There’s a bloke in my localPokemon GoFacebook group who posts his ‘wins’ after every event. He’ll usually get around 50 shinies per weekend of grinding, including every newly released one of course, and add in a dozen screenshots or so of the incredibly rare Galarian birds for good measure. He’s always met with a chorus of laugh reacts and comments that don’t take him seriously, but it doesn’t deter him. He wants to prove his superiority, and posts his hauls about twice a week.
This man is a spoofer. He’s also definitely not local. He likely joined the group ahead ofLiverpool’s Go Fest celebrationlast year, and I doubt he could point to the city on a map. I’m certain he’s doing the same spoofing-posting rigmarole in a bunch of other groups, too. Maybe he’s got a humiliation kink? I don’t know. But one thing I’m 100 percent sure of is that he cheats.
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Spoofing is a way of fooling your phone into thinking you’re somewhere else. I don’t know exactly how it works because I’ve never felt the urge to cheat at a casual game I play for fun, but I assume it uses some kind of VPN or GPS shifter to change your location. In the early days of Pokemon Go, people used it to beat Gyms or teleport toPokemonwith max stats to catch them. Some people even spoofed to specific malls in Japan in order to grind experience among the countless PokeStops and regular spawns. Others use it to easily catch any and all regional Pokemon without a single footstep.
There’s still a lot of people spoofing – just head to eBay and you’ll see people selling spoofed Pokemon by the dozen, but its popularity declined with the introduction of Remote Raiding. With the ability to legally join Raids from across the world – and the fact it was enforced by national lockdowns – casual spoofers practically vanished. Sure, my Facebook group is still being bombarded by that one guy, and eBay sellers still seem to be doing good business, but my Raids are populated by the flickering holograms of remote players, rather than the solid avatars of ‘nearby’ battlers who are nowhere to be seen. That’s all going to change.
Increasing the price of Remote Raiding will have many effects on Pokemon Go. My colleague Eric Switzer hasalready coveredmost of them in great detail, from the impact on disabled players, to the effect it will have on rural communities, and how his in-person Raids will be negatively impacted. But I believe the players who keeping playing will see the return of excessive spoofing. If you can only do five Remote Raids a day, but there’s no limit to the number you can do in-person, I can see a lot of players donning their little spoofing caps, opening up their dusty old spoofing apps, and going back to their spoofing ways.
This won’t impact the average player too much, but it affects Niantic a lot. The company makes its money from selling player data, not Raid Pass bundles, and spoofing makes a mockery of that data. What’s more, it circumvents Niantic’s core pillars of exploration, exercise, and social interaction. It even impacts other players’ social interaction, due to the same reasons that Remote Raiding is being limited.
Spoofing is about to be a bigger problem for Niantic than ever before, and the developer only has itself to blame. Reverting its Remote Raid price changes might go some way to alleviating the issue, but it may already be too late.
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