Niantic shared additional information on their new anti cheating measures and the results of employing them in a recently updated blog post. The measures were successful to a degree, and we now have the numbers to accompany these claims.
Early in 2020, Niantic made a commitment with all of the players towards promoting fair gameplay, preserving the integrity of Niantic games and improving transparency with all players.
As part of this commitment they provided an update on some of recent efforts to curb cheating in any game of Niantic:
- Since the beginning of 2020, more than 5 million spoofers across Pokémon GO, Ingress and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite were punished, where over 20% of the punishments were permanent bans.
- More than 90% of users who received their first warning, stopped cheating afterwards. It looks like they are still finding the right balance between punishing casual spoofers versus the more egregious ones.
- Niantic shared that they have upgraded their technology stack to find false positives more quickly, and to make sure they are using the right tracking methods.
- On the Ingress side, Niantic rolled-out a new Fast Track process, which would enable Agents to request for a quicker manual intervention, before the rogue Agent can cause more damage to the gameboard.
- Since then, more than 4K Fast Track requests were reported, of which 70% were eligible for an expedited review; and after investigating, appropriate actions were taken against those reported Agents.
- Niantic will be sharing more information about their new Compartmental Access Level measures in the coming weeks on the Ingress forum and our other social channels
Cheating and spoofing continues to be an ongoing topic in the Pokémon GO community. Even to this day, there has been no definitive solution to put an end to cheating. Still, it’s great to see how Niantic is acting to eliminate cheating and provide a fair playing field for everyone.
If you want to know more about this, you can find it on the official blog post.
