many of those lazybones found popular spawning spots populated not by high-value monsters, but by boring Pidgeys and such. In practice, it’s like hunting for lions and finding nothing but squirrels.

In a broader sense, the escalation speaks to the difficult balance developers like Niantic have to strike between controlling their games and becoming overly draconian. It probably also says something interesting about what really constitutes cheating in the digital age. But honestly, it’s mostly just hilarious.

Niantic had already taken several steps to stop the scourge of cheating on the game, including a mass ban of accounts last August. The apparent target at the time? Players who used third-party software to send spoofed GPS locations to Pokémon Go servers, giving the appearance of walking around in the real world without actually having to get off the La-Z-Boy recliner.

That purge appears to have been effective. Popular bot services like Necrobot and MyGoBot have since shut down. So, too, have popular scanner apps, like PokeSensor, which build maps of where to find nearby monsters to make acquisitions even easier.

By contrast, this latest ban doesn’t boot pokéculprits altogether, opting instead to drown them in a sea of Rattatas. The enforcement appears so far to be sporadic, but has still prompted several bot operators to log off until they figure out a way around the punitive purgatory.

“As bot accounts (which power 'scanners') are being flagged, some scanners are only able to show common species,” writes Silph Road moderator dronpes in a thread outlining the changes. “Others have shut down temporarily, pending a workaround to the anti-botting measures, to preserve their accounts from being shadowbanned.”

It’s not clear why Niantic has downgraded its response, though the company certainly gets kudos for trolling its misbehavers. It did, though, confirm the technique in a statement.