How to deal with spoofers?

(I originally posted this on the wayfarer forums but later i was referred to this forum, so i'm posting it again here)

Hi, i'm a PoGO and Ingress player (sorry, HP:WU wasnt catching enough for me :P), and i've been recently playing Ingress a lot because of some sort of PoGO fatigue.

The thing is I joined one of the factions and I've gotten to know how this duality works and how people from the community in my city behave in general. It turns out the people in the rival faction are very toxic (one of them, a known pogo spoofer, approached me the other day in an aggresive way and even pushed me for throwing their portal that was where they live, ofc i reported it ingame) and use fishy ways to play including spoofing and secondary accounts for placing mods, hoarding items and securing key locations.

Today I went far from where I live just to throw some of the portals that were holding a big field in the outsides of my city (got to know a little rural village, which was nice) I took some portals on my way there and also 7 of the 8 portals in the village, I also threw some 5~7km links and created a field that gave me around 100MU and other little ones between the portals there making some small layers. Like an hour later a known spoofer account that always makes "sudden" attacks and doesn't capture anything around appeared and burned down what I did.

So how do you deal with these? Because what I feel is frustration and that I don't want to look at the game for a while. It feels unfair and it makes me think of 2 options:

1- that one the best ways for me to do "harm" to them for this behavior is to stop playing so they have less rivals to play against, and because of this their progress will be slowed (cause they'll keep their novas and big fields for so long that no one or less people will touch them) or...

2- turning to the dark side and start using their ways , finding a way to also have a spoofing account and creating secondary accounts to keep up with their playstyle.

I know you can say: "how do you know they are spoofers?", and all I can answer to that is: because of PoGO, a few of them are also in groups formed in messaging apps to coordinate raids and they publicly speak there about spoofing ways and share coordinates (I think spoofing in PoGO is not as bad seen as doing it in ingress since competition and world domination is not the main focus of the game), so if they have already used their wings in PoGO what tells u they won't also use them on Ingress?

And in the rare case that that wasn't a spoofer and it was actually a real person, why the hell would they go to that damn village 20km away from the nearest town just to throw down 4 portals and not capture anything to get items, AP, throw some links and they just banish? Why isn't that account ever seen playing around?

What's worse is that it is very hard to acquire proof of their ways to report them and connect those secondary/spoofing accounts to their main ones to get them penalized (although i'm pretty sure that sooner than later that big field I threw down will be up again)

I'd like to read your experiences, cause frankly this makes me think that maybe this game isn't for me.

Sorry if some sentences didn't make sense, english isn't my main langauge. And sorry if this ended being too long, I needed to let it out.

TL;DR: **** spoofers and toxic people.

Comments

  • In my experience its best not to send a ton of reports about the same incident. I would let the employees worry about checking for spoofing or whatever algorithm may be in use to check of course. Flooding companies with reports about cheating is not very kind and counterproductive imo.. my suggestion is if you suspect spoofing and ingress doesn't see it it most likely isn't.. also, one person reporting an incident of cheating may be more helpful for all.

  • MuzzgoodMuzzgood ✭✭✭
    edited September 2021

    Dont get mad. Get even.

    Put the fields up again.

    Play fair. Report suspicious events.

    It is sad that cheating behaviour like spoofing, multiple accounts and fake portals are leaking from one game to the other, this is for Nia to sort out.

  • Are you in the pokemon go chat group? Are you using the same ign in both games? Did they create accounts just to grief you?

    Play Harry Potter. Post screenshots in your pokemon chat group showing how fabulous you think Harry Potter is. Tell chat group you're giving up all other games because Harry Potter is just that awesome. Leave chat group. (You can do remote raids or gbl for legendaries if you're still playing). Only tap hack in Ingress. Don't do anything that shows up for one week or so while your resonators decay. Request a name change in Ingress. Then play Ingress.

    If they're doing it just to target you specifically, then that's the best option.

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    Changing name won't help. They will know it's same person.

    I really really encourage people to play fair and hard.

    Report incidents in basic format. Suspect spoof, player name, portal link, UTC time and date.

    One report per incident is fine.

    Keep reporting each time they do it.

    Meet other agents on same faction for help.

    Worst case, escalate reports to Vanguards.

    Good luck agent.

  • XAEII12XAEII12 ✭✭
    edited September 2021

    @aerisea yeah I just did 1 report and that was it, today i got the copy/pasted and useless response that they "took action where appropiate". It sucks they don't tell what exactly they did, cause it could be nothing. This whole situation is disheartening and i'm considering quiting when I get to lvl 10, (im just 400k ap away).

    @SSSputnik yeah I already reported it, and I've met other people from the faction but they are not many so there's not much to do. I wanted to ask you what is the Vanguards? Like i said i'm kinda new to the game so idk what it is.

    Edit: I googled it and already filled the form. Hopefully that spoofer gets what they deserve. Otherwise I confess i'm considering learning their ways if this keeps happening.

    Post edited by XAEII12 on
  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    Hrm, stick with it? We have spoofers here, we just outplay them and keep reporting till they got tired of it.

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