GPS fixes and anti-cheat

[Ruvox]

To be honest I didn't understood completely when what change did happen but I experienced the following issue today on my train trip through Germany.

I'm sitting in an ICE train of the Deutsche Bahn (a train travelling up to 230 km/h on my route) and capture land every now and then. As always my old Nexus feels like giving me ... let's say exotic GPS-positions in interesting frequencies. After some time my position tends to go back into the city of Fulda although my train was already about a hundred kilometers away. To be exactly my GPS-position switched between the more or less accurate position and Fulda at least three times in a row. It always switched back to the exact same position in Fulda which seems to be the last "stable GPS-position" I had.

However, after many exciting lightspeed jumps the anti-cheat (or at least I think so) decided to flag me giving me the "Oops! This location cannot be captured..." message again and again no matter what I tried (deleting the cache, forcing the game to quit, restarting the phone, using a third party app to reset my GPS and reload the Xtra-datas) for about 2 and a half hours now.

If there is any way to prevent this behavior please let me know. Getting flagged because of bad GPS-behavior is really not a nice thing although I did not lost anything important because of this issue in this case. I'll see what the end of the train ride (so a longer time at a stable position) will bring.

After all, please don't get this wrong. Having a overly sensitive anti-cheat is still a by far better option than to have none or a not sensitive enough one. This is more meant as a (maybe helpful) reallife report of anti cheat, bad GPS and travelling combined.

 

Edit:
Maybe also important, I had a plane ride just a few hours before but everything went totally fine before and after it.

Edit2: I was just able to capture a land again while the train is still rolling

Edited March 26, 2018 by Ruvox

[Mr. D]

Hi Ruvox!

Thanks for letting me know!

First of all, I have checked the anti-cheat logs and you aren't flagged as a cheater; the system seems to be correctly recognizing that you're experiencing GPS issues.
So the land capture block you've experienced is just a harmless precaution.

However, having analyzed a few dozen of trips similar to yours last week I have begun developing a new anti-cheat version that should be even more accurate and potentially allow to remove this precautionary block completely (as there's really a very clear difference between players like yourself and those using Fake GPS from my end; I am hopeful that at some point even the cheater punishment will become automated due to precision of this new system).
It will probably go live at some point around/after Easter!

As for the GPS position jumping to a previous location: we've actually switched to using Google Location Services API instead of just reading coordinates off your GPS, as Google's algorithms are a lot more advanced than anything I can possibly design myself (simply because they've spent more time developing their solution ) and many more devices are now showing accurate positions compared to previous versions.
However, I have honestly no idea how they work internally and cannot say why the API sometimes decides to throw you back into a last visited city!
It's quite possible that, as you noticed yourself, the accuracy level of your current coordinates is simply too low and the Location Services decided to use the last known accurate position instead.

* shrug *

Unfortunately, there's little I can do to improve the GPS accuracy further, as there are just too many devices working in different ways and whenever one of them gets really accurate some of the others stop working completely (as it happened in 1.17.5).
So we're probably going to keep the current version, but as mentioned above I will adjust the anti-cheat around it.

[Ruvox]

9 hours ago, Mr. D said:

However, having analyzed a few dozen of trips similar to yours last week I have begun developing a new anti-cheat version that should be even more accurate and potentially allow to remove this precautionary block completely (as there's really a very clear difference between players like yourself and those using Fake GPS from my end; I am hopeful that at some point even the cheater punishment will become automated due to precision of this new system).
It will probably go live at some point around/after Easter!

Amazing !

[Backup Cliffy]

I'm still having issues similar to Ruvox, but worse.

I started playing about a week ago and was really enjoying the game.  At some point last week I received the spoofing warning.  I didn't think much of it since I wasn't spoofing.

Cut to tuesday, my original account (Cliffy / Cliffytopia) gets blacklisted.  I send an email but the support email in the blacklist announcement is no longer valid.

I created this Backup account with a backup email and tried to move on. But this morning I received my first and only spoof warning.  

I actually work in troubleshooting, so here's what I observed:

 A: after the blacklist I saw that my phone had power save mode turned on, so I disabled that, thinking possibly it was causing "shortcuts" in the GPS calculations.  Issue recurred

B: my play pattern is a pretty even split between my home base and where I work, 15 mi away.  The exception is when I take my partner to work at her job, a bookstore chain with public WiFi.  I don't believe my phone connects to that wifi, but I know if Google can see it it will use it for GPS calculations.

I do not recall when my first warning occurred, but my final ban and my first warning on the new account both occurred within minutes of dropping her off at the bookstore then returning home.

C: at one point (before power save mode was disabled) directly after returning home from work, where I had checked in several times, I opened the game and observed that the game initially had my location as still at work, then over the next 60 seconds the blue dot traced my route down the highway until it arrived at home, as though playing back a recording of my last 30 minutes at super speed.

D: I have a bad habit of loading up on range powerups and blindly jamming the collect button while I drive to or from work.  However I observed no correlation.  In fact I can say that my warning today did NOT follow such behavior.

I hope this helps.  I really like the game but If this account gets banned then there's no point in creating another.  I can't cheat LESS, because I'm not cheating in the first place.

[Mr. D]

27 minutes ago, Backup Cliffy said:

I'm still having issues similar to Ruvox, but worse.

I started playing about a week ago and was really enjoying the game.  At some point last week I received the spoofing warning.  I didn't think much of it since I wasn't spoofing.

Cut to tuesday, my original account (Cliffy / Cliffytopia) gets blacklisted.  I send an email but the support email in the blacklist announcement is no longer valid.

I created this Backup account with a backup email and tried to move on. But this morning I received my first and only spoof warning.  

I actually work in troubleshooting, so here's what I observed:

 A: after the blacklist I saw that my phone had power save mode turned on, so I disabled that, thinking possibly it was causing "shortcuts" in the GPS calculations.  Issue recurred

B: my play pattern is a pretty even split between my home base and where I work, 15 mi away.  The exception is when I take my partner to work at her job, a bookstore chain with public WiFi.  I don't believe my phone connects to that wifi, but I know if Google can see it it will use it for GPS calculations.

I do not recall when my first warning occurred, but my final ban and my first warning on the new account both occurred within minutes of dropping her off at the bookstore then returning home.

C: at one point (before power save mode was disabled) directly after returning home from work, where I had checked in several times, I opened the game and observed that the game initially had my location as still at work, then over the next 60 seconds the blue dot traced my route down the highway until it arrived at home, as though playing back a recording of my last 30 minutes at super speed.

D: I have a bad habit of loading up on range powerups and blindly jamming the collect button while I drive to or from work.  However I observed no correlation.  In fact I can say that my warning today did NOT follow such behavior.

I hope this helps.  I really like the game but If this account gets banned then there's no point in creating another.  I can't cheat LESS, because I'm not cheating in the first place.

Hey @Backup Cliffy!

I did get your email, but this week has been completely insane and I haven't had to respond yet, sorry!

I will investigate your account more thoroughly as soon as physically possible; if you weren't cheating then it will be apparent and you will be unbanned of course, but I will most likely contact you with some follow-up questions and enquiries in the near future.

Please note though that network lags / "instant travels" / "speed of light" and similar problems are really not the reason for your warnings & the ban; we are very familiar with network & gps issues by now and have considered all such scenarios.

Once again, I apologize for inconvenience (if you really weren't cheating! ) and delays, I will get back to you very soon.

[Backup Cliffy]

Thank you!  Like I said, I'm a troubleshooter IRL, so I'll be happy to provide whatever info I can to help.