Niantic’s Brilliant New Plan For Dealing With Pokemon Go Cheaters
Remember in Pokemon when Ash’s Charmeleon/ Charizard wouldn’t listen to him? Remember in Pokemon Red/ Blue/ etc when traded Pokemon wouldn’t obey you unless you had the proper number of Gym Badges? Well it looks like Niantic is taking a page from GameFreak’s playbook and is now implementing new coding to stop Pokemon Go players that want to cheat the system. Yesterday on Reddit, Niantic revealed:
“Starting today, Pokémon caught using third-party services that circumvent normal gameplay will appear marked with a slash in the inventory and may not behave as expected.”
For a while now, some players have been spoofing Pokemon Go with GPS software that can fake their location, which when paired with 3rd party tracking apps can allow trainers to jump around the map and catch every rare or high IV Pokemon that appears. This might not seem too bad at first, but when you pair this with players putting this perfect Pokemon into gyms, then you have some problems. Niantic has tried banning accounts one by one and limiting the appearance of rare Pokemon on these accounts all together, but none were truly successful. That’s where this new change would come in handy!
Some might wonder why Niantic is simply ”slashing’ the hacked Pokemon rather than deleting them all together. Well maybe someone used the hack to catch their favorite Pokemon that happened to be a Regional. Maybe they just wanted one for collection purposes; and that’s it’s. The real problem arises when they try to use those spoofed Pokemon against other trainers. So just like in the show/ video game, when you acquire a Pokemon through other means of capture there’s a chance it won’t obey you!
This trick was implemented in the original games so that you couldn’t trade high level Pokemon and sweep the game; and it fits so well in Pokemon Go I don’t know why they didn’t think of it sooner! We don’t know what this “not behave as expected” means, but it could be anything from lower motivations (a new factor in Gym Battles which leads to lower CP) or the Pokemon occasionally not attacking at all when you tap on it. Though whatever it is, I applaud Niantic’s recent improvements to the game. Now if we could just sort out the rumors of Legendary Pokemon Raids – but that’s an article for another time!
Joe primarily covers video games news (i.e.: Pokemon, Spyro & Destiny) as well as the occasional ‘Theory Thursday’ pieces. Before writing for FanFest, Joe was the Creator & Editor of TheInsightfulPanda.com. He is also an illustrator and is currently working on Season 3 of his not-for-profit, fan-art crossover series PokéRangers on Instagram.
