Players from Pokémon Go were shocked to see a large-scale bot attack in their area. What if Team Rocket was real?
If Pokémon is mainly known for its hundreds of creatures to capture, another important element of the franchise is the existence of antagonistic groups like the Team Rocket.
If the big villains of Pokémon terrorize the population in video games and anime, it seems that reality sometimes catches up with fiction.
Indeed, scriptwriters do not hesitate to ruin the game experience of many Pokémon Go trainers, with gigantic operations that have nothing to envy to the Machiavellian plans of Team Rocket.
Pokémon Go players attacked by bots
On TheSilphRoad’s subreddit, a user shared with the community the strange experience his local group of gamers are currently having on Pokémon Go:
“Since about Monday at 7:30 p.m. there has been a huge increase in activity in the arenas around where I live. And I’m not talking about children who have just discovered the application.[…]
It started with all the arenas that went white almost simultaneously in several cities tens of kilometers from each other. Then, these arenas were repopulated in a few hours, only by new accounts that no one had ever encountered, and with similar name patterns.[…]
All players who tried to take over an arena lasted about 15-30 minutes before losing it again, at any time. It almost looks scripted. It’s clearly not kids teleporting around to catch Pokemon, but rather a massive operation.
En drawing a shape around the affected area on FreeMapTools, the perimeter of affected cities is about 43km. This finding only comes from players on a local Discord server who shared their finding, there could be even more areas affected.”
In comments, users explained that they had already seen this type of situation, which would be particularly common in areas known for their excellent density of arenas such as San Francisco or Tokyo.
According to user tiki7iboothe cheat process would be simple:
“You can create 1000 bots with one click, and send them to look for shiny (the algorithm is well known now), and sell each of them for ten dollars. I would say the main objective is to earn money (in addition to completing your own shiny collection).”
If it is recognized that Niantic actively fights against botting, it would seem that it remains today very easy to cheat on Pokémon Go. With attacks of this magnitude, these unscrupulous cheaters really have nothing to envy to the Team Rocket!