3 ms·
The problem with that is that game will have the Ingress/PGo/Wizards Unite problem of limited activities outside crowded urban areas but 1000-fold because you'r
by rtkwe 7y ago
The problem with that is that game will have the Ingress/PGo/Wizards Unite problem of limited activities outside crowded urban areas but 1000-fold because you're adding physical infrastructure. And on top of the issues of just getting them out there there's the other issue of just coordinating placing all those locations and making sure your infrastructure doesn't get ripped up for being an eyesore or for angering some local politician.
One alternative might be to combine multiple location sources, eg: GPS, local wifi and cell tower data to cross check. Spoofing all those at once should be harder but the OS would have to support lower level access to the location info. In a similar vein there's probably some way to validate the GPS info if the app had access to the incoming signals more directly as those and the slight jitter coming from reflected GPS signals should be harder to spoof.
- pavel_lishin 7y agoI think Ingress actually ended up solving most of those problems - from what I read on forums, it became more difficult to spoof your location, and they would track the plausibility of player moves - anyone moving around faster than a slow driving speed would be penalized. And yup, it's a problem outside of urban areas. Honestly, if I were designing an ARG game, I probably wouldn't even try, but explicitly limit it to dense environments. Roll out in New York, Chicago, San Francisco.
- rtkwe 7y agoYeah that's another option even if it doesn't totally eliminate the problem it does severely hamper the power of spoofing. It does fail if part of your goals is to geofence content like Pokemon Go does (did? It's been a while since I played but I doubt they removed the region specific pokemon) since just disappearing in one location and appearing somewhere else hours later isn't that weird. IIRC in pokemon go some of the later GPS spoofers would have you walk around a map instead of jumping instantaneously from location to location.
- pavel_lishin 7y agoOh, appearing and disappearing somewhere hours later was fine. But appearing in Los Angeles, then five minutes later popping up in New York would earn you a ban.