Regular reports on account actions taken by Niantic

Cheaters exist in Ingress - always have, always will. They make life harder on everyone, and I think it's probably safe to say that the community's trust in the enforcement actions taken by Niantic is not as high as it should be.

What I'd love to see - and yes, this might be reaching - is a regular (say, monthly or quarterly) aggregation of enforcement actions Niantic has taken on accounts. This could look something like the below:

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June 2020

  • 1,000 account terminations issued
  • 100 account suspensions issued
  • 100 warnings issued

Reasons for account terminations:

  • 250: Falsifying location
  • 200: Device modification
  • 100: Selling of in-game items
  • Etc.

Reasons for account suspensions:

  • 80 inappropriate use of COMM
  • 20 Other

Reasons for warnings:

  • Etc

Source of account action:

  • 900 Proactive account terminations by Niantic
  • 100 Account terminations from player reports
  • 100 Account suspensions from player reports
  • 100 Account warnings from player reports

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Personally, I think this would help increase the player base's trust in Niantic's ability to govern the game and enforce the rules of fair play. It's always been an argument that Niantic don't release specifics on individual account terminations so as not to inspire more cheating; that's fine, I think. But releasing aggregated data like this should avoid those problems.

Even if reasons weren't included, this might give more credence to the argument we've been given in the past, that the cheaters that agents see are a small number compared to the number that Niantic identify and terminate.

Is it perfect? No, I guess Niantic could just make up their own numbers. But it would be a step in the right direction. And, of course, I realise that we probably can't expect anything anytime soon, as the world grapples with the current crisis, but an idea for whenever things start to get moving again, perhaps 😀

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