Pokemon GO has an Easter event going on, giving people more reasons to hatch eggs and purchase Lucky Eggs for as much as quadruple the XP than in normal days. But in the past week, Niantic has also stamped down hard on the “GPS spoofers” in the game – those who fake their GPS locations to cheat the game.
Pokemon GO was designed to get people off their lazy butts and walk around in the sunshine – or in the nighttime, if that’s your thing – to catch Pokemon. Really, it’s a game that’s designed to get you to move around in your environment, just as Niantic’s other augmented reality success “Ingress” did before Pokemon GO was released. But some people have taken their computer savvy to extreme directions, picking at the game’s code and faking their GPS locations so they can catch Pokemon without having to walk around.
The latest “Ban Wave” hit the Pokemon GO spoofers pretty hard last week. You can see it by monitoring Reddit communities dedicated to spoofing – almost simultaneously, these groups were assaulted by people asking for new ways to spoof GPS because the old ways stopped working, apparently. That was all Niantic’s work.
Of course, the battle against cheating will never really end. As long as Pokemon GO exists, there will always be people who want to do stuff the easy way. It will be up to Niantic to finally figure out a way to get these cheaters off their butts and PC terminals to finally soak in the sunshine, and catch a Rattata. Or three.
VIA: SlashGear
