The anti-cheat system in Pokémon GO causes trouble and bans innocent players.
The “Augmented Reality” game Pokémon GO fights against cheaters who gain unfair advantages in the game. With cheats and bots that fake locations, some players modify the mobile game. This way, they can interact with many more gyms, PokéStops, and wild Pokémon without moving from their spot. Due to this unfair behavior in the game, “legitimate” players feel disadvantaged, and Niantic developed a system against cheaters. However, the new anti-cheat system is not yet fully refined, as seen in the case of Jimmy Derocher.
This route should bring success
In many video games, there are groups of players who want to play particularly efficiently to get the most out of a game. Jimmy Derocher could be described as a hardcore “Pokémon GO” player, as he is searching for (legitimate) ways to gain the most experience points in the shortest time. During one of his adventures, he wanted to prove that it is possible to gain 1 million experience points in just one day. For this, he chose a special running route:
Derocher says: “We placed lures at 10 PokéStops that are spread out over a distance of 0.2 miles. This route has been called Jimmy’s Loop by other players. The plan was to walk this route repeatedly.” With this route, he wanted to prove that one can gain 1 million experience points in Pokémon GO without cheating – and within 24 hours. To prove that he earned the experience points legitimately, he even set up a live stream on Twitch.TV. After the event gained attention, hundreds of people appeared in the stream chat wanting to experience the adventure.
The start of the event went smoothly, and Jimmy Derocher gained several hundred thousand experience points by catching wild Pokémon, interacting with PokéStops, or through tactical evolutions of Pokémon. After about 13 hours, success came to a sudden halt.
1 million experience points a day are too much
Suddenly, it became impossible to catch wild Pokémon. No matter which ball he threw at the Pokémon, every Pokémon fled from the encounter. The reason for this is the anti-cheat system of Pokémon GO. After Derocher had collected about 600,000 experience points, the game issued him a so-called “soft ban.” A soft ban lasts about 24 hours and denies players the “normal amount” of experience points during this time. If there are any experience points available for an action in the game, then those points are significantly reduced. A soft ban is usually activated when the anti-cheat system detects a player gaining more experience points than “normally possible.”
Derocher was aware of the soft ban principle and wanted to find a solution with Niantic in advance to prevent his account from being affected. He reached out to Niantic CEO John Hanke on Twitter, asking for an exception for his player account. However, he received no response.
As a hardcore player, he wanted to show the Pokémon GO team that the system against cheaters is also bad for players who play legitimately. Bots are much more efficient than players and earn more experience points than hardcore players. The soft ban feels arbitrary according to Derocher and affects more players than Niantic has imagined. Although his million XP run was interrupted early, he still raised money that he will donate to charity. With an app called Charity Miles, he generated money through the distance he covered. Also, viewers on Twitch.TV donated money for the charity action of the stream.
By the way, Derocher did not give up after receiving the soft ban in the game. The viewers in the stream found it entertaining that he continued to play despite the ban and after about 1.5 hours only gained 25,000 experience points.
