“Pokemon Go” players will resort to anything to level up their avatars though the manner of doing so will be up for debate. The easy route is to cheat and seek the aid of bots and GPS spoofers. However, that doesn’t mean some individuals will find a way to lay out a tactical plan to level up in the augmented reality game.
By now most are aware that Niantic has tightened up its measures to waylay the “Pokemon Go” cheaters. That includes imposing bans (soft or permanent) to ones found to be using some app or tactic to raise their stats.
There will always be grey areas in the mix, the same way that Niantic continues to address flaws. And now an ingenious individual named Jimmy Derocher finds himself banned with his logistics which were shown to be fair and square.
A Million XP weekend
Derocher is a hardcore gamer and wanted to accumulate as much XP as he can without using any cheat app. Apparently he did come up with an unusual way, something he managed over the course of one weekend.
Derocher mapped out a special walking route over in Austin, Texas – something called as “Jimmy’s Loop”. He explains that he and his group placed in-game lures at 10 PokeStops via 0.2 mile loop which they walked over and over.
To prove that everything was legit, Derocher and his friends even showed everything via livestream on Twitch which gained the attention of fellow “Pokemon Go” game addicts. Everything went smoothly in the early goings, Derocher amassing hundreds of thousands experience. That was until the 13th hour when things changed.
“Pokemon Go” characters were running away which was attributed to the game’s anti-cheat measures. Kotaku explains that such is a 24-hour ‘cheating prevention’ tool that deprives players from gaining XPs.
With the revelation, the question is now up – was it a cheat or an oversight on the part of Niantic?
The thing is that despite being a craze, “Pokemon Go” is not perfect. There are exploits and as far as figuring out the algorithmic mechanics, Derocher obviously found a way to work around it. Hence, Niantic finds itself trying to address yet another issue to their highly successful augmented reality game.
