Niantic has started dishing out permanent bans to Pokemon Go cheaters. (Photo : Getty Images/Tomohiro Ohsumi)
While Pokemon Go is definitely the biggest game in the world right now, it has also spawned controversy. The latest development is that an entire country has been from playing the game.
According to a report from Comic Book, this was all because of one user. Niantic Labs, the game's developer, has been consistently strict when it comes to players who use "bot programs" to gain an edge over other players as it is, simply put, a form of cheating. Niantic does not hesitate to ban players, sometimes permanently, over bot use.
While the process of banning has not been very clear, what we do know is that Niantic targets IP addresses and player accounts. For IP bans, the player can log in to Pokemon Go, but there won't be any Pokemon, Pokestops or gyms that will appear. In the incident described by CB, one player decided to test the extent of the IP address ban.
"Earlier today, a Redditor on /r/pokemongodev, a community that developed many of the bot programs Niantic is battling against, decided to test a theory on IP bans with surprising results. The redditor allegedly used several burner SIM cards to launch several thousand simultaneous scans of the Pokemon Go servers, similar to what services such as PokeVision did in order to display Pokemon locations. All of the scans were tied to a specific national IP address, used by the cell phone company Proximus. Proximus is Belgium's largest cell phone service provider."
That test act resulted in Niantic eventually flagging the IP address but due to the number of SIM cards, the entire IP of Proximus was banned.
"This inadvertently led to Niantic banning every single user who had a Proximus's cell coverage, as banning Proximus's national IP address meant that all Proximus users could no longer use their mobile data to access the game. It's likely whoever flagged the IP address was unaware that it wasn't a private/personal IP address," the CB report stated.
However, there's one twist in the plot, though. The Reddit user who declared to conduct the test actually didn't push through with it.
UPDATE: The Original Poster apparently deleted his account as seen here.
Does that mean that Niantic Labs actually banned a whole nation's carrier simply out of hearsay? Some of the comments on the Reddit post don't think so. They believe that the Reddit user actually pushed through with it, resulting in the (supposedly inadvertent) ban and chickened out when he realized his "test" had gone too far.
Niantic Labs does have an obligation to keep the playing field open and fair for all players and banning hackers who try to jump the system but for them to shut down millions of users in an entire country may be jumping the gun.
