Fake GPS

[maximus43]

Hi, friends .

As I understand it . The game is not protected against cheating. A lot of plaeyrs from this comunyty played to the Ingress and know, how Ninatic struggling with unfair players.

i think it's very important for the future of DE!?

[Mr. D]

Hi,

That's not correct, anti-cheat is in place and we're constantly working on improving it.

I can't provide you with the exact details about how it works (not to assist those trying to bypass it ), but if you see a message saying "Oops! This location cannot be captured, please move to another spot and try again" - that's the anti-cheat kicking in.

Sometimes you may not be blocked straight away, but this activity is still being recorded from our end and the system composes a list of "cheaters" - we're still deciding what to do with some of them, but it doesn't mean we don't know they exist.  

Obviously, cheating in any form isn't appreciated, so I advise against using Fake GPS as everyone doing so will be caught eventually!

[maximus43]

Ye! I liked it. Must be hard policy for cheaters !!!

[Ruvox]

I also know the problems with the cheaters from ingress but I also remember how niantic handled somethings really baldy. They sometimes blocked or banned people for not very clear reasons. 

I am just a little bit afraid of your list because my GPS is sometimes not the best resulting in the "...waiting for location" message while trying to scrap items (I already mentioned this in another post) but also ends up with the "Oops! This location cannot be captured, please move to another spot and try again" message you mentioned sometimes. This happens quiet often after some GPS drifts for example when I enter a building and restart the game afterwards. Concerning this your list of "cheaters" might fill up with people who have a bad GPS-chip quickly.

I like your game very much and hope it won't get destroyed by cheaters, I also appreciate that you record those things to prevent people from cheating. 
 

It is just my entreaty to you to stay fair as you are and when banning people from domination please state clearly why you do this.

[Mr. D]

Don't worry, @Ruvox!

First of all, it is unlikely that we'll be banning anyone in the near future as the latest version of anti-cheat is doing a pretty good job on its own (all of its blocks are temporary).
The similar looking messages that you're experiencing aren't actually coming from anti-cheat; this message is also shared by a few other systems that throw it when there's simply no internet connection or the GPS signal is weak.
We're very much aware of the GPS problems on certain devices (especially Android 5.0) and will never punish someone for experiencing that!
But we don't want to make it too easy to tell when you're interacting with the anti-cheat system not to assist with bypassing it, so you may see the same message in multiple unrelated cases.

Finally, evidence collected by the anti-cheat makes it very easy to distinguish when someone's being thrown around by a poor GPS chip and when it's a fake coordinate selected from a mock GPS app. We're still fine-tuning the anti-cheat to work better around plane flights (sometimes you may be blocked for a little while after a short flight, but with no permanent changes to your account); in these cases we do a manual review and can still tell when the person's travel was real.

If we decide to actually ban someone you can rest assured that it will be a genuine cheater; we may not share the entire evidence trail, but will of course elaborate on how we've reached that decision.