[happymellon]

I don't play Pokémon go, but with my understanding of the game I'm not sure how spoofing the GPS would impact other users in a negative way.

Considering that most of the world has some form of travel restrictions over the past year, and I believe that being able to interact with friends in the game requires you be be in very close proximity. Can you explain how spoofing GPS data so that people are allowed to play together even though they are not close is bad?

[kingaillas]

>I'm not sure how spoofing the GPS would impact other users in a negative way.

You could attack a pokemon gym at your convenience (from your couch, whatever time of the day). This negatively impacts other players because a legit, non-cheating spoofer will have to expend far more effort to do the same thing.

>Can you explain how spoofing GPS data so that people are allowed to play together even though they are not close is bad?

Friend interaction or just interaction in the game has to do with raiding and trading. You can already league battle (pvp) over any distance.

Niantic has made some changes along these lines - main one is the remote raid pass. One person close enough to a gym can invite friends to raid, no spoofing needed. They also upped the trade distance, how close you need to be to interact with a gym/pokestop, etc.

So the answer to your question is the game itself has made changes to address actual in-game scenarios. That leaves spoofing GPS as a way to asymmetrically cheat against gyms, or perhaps trivialize collecting pokemon (some are region locked and so on).

[duxup]

In games like Pokemon Go (and similar augmented reality games) players go to real world locations in order to gather resources, and battle the pokemon of another user who currently holds that position.

If you can just spoof, the whole nature of augmented reality falls apart and someone could simply spoof themselves anywhere and take those positions. It was a big problem before the android os made it harder to spoof.

There's no point/ fun in playing augmented reality games if enough people simply cheat and the real world limitations aren't a factor.

[afiori]

I played pokemon go seriously for a few years (both at the beginning and recently) and honestly spoofers are an issue only because imho Niantic is incompetent and doesn't care.[1]

not to say how it you are anywhere not in a medium size city you need either spoofers or endless grind to unlock significant parts of the game

[1] to be fair I left before the pandemic, so I cannot comment on how they handled that

[duxup]

I think spoofing early on was an issue because it was so easy.

It really stopped being a large scale issue after Android started making it harder to spoof.