Niantic shared additional information about their new anti-cheating measures and the results of using them in a recently updated blog post. The measures were successful to some extent and we now have the numbers to back up these claims.
In early 2020, Niantic committed to promoting fair gameplay, maintaining the integrity of Niantic games, and improving transparency with all players.
As part of this commitment, they have provided an update on some of the recent attempts to combat cheating in a 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 sentences were permanent bans.
- More than 90% of users who got their first warning stopped cheating after that. It seems they still strike the right balance between punishing casual spoofers and the more blatant.
- Niantic said they have upgraded their technology stack to find false positives faster and make sure they are using the correct tracking methods.
- On the Ingress side, Niantic has rolled out a new Fast Track process, allowing agents to request faster manual intervention before the rogue agent can cause more damage to the game board.
- Since then, more than 4K Fast Track requests have been reported, 70% of which were eligible for an accelerated review; and after investigation, appropriate action was taken against the reported agents.
- Niantic will be sharing more information about their new Compartmental Access Level measures on the Ingress forum and our other social channels in the coming weeks
Cheating and spoofing remains a constant topic in the Pokémon GO community. Even to this day, there is no definitive solution to end cheating. Still, it’s great to see how Niantic acts to prevent cheating and provide a fair playing field for everyone.
If you want to learn more about this, you can find it on the official blog post.