When Pokemon Go first launched last month, it was pretty much a “wild west” situation with numerous players using various hacks, third party apps and other tricks to “improve” the game or give themselves a competitive advantage. At first, Pokemon Go developer Niantic mostly turned a blind eye — they had enough on their plate — but recently they announced a crackdown was coming for players guilty of:
“Falsifying your location, using emulators, modified or unofficial software and/or accessing Pokémon GO clients or backends in an unauthorized manner including through the use of third party software.”
Considering how sloppy and unregulated the launch of Pokemon Go was, that covers a whole lotta players, and yesterday the ban notifications started rolling out en masse. Here’s what they look like:
But what if you feel like you’ve been unfairly banned, or just think you deserve a second chance? Well, thankfully Niantic has set up a ban appeal form, which you can access right here. I’m sure there’s a backlog of requests, but hopefully players with legitimate cases will be able to regain access to their accounts.
Anybody out there have the ban hammer come down on them? Don’t worry, you can share. We won’t judge.