Three words I have to say about this game: Too many spoofers.
In case some of you haven’t caught on, spoofing is short for GPS spoofing, or basically changing your location by cheating.
On Monday, January 2, 2017, we went to Cougar Mountain again to see if the spoofers were still there or not. It was such a bad idea to go mainly for three reasons:
- It is absolutely freezing up in the mountains. Cougar Mountain is a mountain with dirt trails that are covered in snow and ice. As we got out of the car, a swift breeze brushed by my face. The air was chilly, with the temperature being slightly below freezing. I took one step towards the nearest Pokéstop and skidded across the ground. I spun the Pokéstop and immediately put my hands in my pockets because it was so cold. It was a nice sunny/cloudy day and the time was around 2:00. We went to our usual route, going in a giant triangle shape. I would not recommend visiting Cougar Mountain in the winter. Driving can be quite scary as the roads are covered in ice and are somewhat steep. We got the first gym with ease, with it being a 5 minute walk from the parking lot. The next one on our schedule was one that took around 10 minutes to walk to, but since the ground was really slippery, it took us a little over 15 minutes to get to the next gym. We take over that gym and head off to the third one. The path between the second and third ones are steep, so I slipped and fell. Good thing that I didn’t drop my phone. Another 15 minutes later and we arrived at the third gym. By that point, it was getting really cold, as I wasn’t expecting the mountain to be covered in snow, so I didn’t prepare quite enough clothing, but I was still ok. The fourth gym was 20 minutes away from the third because our route kind of looked like this:
It’s obviously not to scale, but that’s the general shape, with number one being the anti-air gym. The gyms are really far apart.
We finished at around 4:00, only claiming 7 gyms (there’s one more below number one that I didn’t draw) and used a bunch of energy walking down the freezing cold icy paths.Reason 1: The trails are very slippery, takes a lot of energy to traverse, and is a HUGE waste of time
- At about 4:30 that day, we lose gyms 4 and 6, which is kind of odd, since there is a number 5 in the middle, and then around 5:00 we lose another gym that is located right below number one, it’s about a 10 minute walk “down” of number one, so we basically lost 3/7 of our hard-earned gyms.
We take over other random gyms near our home to collect 90 coins later that night. We lost 3 gyms, probably to spoofers because they didn’t attack gyms 5 and 1 because if they took out the one “down from one,” then they would have had to walk and attack one of our gyms that are on the way.
Reason 2: We lose some gyms almost immediately after we get them (the spoofers probably waited a little bit to make sure we were gone so we couldn’t report them) - At 5:50pm on Tuesday (the next day, January 3), I am looking at my Pokémon and I notice that one of them are dead, which means that we lost a gym again! I look out the window and go “whaa…” It’s DARK! The sun sets around 4:30pm. Who would go to the mountain with icy paths in the pitch black? Might I also tell you that there are no lights there, which means the “real person playing there had to carry a flashlight.” The temperature today is also colder than Monday (the day we took over those gyms). At 5:55pm, we lose another, and at 6:00pm, we lose another. “Seriously?” I say to myself, “Can’t Niantic see that these people are moving way too fast? It takes us at least 10 minutes to go between each gym.”
Reason 3: Even though that the gyms are basically inaccessible at this point in the day AND the player is also taking down our gyms within a short time frame, Niantic still hasn’t stopped the obvious spoofers from spoofing.
Another example of an obvious spoofer is that there is construction around one of the gyms, and since this was the holiday period, the workers were off of work. They have fenced off around the entire gym area and it is inaccessible unless you climb the fence and stuff like that; yet every day, I see the person in that gym change. One of the players I distinctly remember is a person from team Instinct: WHBIV. He is currently is a level 30 Trainer and when we go by that gym I ask, “That gym is inaccessible, so how do they get in?” Obviously, they’re GPS spoofing, because I see him in random gyms in different gated communities. Let’s pretend that he is not GPS spoofing. Then, he would have to climb the fence, which is clearly against Niantic’s rules about “poor behavior in the real world”.
Climbing fences and trespassing is definitely poor behavior, right?
Sadly, even though requests are submitted AND it’s very obvious that the person is spoofing, it seems that Niantic haven’t done anything to these players, as I still see them re-taking over my gyms every time we visit, thus lowering my interest in taking over gyms.