Pokémon Go Creators Boost Anti-Cheat Measures

In a blog post shared on their website, Niantic shared its plans for dealing with cheaters in Pokémon Go. 

In the post, Niantic shared that they are becoming better and faster at identifying cheaters. This also has the positive consequence of preventing legitimate players from being punished incorrectly. 

As a result of their improved systems, Niantic will be rolling out its new anti-cheat approaches. They are beginning immediately by punishing players found to be cheating during recent in-game events. 

They hope to integrate these new measures into all of their games, and rather than banning players in waves like previously, Niantic hopes to enforce their anti-cheating procedures on a consistent basis. 

According to Niantic’s player guidelines, cheating includes:

• Using modified or unofficial software.
• Playing with multiple accounts. 
• Using tools or techniques to falsify your location. 
• Sharing accounts.
• Intentionally exploiting a bug to gain a reward. 
• Abusing the refund policy and mechanism. 
• Buying or selling in-game currency on third-party platforms.
• Buying, selling or trading accounts.

The developers ended their blog post by reminding players to only download official versions of the game and that they do not support jailbroken devices. 

Pokémon Go recently had a community day, where the featured Pokémon was Deino. However, recent changes to community days have been unpopular as players are given just four hours to complete the allotted tasks. 

Interestingly, Niantic also brought in a feature to encourage people to re-engage with in-person Pokémon Go. While the game has received a lot of remote features due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Niantic wants people back to interacting in person. In order to accomplish this, they have added a feature whereby if players raid at their local gym, the runtime of the community day event will be extended. 

Pokémon Go will continue to have new events throughout the summertime.

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