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Pokémon Go Is Shadow Banning Cheaters

98 points by pencilpup223 9y ago

js8 9y ago
This is similar to an approach I suggested some time ago here for other games as well - if you detect griefers/cheaters/trolls, just let them play against each other.
- sov 9y ago
  That's what Blizzard did for Diablo II about 15 years ago.
  - sbarre 9y ago
    Yep, this is easily the best way to deal with people who are committed to messing with an online community.. Make them think they're still having an impact when they're not.. I believe HN does something similar but I ran a small forum back in the early 2000s and we could flag one or more people into groups where their posts were only visible to each other, but not to anyone else. Since the site was invite-only, there was no anonymous access so they had no practical way of finding this out on their own. Eventually they got bored of "being ignored" and left on their own..
    - RangerScience 9y ago
      > their posts were only visible to each other For the Something Awful forums, this is called hell-banning.
  - bitwize 9y ago
    Blizzard has another cool anti-cheat tactic that's deployed alongside cheating bans. Remember that old story about how ITS had a command to crash the system to take the fun out of crashing the system? In Overwatch, one character's Ultimate is basically an aimbot; another's is basically a wallhack.
- apetresc 9y ago
  Shadowbanning seems like a technique that only worked back when it was an original idea that nobody knew about. Nowadays if you have a dedicated cheater who actually has something concrete to gain from abusing the system, it's absolutely trivial to "test" if you're shadowbanned by checking on an account in good standing, and treating that exactly the same as a supposedly-ineffectual normal ban.
  - kazinator 9y ago
    If shadowbanning traps most of the casual abusers, leaving only the elite cheaters, we cannot quite say that it doesn't work, right? Shadowbanning can be refined to deal with the situation you have identified. For instance, the abusive account's postings can be shown to an account in good standing, if their IP addresses are the same, or in the same class C, or in recent login history, those accounts did appear to some from the same machine or small network. The system can also detect a pattern of behavior whereby some account in good standing is expressing unsual interest in accounts in poor standing, like specifically searching for their postings or looking at profiles or whatever. Or maybe some more subtle clues.
coding123 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tabVaoeNtdk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tabVaoeNtdk Start at 27:45 but you should watch the entire thing.
marxdeveloper 9y ago
I guess my account has been shadowbanned since the beginning - there are only 2 PokeStops in 5 km (3.1 mile) radius and all they have is Pidgey and Rattata 99% of the time.
- Scramblejams 9y ago
  Did you cheat, grief or troll?
  - jgoewert 9y ago
    I am putting a strong assumption that he has the same problem that a large chunk of players like myself have called 'ruralistis' or 'farmlandempti' where if you aren't in a large city or on a coast, your pokemon spawns for the first 8 months of the game were limited to pidgeys and rattatta and once in a blue moon there might be something amazingly rare like a Weedle, because our town data wasn't in the data source they used to calculate biomes. Many player have noticed this and have been updating openstreetmaps.org data in hopes that Niantic does a biome refresh and that OSM is actually where they are sourcing their data from.
    - nathancahill 9y ago
      "updating" OSM = creating parks and rivers where they don't exist. It's an annoyance for OSM maintainers, there's a Slack channel that specifically flags things that look like they might be Pokemon Go users adding bogus features.
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      > and that OSM is actually where they are sourcing their data from Which it isn't - they use Google Maps data. Tho GM uses OSM as one of their sources (apparently) so... YMMV
  - marxdeveloper 9y ago
    No. I open the app every day for 45-60 minutes when I go for a daily walk, no funny business.
Zarathust 9y ago
Breaking the game IS the fun. Actually winning afterwards is irrelevant.
- titanix2 9y ago
  No it is not. Some gyms of my town are full of Blissey from level 40 accounts all with the same looking names. Given how hard it is to KO even one within the allocated time when playing alone, it's effectively ruining a whole part of the game for every non-cheater player.
  - Zarathust 9y ago
    I didn't play Pokemon Go, but the only reason I ever installed Ingress was to figure out how Android location services ran. This led me to arm shared objects decompilation and mocking and other interesting shenanigans. Achieving internet points was not very high on the goals list
    - nemo 9y ago
      The people who are cheating aren't the ones figuring out the cheats. The people providing the cheats are doing interesting things, but also enabling cheaters to steal fun from the game from everyone else.
  - nemo 9y ago
    Blisseys are hard solo, though if you have a few folks hitting them with a Gyrados or Dragonite you can take them out. My wife and I just took down a L10 gym with 5 Blisseys, and the rest Snorlaxes and Dragonites, and with three people no gym can hold no matter what's in it. You have to know other players to do that, though. The cheating scum will just take it back after a while and play the same game though. Glad they're finally starting to try to take on the cheaters - they definitely do steal the fun from legit players.
  - fencepost 9y ago
    There's some indication that this is being addressed - among other things, it seems like they may cap the number of a single type that can be in a gym. Honestly this is the kind of thing where I could see hyper-local chat (team or public) of the sort Yik-Yak was trying to do. "Hey Instinct within 1 mile, meet in 15 to take down the gym at the fountain?"
killin_dan 9y ago
People are still playing Pokemon Go? I stopped within the first few days when I realized you can't actually battle your Pokemon with other people. That's OBVIOUSLY what people wanted, but luckily we had a stupid minigame at gyms? Can't imagine a worse execution of such a successful IP on such a breakout platform. Pokemon Company really let me down. I know it's not their fault, but they should've spoken up about the whole thing.
- XaspR8d 9y ago
  You can't imagine a worse execution? It was the fastest mobile game ever to reach $600 million and has made well over $1 billion at this point. I understand the design complaints--the gameplay won't resonate with anyone wanting a strategy game of any depth--but saying they did poorly is pretty hyperbolic. It obviously struck a chord with some segments as I do still see people playing in dense areas (and at the local game stores). I also think looking into Niantic's past work or Pokemon Company's past partnerships would've revealed this game couldn't possibly have the mechanics of the core Pokemon line, but I do understand that the marketing and messaging was very vague.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Niantic initially developed Pokemon Go as a lighter version of Ingress. Except that game wasn't much fun, either. It's as if they only had a very vague concept of what it was actually like to play a single-player Pokemon game on a handheld. BUG CATCHER wants to BATTLE! You catch wild pokemon by walking through the tall grass, and you make yours stronger by training them against wild pokemon and other trainers. Other trainers can test your mettle by challenging you to a battle that you cannot refuse. At launch, the only way your kids could fight with their pokemon is if you all pile into the car and drive to a nigh-random location too far away to reach on foot and fail to displace the otaku-whale that managed to put a level 500 Vaporeon on the gym with the Rattattas, Pidgeys, and Weedles that are the only things to show up in your neighborhood. The game still needed to be both fun and playable entirely within the bounds of a single neighborhood, and it just wasn't.
    - 9y ago
Allower 9y ago
who fucking cares? does anyone still play this?
neivin 9y ago
I really liked the concept of a Pokemon game for mobile. Unfortunately, they went with the P2Win model that 99% of mobile games use nowadays, chock full of microtransactions and devoid of any meaningful content. They stripped the game of all the elements that actually made Pokemon fun and all that was left was Ingress with a Pokemon skin. Maybe some day we'll get an actually good Pokemon game for mobile. Until then, I'll cherish the memories of playing on my gameboy.
- haburka 9y ago
  I feel like the number one gripe I have is that they are using the branding of one of the most simple and fun games of all time but ignoring it's design. Rather than just copying the mechanics of the Pokemon games, they just made their own game? For example, battles obviously should be a direct rip off of the main games. Coding Pokemon battle seems super easy to do. And in order for it to be fun, they just have to copy the exact system. Similarly with leveling, encounters, missions, everything was just designed around what was easy for the team to do rather than what people liked about Pokemon. It's embarrassing.
  - zht 9y ago
    try to take a step back and think about what would actually be involved with coding a pokemon battle. all the possible moves, statuses, mechanics, etc of a pokemon battle is probably not super easy to do. there may be product decisions that you may not have considered. do you think pokemon GO would be as fun if each interaction with a pokemon took 2 minutes instead of 10-15 seconds it takes now?
    - s73ver 9y ago
      I think most people like the concept of catching Pokemon as it is now. But I've of the biggest complaints is that you can't battle other trainers.
    - fredley 9y ago
      Good God yes!
MrJagil 9y ago
"We could never have expected it would become such a huge success. Our best engineers were unable to foresee the server capacity to support the players’ demand. Our biggest prediction was 50 times lower than what actually happened. We knew Pokémon was a powerful brand with 20 years of existence and over 200 million fans across the globe, but people told us this game was for kids, that it had no appeal, that people would need to get out of their homes to play. It wasn’t easy, it was a massive bet. Back then, people were already talking about augmented reality, but nobody knew when this technology would be accessible. And then what happened: within two minutes, you could access an augmented reality experience and catch Pokémon in the real world, free of charge. And this game blew up without the need to advertise it." From an interesting interview with a Niantec Exec on the linked sub, stating they're adding PvP aswell: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/6e3qt2/legendaries_and_pvp_coming_this_summer/di7y4z7/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/6e3qt2/legend...
- ktta 9y ago
  See, the thing is, I think that's all it was. Hype at the start. Things aren't looking so well now. I've heard that the developers are continuously adding things, but it looks like the game has become a lot more harder to play without spending money on it.[1] [1]:https://redd.it/6dn5kp https://redd.it/6dn5kp
  - jasondemeuse 9y ago
    The link you posted, did you read past the top comment? There are a lot of people still playing and many of those that are are still heavily involved. I can't say I've ever played every day or every time I get my phone out, but I know enough people that play often that I still keep it around and play once in a while especially if there is an event. Of course there was a spike at first release, like every other game. Less press after a year is hardly indicative of the game being only hype. If you can name a game that didn't get less press a year after release I'd love to hear it. > but it looks like the game has become a lot more harder to play without spending money on it I'd love to hear why you think this is true other than someone mentioning it with no explanation in the top comment of that link. The only thing I can think of is a slight hit to pokeball drop rates which - while annoying - only affects those in rural areas who don't have access to many pokestops. This game (like Ingress) has always been geared toward urban areas and ignored rural players. This was an issue day 1 and it hasn't changed unfortunately, but this is not a recent development. Honestly, the game is pretty hollow and is hardly something I'd recommend everyone pick up, but to say that it was only hype and things aren't looking good now is uninformed.
wnevets 9y ago
do people still play?
elliottcarlson 9y ago
Shadowbanning was in place from very early on - we noticed it during the initial attempts at decoding the original protobuf syntax. Specifically, "moving" around very quickly would often get you shadowbanned very quickly.
bArray 9y ago
Manager: "You know what this website really needs?" Programmer: "What?" Manager: "No scroll bar..." Programmer: "Hmm..." Manager: "... For a website that you need to scroll." Programmer: "Genius!"
Yizahi 9y ago
When I first discovered Ingress it was a revelation. I played it for hours, walked everywhere etc. Then I discovered cheaters and that's it. A pity really, it was a cool concept for millions completely broken by a few dozen morons.
hackunomatter 9y ago
So... paying to level up is not 'cheating', but using a bot is? I don't think the distinction is as stark as Niantec would like one to believe.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
This is the best kind of ban. Make them think they aren't banned and just let them continue to waste their time.

98 points by pencilpup223 9y ago

js8 9y ago

This is similar to an approach I suggested some time ago here for other games as well - if you detect griefers/cheaters/trolls, just let them play against each other.

sov 9y ago
That's what Blizzard did for Diablo II about 15 years ago.
- sbarre 9y ago
  Yep, this is easily the best way to deal with people who are committed to messing with an online community.. Make them think they're still having an impact when they're not.. I believe HN does something similar but I ran a small forum back in the early 2000s and we could flag one or more people into groups where their posts were only visible to each other, but not to anyone else. Since the site was invite-only, there was no anonymous access so they had no practical way of finding this out on their own. Eventually they got bored of "being ignored" and left on their own..
  - RangerScience 9y ago
    > their posts were only visible to each other For the Something Awful forums, this is called hell-banning.
- bitwize 9y ago
  Blizzard has another cool anti-cheat tactic that's deployed alongside cheating bans. Remember that old story about how ITS had a command to crash the system to take the fun out of crashing the system? In Overwatch, one character's Ultimate is basically an aimbot; another's is basically a wallhack.
apetresc 9y ago
Shadowbanning seems like a technique that only worked back when it was an original idea that nobody knew about. Nowadays if you have a dedicated cheater who actually has something concrete to gain from abusing the system, it's absolutely trivial to "test" if you're shadowbanned by checking on an account in good standing, and treating that exactly the same as a supposedly-ineffectual normal ban.
- kazinator 9y ago
  If shadowbanning traps most of the casual abusers, leaving only the elite cheaters, we cannot quite say that it doesn't work, right? Shadowbanning can be refined to deal with the situation you have identified. For instance, the abusive account's postings can be shown to an account in good standing, if their IP addresses are the same, or in the same class C, or in recent login history, those accounts did appear to some from the same machine or small network. The system can also detect a pattern of behavior whereby some account in good standing is expressing unsual interest in accounts in poor standing, like specifically searching for their postings or looking at profiles or whatever. Or maybe some more subtle clues.

coding123 9y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tabVaoeNtdk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tabVaoeNtdk Start at 27:45 but you should watch the entire thing.

marxdeveloper 9y ago

I guess my account has been shadowbanned since the beginning - there are only 2 PokeStops in 5 km (3.1 mile) radius and all they have is Pidgey and Rattata 99% of the time.

Scramblejams 9y ago
Did you cheat, grief or troll?
- jgoewert 9y ago
  I am putting a strong assumption that he has the same problem that a large chunk of players like myself have called 'ruralistis' or 'farmlandempti' where if you aren't in a large city or on a coast, your pokemon spawns for the first 8 months of the game were limited to pidgeys and rattatta and once in a blue moon there might be something amazingly rare like a Weedle, because our town data wasn't in the data source they used to calculate biomes. Many player have noticed this and have been updating openstreetmaps.org data in hopes that Niantic does a biome refresh and that OSM is actually where they are sourcing their data from.
  - nathancahill 9y ago
    "updating" OSM = creating parks and rivers where they don't exist. It's an annoyance for OSM maintainers, there's a Slack channel that specifically flags things that look like they might be Pokemon Go users adding bogus features.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    > and that OSM is actually where they are sourcing their data from Which it isn't - they use Google Maps data. Tho GM uses OSM as one of their sources (apparently) so... YMMV
- marxdeveloper 9y ago
  No. I open the app every day for 45-60 minutes when I go for a daily walk, no funny business.

Zarathust 9y ago

Breaking the game IS the fun. Actually winning afterwards is irrelevant.

titanix2 9y ago
No it is not. Some gyms of my town are full of Blissey from level 40 accounts all with the same looking names. Given how hard it is to KO even one within the allocated time when playing alone, it's effectively ruining a whole part of the game for every non-cheater player.
- Zarathust 9y ago
  I didn't play Pokemon Go, but the only reason I ever installed Ingress was to figure out how Android location services ran. This led me to arm shared objects decompilation and mocking and other interesting shenanigans. Achieving internet points was not very high on the goals list
  - nemo 9y ago
    The people who are cheating aren't the ones figuring out the cheats. The people providing the cheats are doing interesting things, but also enabling cheaters to steal fun from the game from everyone else.
- nemo 9y ago
  Blisseys are hard solo, though if you have a few folks hitting them with a Gyrados or Dragonite you can take them out. My wife and I just took down a L10 gym with 5 Blisseys, and the rest Snorlaxes and Dragonites, and with three people no gym can hold no matter what's in it. You have to know other players to do that, though. The cheating scum will just take it back after a while and play the same game though. Glad they're finally starting to try to take on the cheaters - they definitely do steal the fun from legit players.
- fencepost 9y ago
  There's some indication that this is being addressed - among other things, it seems like they may cap the number of a single type that can be in a gym. Honestly this is the kind of thing where I could see hyper-local chat (team or public) of the sort Yik-Yak was trying to do. "Hey Instinct within 1 mile, meet in 15 to take down the gym at the fountain?"

killin_dan 9y ago

People are still playing Pokemon Go? I stopped within the first few days when I realized you can't actually battle your Pokemon with other people. That's OBVIOUSLY what people wanted, but luckily we had a stupid minigame at gyms? Can't imagine a worse execution of such a successful IP on such a breakout platform. Pokemon Company really let me down. I know it's not their fault, but they should've spoken up about the whole thing.

XaspR8d 9y ago
You can't imagine a worse execution? It was the fastest mobile game ever to reach $600 million and has made well over $1 billion at this point. I understand the design complaints--the gameplay won't resonate with anyone wanting a strategy game of any depth--but saying they did poorly is pretty hyperbolic. It obviously struck a chord with some segments as I do still see people playing in dense areas (and at the local game stores). I also think looking into Niantic's past work or Pokemon Company's past partnerships would've revealed this game couldn't possibly have the mechanics of the core Pokemon line, but I do understand that the marketing and messaging was very vague.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Niantic initially developed Pokemon Go as a lighter version of Ingress. Except that game wasn't much fun, either. It's as if they only had a very vague concept of what it was actually like to play a single-player Pokemon game on a handheld. BUG CATCHER wants to BATTLE! You catch wild pokemon by walking through the tall grass, and you make yours stronger by training them against wild pokemon and other trainers. Other trainers can test your mettle by challenging you to a battle that you cannot refuse. At launch, the only way your kids could fight with their pokemon is if you all pile into the car and drive to a nigh-random location too far away to reach on foot and fail to displace the otaku-whale that managed to put a level 500 Vaporeon on the gym with the Rattattas, Pidgeys, and Weedles that are the only things to show up in your neighborhood. The game still needed to be both fun and playable entirely within the bounds of a single neighborhood, and it just wasn't.
  - 9y ago

Allower 9y ago

who fucking cares? does anyone still play this?

neivin 9y ago

I really liked the concept of a Pokemon game for mobile. Unfortunately, they went with the P2Win model that 99% of mobile games use nowadays, chock full of microtransactions and devoid of any meaningful content. They stripped the game of all the elements that actually made Pokemon fun and all that was left was Ingress with a Pokemon skin. Maybe some day we'll get an actually good Pokemon game for mobile. Until then, I'll cherish the memories of playing on my gameboy.

haburka 9y ago
I feel like the number one gripe I have is that they are using the branding of one of the most simple and fun games of all time but ignoring it's design. Rather than just copying the mechanics of the Pokemon games, they just made their own game? For example, battles obviously should be a direct rip off of the main games. Coding Pokemon battle seems super easy to do. And in order for it to be fun, they just have to copy the exact system. Similarly with leveling, encounters, missions, everything was just designed around what was easy for the team to do rather than what people liked about Pokemon. It's embarrassing.
- zht 9y ago
  try to take a step back and think about what would actually be involved with coding a pokemon battle. all the possible moves, statuses, mechanics, etc of a pokemon battle is probably not super easy to do. there may be product decisions that you may not have considered. do you think pokemon GO would be as fun if each interaction with a pokemon took 2 minutes instead of 10-15 seconds it takes now?
  - s73ver 9y ago
    I think most people like the concept of catching Pokemon as it is now. But I've of the biggest complaints is that you can't battle other trainers.
  - fredley 9y ago
    Good God yes!

MrJagil 9y ago

"We could never have expected it would become such a huge success. Our best engineers were unable to foresee the server capacity to support the players’ demand. Our biggest prediction was 50 times lower than what actually happened. We knew Pokémon was a powerful brand with 20 years of existence and over 200 million fans across the globe, but people told us this game was for kids, that it had no appeal, that people would need to get out of their homes to play. It wasn’t easy, it was a massive bet. Back then, people were already talking about augmented reality, but nobody knew when this technology would be accessible. And then what happened: within two minutes, you could access an augmented reality experience and catch Pokémon in the real world, free of charge. And this game blew up without the need to advertise it." From an interesting interview with a Niantec Exec on the linked sub, stating they're adding PvP aswell: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/6e3qt2/legendaries_and_pvp_coming_this_summer/di7y4z7/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/6e3qt2/legend...

ktta 9y ago
See, the thing is, I think that's all it was. Hype at the start. Things aren't looking so well now. I've heard that the developers are continuously adding things, but it looks like the game has become a lot more harder to play without spending money on it.[1] [1]:https://redd.it/6dn5kp https://redd.it/6dn5kp
- jasondemeuse 9y ago
  The link you posted, did you read past the top comment? There are a lot of people still playing and many of those that are are still heavily involved. I can't say I've ever played every day or every time I get my phone out, but I know enough people that play often that I still keep it around and play once in a while especially if there is an event. Of course there was a spike at first release, like every other game. Less press after a year is hardly indicative of the game being only hype. If you can name a game that didn't get less press a year after release I'd love to hear it. > but it looks like the game has become a lot more harder to play without spending money on it I'd love to hear why you think this is true other than someone mentioning it with no explanation in the top comment of that link. The only thing I can think of is a slight hit to pokeball drop rates which - while annoying - only affects those in rural areas who don't have access to many pokestops. This game (like Ingress) has always been geared toward urban areas and ignored rural players. This was an issue day 1 and it hasn't changed unfortunately, but this is not a recent development. Honestly, the game is pretty hollow and is hardly something I'd recommend everyone pick up, but to say that it was only hype and things aren't looking good now is uninformed.

wnevets 9y ago

do people still play?

elliottcarlson 9y ago

Shadowbanning was in place from very early on - we noticed it during the initial attempts at decoding the original protobuf syntax. Specifically, "moving" around very quickly would often get you shadowbanned very quickly.

bArray 9y ago

Manager: "You know what this website really needs?" Programmer: "What?" Manager: "No scroll bar..." Programmer: "Hmm..." Manager: "... For a website that you need to scroll." Programmer: "Genius!"

Yizahi 9y ago

When I first discovered Ingress it was a revelation. I played it for hours, walked everywhere etc. Then I discovered cheaters and that's it. A pity really, it was a cool concept for millions completely broken by a few dozen morons.

hackunomatter 9y ago

So... paying to level up is not 'cheating', but using a bot is? I don't think the distinction is as stark as Niantec would like one to believe.

bitmapbrother 9y ago

This is the best kind of ban. Make them think they aren't banned and just let them continue to waste their time.