Forget cheating, Pokemon Go will block you just for being too good
Pokemon Go developer Niantic has taken a strong position against cheaters. This past Friday the company came out once again to warn players that cheating could get them banned from the game permanently. That's right... despite all the game's problems such as crippling reliability issues and the lack of a decent Pokemon Go tracking feature, Niantic is focusing valuable time and resources on identifying and banning people who cheat. At a smartphone game. About finding and catching virtual animals.
Ridiculous though it may seem, Niantic is indeed focusing a tremendous amount of effort on taking measure to stop cheaters, but it looks like some of those measures are about as reliable as the company's servers. This past weekend, one of the best Pokemon Go players in the world had his account temporarily suspended for being too good, and it happened right in the middle of a Pokemon Go event.
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This past weekend, avid Pokemon Go fan Jimmy Derocher finally set in motion a plan he had been working on for weeks. As he had been discussing on Facebook, he worked out a plan to accrue 1 million experience points in Pokemon Go over the course of just 24 hours, without cheating at all.
Derocher had previously managed to rack up more than 1 million XP in one weekend, but the internet doubted his accomplishment and accused him of cheating. As he noted in a post on Reddit, he hatched his new plan in part to prove that its possible to rack up that much XP in a short period of time without having to cheat. So he mapped out a "loop" in Austin, TX that would allow him to hit the same 10 Pokestops repeatedly and rack up experience points as quickly as possible, and he hit the road.
His plan was going swimmingly at first, and Derocher racked up XP at an amazing pace. In fact, he managed to score more than 600,000 experience points in just over half a day. But as noted by Kotaku, the fun wouldn't last — after 13 hours, Pokemon Go enacted anti-cheating measures that hardcore players call a "soft ban."
"Niantic Labs recently implemented an anti-botting policy becoming more well-known to players as a ‘soft-ban’," he wrote on Facebook. "More or less, the policy is a 24 hour ‘cheating prevention’ tool which stops you from getting more XP than should be possible."
The lesson here is apparently that you shouldn't cheat, but you also shouldn't be so good at Pokemon Go that you don't have to cheat. So you might as well just cheat... and you'll be happy to learn that the greatest Pokemon Go cheat ever is now available to iPhone users with no jailbreak required.
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