[tfm]

Probably good to regard these first few weeks (months?) of Pokémadness as an "open beta" period, before the security measures get turned on. We can look at Niantic's previous project, Ingress, for a roadmap.

The two major categories of cheatifying in Ingress are falsifying one's location and multi-accounting. There's precious little that can be done about the latter, so Niantic focus on banning players that appear to be "spoofing" their location.

Given the wealth of different devices and playing scenarios, immediate detection of GPS spoofing is infeasible. Things like WiFi router locationing idiocy (or even just dodgy GPS antennae) play havoc with the utopian dream of perfect positioning every time. If a player performs actions seconds apart that are separated by thousands of miles then the game temporarily ignores them, but after some time in the naughty corner they can resume play.

Hardy spoofing detection instead depends on longer-term profiling. Ingress has a similar API to Pokémon Go – JSON chunks (rather than protobuf) over HTTPS, most fields out in the open – but each request from the app includes a monolithic "clientBlob" containing device characterisation. The format of this has been (presumably) reverse-engineered by a few hardy souls but it is certainly closely-protected Niantic knowledge. We could safely assume that it's a proprietary blend of signal strengths, gyroscope readings, touch events and timings, secret herbs and spices etc.

The clientBlobs lend themselves to offline processing. There are conceivably servers continuously trawling through a backlog looking for tell-tale patterns of bad behaviour, but it also provides an audit trail if a particular player is suspected of spoofing. Occasionally Niantic indulges in mass purges, which presumably follow from a new cheat detection heuristic being run on all the collected data for some period. These "ban waves" have a reputation for penalising unusual device configurations (the most recent major wave appeared to target, amongst other things, players with modified Android variants that might mask GPS falsifying code, including cheaper Chinese knock-offs, and Jolla phones running Sailboat).

Occasionally during major Ingress gaming events – so called "XM anomalies" – there is some level of human supervision to quickly identify and remedy clearly-fraudulent player behaviour, but for day-to-day operations it seems that account termination, so-called "hard bans" and shorter-lived "soft bans" are entirely automated, and based on offline player data analysis.

Getting back to the New Cruelty: the clientBlob was not part of Ingress's initial implementation; for a while after it was introduced was ignored, and then it became mandatory. A similar opaque chunk of data is included in the Pokémon Go requests, so we should look forward to its imminent deployment when Niantic scrape together enough Pokécoins to buy a few new servers for batch processing. At that time these convenient APIs won't have long to live.

[pbhjpbhj]

>If a player performs actions seconds apart that are separated by thousands of miles then the game temporarily ignores them, but after some time in the naughty corner they can resume play. //

I'm curious how the financial side works with the gameplay side - the people doing spoofing might also be those that are motivated enough to spend money on the game; you don't want to ban your whales [best spenders] just because they tried to cheat. Would be really interested to see how much of that weighs in to business decisions on crack-downs on unauthorised "play".

[tfm]

I'd certainly agree that someone who went to the effort of setting up a system for spoofing (even if it was just downloading an extra app) is, in some sense, more motivated than a very casual player.

I don't think though that Niantic have much of a moral hazard to consider here. Looking at what's purchasable in the Pokémon store, there's nothing that would be attractive to anyone who was able to virtually wander the world at all hours from the comfort of their couch, especially since anything that can be bought with cash money could be obtained using coins earned in-game. If a player's motivation in spoofing was to "catch 'em all" by whatever means necessary, it seems unlikely that they'd draw the line at restocking from Pokéstops along the way.

Comparing with the dark side of Ingress, there is a ludicrously well-organised black market economy offering purchases for every in-game commodity – all, of course, completely against the T&Cs, all completely abhorred by legitimate players, but all offered with consummate professionalism (think of the slick ransomware scammers offering a support number). Niantic don't see any of that cash. It is likely to have had a major impact on their design decisions for the PoGo store, and the game in general. If, for instance, there is no way to trade items between players, then it severely limits the options for a parallel economy.