Pokemon Go has had a problem with cheaters from the beginning. Some of it, like GPS spoofing, is relatively innocuous; if somebody lives in the sticks, why shouldn’t they enjoy walking around Manhattan and collecting Pokemon there? Others, though, like those who use bots that play the game for you, and mappers who park themselves right near rare spawns and rack up a dozen Snorlaxes to make gyms impossible to play through, are more annoying. Now, they’ll have a fairly strong motive to play fair, as Niantic has started shaming cheaters.
Niantic announced on Reddit that cheaters will soon be seeing the consequences of their action. If you catch a Pokemon using a “third-party service,” the Pokemon will have a slash next to its name, and may, as Niantic puts it (threatens?), “not behave as expected.” In other words, you can cheat, but the game is going to make your life miserable for it, much like the original handheld games make certain Pokemon hard to manage if you’re under a certain experience level.
In some cases, as we noted, this may not be entirely fair. Where you live shouldn’t preclude you having fun with the game. But the guy who does nothing but scrape rare Pokemon and then run off to control the gym? Yeah, give him all the grief you can muster.
(Via Kotaku)