Pokémon GO Cheaters Get A Nasty Surprise In The Latest Update

Maybe it's arbitrarily vindictive of me, but I love when cheaters get punished.

So they know which Pokemon are caught by cheating... why not ban the whole account?

I love this!
I'm laughing hard.

Now, teach the inept Nintendo how to punish cheaters in Splatoon, please! Thanks!

@DrVollKornBrot Trying to be nice? More realistically, banning the whole account means the player is likely to stop playing entirely. This way, they may keep playing, which means they may spend more money.

What about a compromise instead? Such as making the game, er, playable in rural areas?

Wonderful idea. I can't wait to hear the excuses cheaters make up to justify their lazyness of not actually getting out and playing the game right.

"While some accept this is cheating, others argue that when playing in a sparely-populated region such apps are needed to maintain interest."

I don't cheat with this kind of stuff, but I think they have a solid argument in that it is a flaw within the game. I live in a more sparely-populated area, (it isn't even that rural, I'm just not in a city), and honestly, nothing of interest ever shows up. I pop it on if I go to a city, but otherwise, it is a worthless experience and I've pretty much stopped playing entirely. I'm not promoting the cheating, but I think they could make changes to address it.

On a side note, that update to add the "may not behave as expected" is pretty funny.

Cheetah ? (Cheater)

Here you go, Cheater.

Hahahaha cheaters

I stopped playing a long time ago because I live in a low population area, and got tired of walking around town catching pidgeys and rattatas. The highest cp pokemon I've ever seen in one of the gyms here was maybe 1300, and it was a vaporeon.

It makes me laugh how the countryside has fewer Pokemon when it's teeming with wildlife.

The reason I rarely play is because Niantic is the one cheating with their fake steps counters.

I'll do 2 mile jogs or walk 10 miles during a theme park day with the app on (and draining the heck out of my phone batt) and every time my Apple Watch or FitBit gives an accurate step count but PoGo gives me a kilometer or so. It's frustrating.

@DrVollKornBrot The cheaters are probably whales and tracking Pokemon doesn't hurt Niantic's bottom line, just everyone else's user experience.

@roadrunner343 SMART!!!!

@BornInNorway81 You can't back up your saves or access the web browser on Switch. I think Splatoon 2 is learning that lesson

@MoonKnight7 Could not agree more with this. If I head into London it's fun but other than this I just get tired of the lack of interesting things.

This is a nice way to troll cheaters. I know some would justify using third party to complete their dex (fair to some extent), but most use them for gyms, especially bots.

Snorlax have been caught.......enjoy

I'm pretty sure everyone who's ever caught a Snorlax got it through cheating. They're in way too many gyms to have been caught legit. I'm on the app almost every day and grant it I use the Pokémon GO Plus so I'm not always looking at the screen, but I've never seen a Snorlax in my city which means if it did show up in my radar, my Plus would buzz differently and flash orange. It's done that and everytime I've felt that different buzz, I've opened my app to find a different Pokémon...it's never been Snorlax. So how is it that every gym has multiple Snorlax in it? My only conclusion, people cheated to catch them.

But they're not gonna fix the fact that where I live (a suburb of 100,000 people btw) has no pokestops or gyms and rarely has any pokemon show up while someone downtown can sit in their house and catch pokemon. I think Niantic is the one cheating.

I know a lot of people that use third party apps to cheat in big cities (I live in Chicago) and I think this update is great for those cheaters. There's never any problem here with finding Pokemon, so it's annoying when people cheat and don't get Pokemon the legitimate way.

However, I do agree that this outlines an inherent problem with playing the app in rural areas. I think Niantic needs to analyze their map of the world within Pokemon Go and perhaps adjust spawn/rarity rates based on population and population density. It might be a lot of work for them but by judging by the comments in this thread, it would get a lot more people playing while not changing the experience at all for people that live in populated areas.

In other news, what do they mean by these Pokemon will "behave differently?" Lol curious.

@DarthFoxMcCloud
I don't think you have been very lucky. I have a caught a few and had a few in eggs too. And I have caught three on different occasions in what I would describe as a 'rural location, so don't know what people are referring too as 'rural' either.

Let me preface this by saying that I am one who is vehemently against cheating and doing anything dishonest.

Personally, though, I don't feel like this is cheating. Sitting at home and using a tool that spoofs your GPS: yes. Using something that would allow you to make the perfect Pokemon (dunno if this is possible in Go, but it is in the main games): definitely cheating.
However, I don' t think using a tool that just tells you (in a more accurate manner than the game does) where the 'mon are is cheating.

It has gotten slightly better, but there was a period of time where the spawns had decreased a lot (late fall I think?) and it felt pointless to wander around and get nothing (and I live in the second largest city in my state at that!). I actually used third party websites to help me locate Pokemon. Heck, I probably would have given up on the game, but instead I would look at my computer from work and see that there was something rare just down the street and would jump up to go get it. I have never personally used an app that links to my account as I am paranoid about just this sort of thing happening, but I don't really see the big deal.

Also, I feel that the "it adds extra load on the server" line is a bunch of BS. I have not noticed an increase in performance since they have shut down any of these things (in fact, I think the opposite might be true). I'm in the IT industry and the idea that these tools (at least the ones that I used) added that much overhead to make a difference is kind of silly to me.

@DarthFoxMcCloud
Caught my first one legitimately when the game first launched. There were so many lures around I know of a few people who got them. I also got lucky and hatched one in an egg.

Now training it is a bit of a grind, since really the only way is to have it walk with you, and you only get one candy per 5km.

So what exactly do the red slashed Pokémon do?

um so does that include pokemon go plus? because as far as i remember it lets you catch pokemen without actually playing the game...
to me this seems more like "if you want to catch pokemon automatically you better buy a plus and that's the only way you're going to do it!" than doing something against cheaters.....

@thesilverbrick
You're not the only one. I'm sure many people take satisfaction in it, me included.

@DarthFoxMcCloud
I have mentioned this before, I see gyms that have 2 snorlax both over 3000, onvuiosly a cheat. I would say 80% of the Pokémon in gyms are cheaters, but that's subjective.

I have been playing since day one, and I have 2 snorlax, a 2354 that I caught in Miami where I live, and a 1891 that I got from a 10k egg. It's possible to find but again I have only SEEN one in the wild and that was in a major metropolitan area.

It's a shame that Niantic is worried about gyms, rather than making the Pokémon catching experience more varied and accessible for those that don't live in a major metropolitan area

I live in the biggest city of my country (which is small so that's not saying much) but still there were barely any PokéStops or whatever and I barely could catch any Pokémon back when I used to play, but I never cheated.

To be honest I don't know how people can take this game seriously.

@Rumncoke25 I live in the national capital city of Canada. It's the fourth largest city in the country and attracts lots of tourists. It's actually the kind of city where you think finding legendaries or very rare Pokémon would be easy. But alas, there's never any. Back when Pokevision was working, I did see 1 Snorlax generate in the middle of the Ottawa River......around a spot where there were no bridges. I didn't feel like swimming out to the middle and be carried away by the rapids just to get a Snorlax. But for some reason, Drowzees run rampant here.

@DarthFoxMcCloud I woke up one day and saw it on my nearby, I ran around the whole block and found myself a snorlax. But I agree, they are really rare, and most people probably did cheat.

Down with the cheaters. Well done!

Just caught Farfetch'd! 💕🍾📣

@XCWarrior In certain regions (such as Brazil), it is almost impossible to get out with a cellphone without being robbed.

Not trying to justify cheating of course, but that's the alternative some of us found out to keep playing the game without risking our stuff.

Not to mention we cannot (properly) play as a passenger anymore, which previously was the safest alternative...

@DarthFoxMcCloud snorlax is rare but I've gotten two without cheating I used to play almost all day when the game came out and maybe the drowzee are common in Canada cause of all the liberal/democrats 😂 (It's a joke)

The article's header image brings back a ton of memories.

Man, it's been months since I played this game. It's almost been a year since its been out.

@DarthFoxMcCloud I've seen too many wild snorlax to say that they're All Cheats what I call BS on is all the f**ing dragonite. I haven't seen a single Dratini since this game came out. How is it that the same player has a dragonite in every gym in the neighborhood?

@demonta4 Niantic are apparently adding more Pokestops to rural areas and gyms now work as Pokestops too.

@manu0 For Pokemon Plus you can only catch the Pokemon that are in your location and you can waste Pokeballs on Pidgeys because you can't see what Pokemon are there.

The best thing is that it doesn't seem to affect Pokemon that people caught by following tracker. Not sure what methods got Pokemon banned though, probably GPS spoofing and other app cheats.

@thesilverbrick

Only when it's not affecting other players, though.

Only when it's offline.

To me, cheating is literally a no-GO here. I don't live in a highly populated area either but through perseverance and playing in trips & vacations, I did complete the Gen1 living dex in about a year (minus legendaries and regionals).

Basically, just try to play the game as intended, or stop playing. At home, try playing Pokémon Sun & Moon instead of spoofing GO, as that's way more fun anyway!

There is nothing worse than cheaters. They ruin the experience for everyone else. Any action taken against them is great news.

@ProjectCafe Problem is, Pokémon GO cheaters do affect players who play the game fairly. The game is a community experience and cheaters gain an upper hand far too quickly. I remember two days after Gen II was added to the game, a gym down the street was occupied by a 3000+ CP Tyranitar. Clearly somebody cheated to obtain that and shouldn't have been allowed to use it to gain an advantage.

@DarkVortex

This is me. I do live in rural and there isn't even those rattatas When I go to store, there are...rattatas and speardows? Same and same and same again.

And when I remember to turn it on when going to walk and when I get home. Yay no metres at all!

But glad to see they are doing something to annoy cheeters

I don't care about Splatoon 2 now. Not for another four weeks. I want the inept Nintendo to fix Splatoon, the game they sold me at full price that I cannot fully enjoy because of cheaters, thank you very much.

@NEStalgia
"You can't back up your saves or access the web browser on Switch. I think Splatoon 2 is learning that lesson"

@BornInNorway81 Yeah...I wanted that a year and a half ago (Magic teleporting carbon roller in Japan: this means you.) And I argued with the Splatoon community a lot who actually DEFENDED the cheating as acceptable because if others are doing it, then it becomes part of the game and if you don't do everything you can to get the advantage you're in fact the one letting your teams down...and that the save edits were just using hardware features Nintendo provided them!! I swear there is so little hope for human civilization

But, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Fixing the cheats in Splatoon 1 DID exploit a hardware/OS exploit inherent ot the console. There really wasn't much they could do with it. It's likely the main reason our saves are trapped and salvageable on Switch (at least without cloud saves in 2018.)

@thesilverbrick

I didn't say it had to be Pokemon GO.

Did I?

@rushiosan In America, that is not a problem. I'm only going off my demo.

Sorry to hear your environment sounds pretty crappy.

Now make all the spoofed Pokemon turn into Pidgeys to rub salt in the wound.

Maybe they need to grow up and start allowing all the pokemon for a region to show up around that region and not be entirely spotty. Where I live now you only mostly get ground, flight(pidgey), grass, a little water, a little dark, a little fairy, and not much else. Electric, steel, fire, and the rest are something you may see just 1 a week, 1 a month or every few months outside of events. Yet when I went on vacation in April wow, head west(ern US) and you can find basically anything in that area. That is completely unfair and unreasonable.

I'm very tempted to use a cheating app because as it stands I can't even get the last 20 pokemon from Gen1 and more from Gen 2 which is entirely unacceptable. I haven't done it yet but I'm very tempted strikes or not. I get you get stuff like Tauros in the US and others in other countries, but standard random pokemon being widely blocked in spaces is wrong. Not everyone can afford to travel to go hunt for digital pets.

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