Pokémon Go developer Niantic says its "becoming better" at spotting cheaters

Pokémon Go cheaters beware: Niantic has outlined new measures to identify and eradicate cheaters.

In a new blog post, Pokémon Go developer Niantic assured players that it understood "how cheating behaviors" affected them and while its efforts were initially "focused primarily on sharing a broad overview" on unfair gaming practices, the team believes it's "becoming better" at identifying, and removing, cheaters. 

"Our last post was focused primarily on sharing a broad overview of the actions we had taken to punish accounts we found to be cheating in multiple Niantic games," the blog post said (thanks, NME). "Since then, we’ve invested in becoming better at observing cheating behaviors, and can now more reliably pinpoint these activities with higher speed and accuracy, preventing legitimate players from being punished incorrectly.

"As a result, we will be ramping up enforcement against these behaviors across our games, and rolling out our improved approach to anti-cheat. We are starting now by taking action against a number of accounts who we found to be in violation of our terms of service or player guidelines during recent in-game events in Pokémon Go." 

That's not all, though.

"This is only the first step in implementing our improved cheating behavior detection and enforcement systems," the blog added. "These improvements will be integrated into all Niantic games to detect and punish players on a consistent and ongoing basis, rather than in waves, as we have in the past."

The update finished with assertions that Niantic would "continue to improve our methods and processes to ensure we’re staying ahead of any new behaviors that allow players to unfairly exploit game rules".

Niantic also recently revealed why it chose to make changes to the app’s long-running Community Days. In an interview, Pokemon Go’s live game director Michael Steranka spoke about the changes the team made to the game, and why the company is making small steps to slowly reverse the adjustments made during the COVID-19 pandemic which helped Trainers stay inside such as reducing its Community Days from six hours down to three.

"We never want Pokémon Go to be a product that you can fully complete and enjoy from your couch," Steranka said. "And the fact of the matter is, with Incense being as powerful as it was, stationary players were able to do that, right?"

Does Pokemon Go make the cut in our list of the best Pokemon games? You can find out right here…