Niantic to file a lawsuit to any devs trying to hack their API

[Lucentt]

RIP Botting: Pokémon Go owners are threatening to sue developers over third-party hacks | The Verge

[Nezaphix]

Surely everybody's scared right? Niantic are losing their ground lol

[rling]

Nintendo and many other corporation have done this to anyone who has tried to reverse engineer their software and hardware. The bigger the threat, or the tougher the challenge, the more people are likely to do it. Reputation gained from cracking something this big is significant.

[kurniawan]

People will definitely stop playing pokemon if botters are gone

[Nezaphix]

I mean the fact that they are threatening the bot developers right now after the API has changed basically means that was only a temporary fix for the problem, which while being obvious, lots of people were stating otherwise.

[kurniawan]

Everything can be cracked dude
New API can even be cracked soon. That is why they threatening these devs

[Nezaphix]

Everything can be cracked dude
New API can even be cracked soon. That is why they threatening these devs

But... that's basically what I said...

[awand]

People will definitely stop playing pokemon if botters are gone

are you sure, greedy botters make this game hard... all gym owned by botters. i want play "fair" game..

[Sylencer90]

If they make their API bombproof that only legit players can play anymore (not even with emulators), yeah rip that Game . Almost no1 will play this anymore then.
I mean they should be happy that the bot developers haven't invented auto take gyms and such.

[Nezaphix]

are you sure, greedy botters make this game hard... all gym owned by botters. i want play "fair" game..

I mean we're in "Pokemon GO Hacks|Cheats" section after all. There's virtually no difference between a botter and a greedy botter. Some people are selling the botted accounts, some people are taking over gyms, ultimately we're using the same software.

[Lucentt]

If they make their API bombproof that only legit players can play anymore (not even with emulators), yeah rip that Game . Almost no1 will play this anymore then.
I mean they should be happy that the bot developers haven't invented auto take gyms and such.

Gym Bots would 100% ruin the game and they're most likely being developed as we speak.

[vosszaa]

Everything can be cracked dude
New API can even be cracked soon. That is why they threatening these devs

lol please crack Denuvo

[JoeThePlumber]

Guys, lots of people will play this game, lots of people played it before the bots and even more playing it right now all over the world after the bots... some people enjoy get out and be social with others while catching the Pokemon, visting Pokestops and gyms in the real world!

[KefkaBot]

I'm pretty sure everyone in general cheaters and non-cheaters are pretty bored of pokemon go already.

The fad was fun while it lasted... but yeah, it's really not that fun anymore.

[ZeroDayGhost]

Well, all it means, if they persist and actually push on with legal actions, is that botting will go underground.

So. To anyone that can write code, grab a copy of some of the bots that are out there (so you have a starting point) while they're still open source!

Right now they're going after (if they really are) the bot-devs, open source ones for sure (see for instance: https://github.com/Mila432/Pokemon_Go_API - though you can always checkout the code before his last commit...)... After that fewer bot-devs will remain on their own, less public or not public at all. At that point they might actually start perma-banning bots. As in right now there's too much data to go off of, like sure there are say thousands accounts that are for some reason "walking" at 200km/h for more than 72 hours straight (not humanly possible lol...) but going after the thousands is harder than going after a couple of open source projects which is where those thousands get their bots from. Once the thousands of botters are gone by having taken down the open source projects, going at 200km/h for 72 hours straight will be picked up as anomaly by (and if they have something to track, and i'm sure they do) whatever system they have to track and will be dealt with more individually (perma-bans?).

Also, making the bot open source in the first place is interesting as well. See, it's not only those that use and develop the bot that might be reading the code, but also the niantic-devs themselves. The niantic-devs reading the bot's code can be like "oh I see how they're doing this... Now, I will just fix it like this..." - essentially helping the niantic-devs against the bot-devs themselves. This kind of sped up the cycle of niantic-devs "fixing" things, bot-devs releasing new version, niantic-devs "fixing" things again...

Niantic's main issue is not really the bots themselves, as much as their API being reversible.

The legal actions, as someone else said, is to protect their rep/cred... (Like right now, everything can be attributed to a rough start, something that most online games have a trouble with)

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Oh and, if there's a question of "why not ban the thousands of botters right now on the spot?"...

Well it's slightly pointless. Half of them will leave/stop anyways once the bots are less readily available. The other (say) half will remain playing as legit players - some of which might buy from their cash shop... And that remaining half is probably not significantly large with respect to those that have been playing legit from the get-go... so the x-botters, will be less commonly seen in their game. Not to mention, in due time, if the game even lasts that long, the legit players will catch up... Maybe the devs will adjust the exp needed to level so that it's less, and raise the level cap to say 100... so that get to 30/40 is relatively fast while getting to 100 is the same as getting to 40 now - if that makes sense.