Niantic shared additional information about its new anti-cheat measures and the results of employing them in a recently updated blog post. The measures have been successful to some extent, and we now have the numbers to follow up on these claims.
In early 2020, Niantic made a commitment to all players to promote fair play, preserving the integrity of Niantic games and improving transparency with all players.
As part of that commitment, they provided an update on some of the recent efforts to curb cheating in any Niantic game:
- Since the beginning of 2020, more than 5 million spoofers in Pokémon GO, Ingress and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite were punished, where more than 20% of the punishments were permanent bans.
- Over 90% of users who received the first warning stopped cheating afterwards. It seems that they are still finding the right balance between punishing casual spoofers and the most blatant ones.
- Niantic shared that they updated their technology stack to find false positives more quickly and to make sure they are using the correct tracking methods.
- On the Ingress side, Niantic launched a new Fast Track process, which would allow Agents to request faster manual intervention, before the unauthorized Agent could cause further damage to the game board.
- Since then, more than 4K Fast Track requests have been reported, of which 70% were eligible for a quick review; and after investigation, the appropriate actions were taken against the denounced agents.
- Niantic will share more information about its new compartmentalized access level measures in the coming weeks on the Ingress forum and our other social channels
Cheating and spoofing remain a constant topic in the Pokémon GO community. To date, there has been no definitive solution to end cheating. Still, it’s great to see how Niantic is doing to eliminate cheating and provide a fair playing field for everyone.
If you want to know more about it, you can find it in the official blog post.