What do you do against every day cheaters?
Hi
As per title, I'd like to know how people are dealing with players who use every possible advantage to the fullest extend. It's quite easy to spot and report a cheater when someone called "Spoofmaster3000" is flying into every restricted area at top speed. It's not so easy in case of people using and sharing multiple accounts, having backpacks, people playing on two phones at once to overcome enemy recharging, maybe even using farm bots and the like.
(Also the occassional suspicious activity like being weekdays at 4am an hour deep into the forest during a thunderstorm. Of course the person could have been there for real but no one would ever know.)
Naturally there is the benefit of the doubt but the players in my area are realy pushing it. For example, smashing solo through several heavily linked and shielded homezones to build a baf. Not just regular cleaning for a link but destroying everything in the vicinity over 3-4 hours without ever stopping to refarm gear. Quite often we have people acitively recharging, sometimes redeploying portals but they give up or run out of cubes half way through these rampages.
Now it's one thing for people with too much free time to spend it one making AP and some people are saying that players who need to cheat aren't good at the game at all.
However, the problem here is the that these actions are always aimed at covering up large areas or cities indefinitely leaving the regular players under the field unable to play the game to the full extend. New players of either faction don't stick around when they need to drive an hour to throw their first link.
I oftern read that the local faction community should not tolerate cheaters among them but these players are basically all that's left of said community. New players are exactly told what or when to link (usualy not at all because it would mess up their bafs) and are encouraged to create multiple accounts. This is well known because it led to a lot of faction changes over the years with people talking and quite frankly to cheating on both sides. (Using backpacks seems to be norm if you don't want to fall behind)
Obviously using the regular report function didn't help much. We sometimes get a farming or spoofing account banned if someone messes up but it's never the people behind them that are stopped. How would one even get proof that one specific person is using farm bots? Or who created and used that throw-away account for spoofing? Or the names of all the backpack accounts, not that the report function would even ask for that information.
Comments
These allegations are extremely difficult to prove if not impossible. Everyone except the cheaters loses in this scenario. Honest players leave, communities dissolve, and Niantic ends up with fewer consumers,
There are three notorious bad actors in my city and as far as I'm aware none of them have received a single warning. Two eventually got bored and rarely play anymore. Hoping that the cheaters will find something more interesting would be better for your mental health than waiting for "justice."
The questions you should be asking yourself are these: How far am I willing to go to catch the cheaters in the act? How legal are my actions in the real world? How do these considerations impact my enjoyment of Ingress?
There not else to do but report.
If it's a know player from our faction, we can exclude it from the community and they keep playing alone. If we spot a know player cheating in the other faction (but nothing someting obvious in the scanner, since they're using the right tools) and Niantic didn't teminate the account, there's nothing to do since they're gonna deny the fact and look away from it. The rivalry is strong in some areas, "the other" is aways the wrong and evil one. Each team has their own agenda and rules, aparently. My faction works as one, the other here apparently works as individuals competing with each other...
I did not read all of your post, but from a glimpse I recognize some parts that you can hand over to the Trusted Reporters.
Daily urban cheaters live forever. be done with it, I always say do the same. For the mentioned spoofer, I provide useful links.
https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/6853/trusted-reporter-program-resumes
Another note: you are going in a unwinnable war against a spoofer. Spoofers always wins unless they give up.
Actions againtst cheaters can come from 3 sides:
-Ban from Niantic.
-Expulsion from communities.
-Block from agent.
The way I see it, there is only one question to ask yourself against cheaters, so I'll slightly rewrite what @Ineras said:
How much of your every day free time are you willing to sacrifice to achieve a fair punishment?
From agent side, is very quick and simple: you choose who do you play with, if you don't want to play with cheaters, just block and move on, play normally and just pretend is an NPC or w/e.
From community side, it depends on how much you care about your community and how much your community cares about you. There is this thread I opened some time ago where it is spoken about that a bit.
From Niantic side, you already know, report is the only way.
But before any of this happens, you should meditate the answer to the question.
We haven't had BAF issues in our area, but we have had issues with the other faction, creating alt accounts and then sending really crazy links all over town making it difficult to field or micro field and then with the crazy slow decay right now, it's been crazy having it all jacked up, hoping an enl agent will come through and clear it, but weird, all of a sudden the links will just stand...
Lots of long crazy links across town? Sounds like a couple of long time local ingress agents and and handful of newer pogo "agents".
Most likely these agents are all from Derpastan. 🤣
Yeah it’s very frustrating playing against cheaters. It really ruins the game. They’ll even switch factions to gain an edge. I’m very competitive so that just makes it worse. I’ve played sports my entire life. This is the first game I’ve played like this. Reality mixed into fantasy. I realized very quickly that cheating is a part of the game. Everyone has a mule account. There’s no way you can compete with cheaters without one. Sports build character. Cheating is not accepted. Cheating is frowned upon. Cheating is not a part of it. In sports, practice makes perfect. You have to work hard to be good. In this game finding the best way to cheat is cool. It makes you smarter, better than the other team. It’s acceptable. It’s a culture. Until the culture changes, all we can do is use the character that was built by playing sports. That’s what makes it fun for me.
As you very well stated, practice makes perfect.
While there's little to do againts spoofers, I can assure you don't need any backpack account to play against multiaccounts. Sure they have a sensible advantage, but they usually lack the skill and the knowledge to make the most of it, so my advice to you is that you pretend they are NPCs.
In some games ( and sports) the cheaters helps to improve the final (next steps) product. Nostalgic will say that it was better before, but new players won't know about the evolution/history of it. Over a decade ago I started playing an online game (Tibia), and after many years without playing I decided to give it a try this year, and now almost everything that was forbidden before, or only able to do with cheats, is now incorporate within the official client. Things like better lighting, aim help, autolooting, better hotkeys, calculators, etc. But the core rules didn't change, you can't automate your actions with bots, and they became better to detect it, and now is practically impossible.
The actions/needs of the cheaters are a response of what the game is lacking, and the company should pay attention to it closely. For example, in ingress there is a lot of backpack accounts to store items. That's a sign that the inventory isn't as good as intended, this may require changes, either expand it or limit it, maybe remove the drop function entirely, that will solve it, but everyone will hate it, so it must be done cleverly. The subscription will allow extra space, but I don't this will solve the backpack account problems.
but spoofing is something else, it completely ruins the game core, so it must be hunted/prevented and punished. So either Niatic develop the guts to punish cheater, or develop a new game core, changing it into something else.
Ignore them. Niantic usually does!
This made me laugh.
Still I do like to empathize that TR program works. The bad part is, I never seen anything else that works, although rumors has it that some succeeded.
Alas, cheaters have long become the norm even in this forum. In some regions, cheaters are used officially and many times a day. Oh yeah, you just have to write about what you need to change the mechanics of the game that will help an honest player to put four modifiers into the portal, as soon as cheaters come up and put dislikes under the comment ...
I guess I'm one of those, lol
Giving exactly what cheaters want isn't the right approach in fixing the problem.
It's better to punish them, than make cheats official.
Awarding cheaters,with what they need to gain an advantage, is never the way to solve any problem. Spoofers are lazy. They wanna sit at their computer and cap a remote portal that is a 20 minute walk just to find out that they don’t have good service on their device and the agent that currently owns the portal, modded it with a force amp and Turret to make it harder to smash. The mods, in this example is the strategy. The spoofer becomes the cheater because he couldn’t, or didn’t wanna spend the time it takes to deal with a situation like that. Maybe he ran out of bursters, battery life, power cubes. Instead of thinking of it as a challenge and going back with a battery pack, plenty of power cubes, ultra strikes, water, the agent decides to spoof the portal. That’s called poor character. Character is built, taught by coaches, parents, players we respect. Another situation I deal with is players buying gear. Every mod is a VR Ageis shield. Using some kind of “bot” that recharges the resos so that it takes 150 L8 bursters and 50 US to take out 1 portal. Again, character. Who teaches “gamers” character? There aren’t any coaches involved. That’s the reason I bring sports into the convo.
Niantic won't do anything about it report such cheaters with proof even give you a useless response
Actions depend on how much he is cheating. If he is still physically present while rampaging it's easy... He cannot play 24/7, so it's all about rebuilt faster than he is able to destroy, so basically ingress at the end. This is let's say the soft version, the endless inventory cheater. Manageable, he doesn't need to farm anything but rampage is time consuming.
It's a harder cheater if the rampage includes burster stacking techniques. Very tricky to compete since there is no way to slow him down with perfect linking & modding + counter recharge. This type of cheater is not spending time in farming and he takes down the whole area very quick, regardless what you built before.
The hardest cheater is even spoofing on top. So all the cheats before + dozens of trash accounts, maybe even including L8 ones. All/some/few of the rampages are managed from home... Maybe even automized. Impossible to block his lifetime, he is doing the stuff while netflixing or so. He is also not spending time in BAFing your area and its pointless to defend against BAF with block links... Trash Account + spoof and its gone. With plenty of backbacks it doesn't even look like spoofing; acc1 takes down guard anchor1, acc2 anchor2... Acc3 attacks northern, 1h later acc4 southern... And so on.
Finally, to answer your question, you have 2 options. No1: just play ingress as usual and accept the rampages. It's healthy to walk around, you got something to do in public transport, and so on. See the benefit if he is BAFing: no more keyfarming needed and no need to think about beautiful multilayer fielding... Just capture the portals. If you feel too bad in wasting time.. just stop spending effort in building up your area. Instead, just play in HIS area, as ugly as possible like 3 reso and 4 common shields. Or even full deploy + fielding (who BAFs the own hood?).
Option 2: Accept that NIA isn't willing or able to stop this. See that honest players left years ago and just freaks are still playing Ingress. Delete the app and give it a 1star review in playtore.