Strike system promotes multiaccounting.
One of my concerns got confirmed just a few days ago, there's this player in my city that is known for multiaccounting and spoofing. He used to have account A and account B, B got banned months ago and then this person inmediatly created account C. Time passed and we caught him flying low and finally managed to get account A banned, that was the main one with 90m AP, because of spoofing, of course he then created account D.
Now, a month and a half after he got his A account banned, he got it back because apparently that was just a strike. So now he has accounts A, C and D (now that A is back he changed its name to the same name account B used to have with the difference it has a "0" where an "o" used to be.
So, what's with this? What can Niantic say about promoting this kind of abuse? (ofc they won't say anything because IGNORED) This person ended up with 3 accounts, A being lvl 16, C being lvl 8 and D being lvl 10. Nice job Niantic, awarding the cheaters with even more resources and accounts.
All of this makes me want to find ways to cheat too, considering how light the treatment of these situations is, and how the cheaters seem to get away with their ways no matter what we do.
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There really isn't much anyone can do until they slip up enough to get one of them banned. I've seen agents with multiple phones in their hands and they still roll around dual wielding months later. One of the reasons I'm slowing finding better ways to spend my time...
Yeah, that's probably why this person has got away with it all this time. I think we managed to ban account B because he also used it for spoofing.
Guess I'm gonna get me a 2nd phone and just start playing their game otherwise it's impossible to keep up with their playstile. Idc how many disagrees it gets me.
With the upcoming removal of the deploying 2 L7 resos, expect to see more multi accounting in the future. And Niantic will do the same about of stuff about it that they do currently.
I've never seen anyone get banned for multi accounting. It's rampant. It's literally how many people play. Spoofing I've seen bans for but multi accounting I've never seen.
He used to have account A and account B, B got banned months ago and then this person inmediatly created account C. Time passed and we caught him flying low and finally managed to get account A banned, that was the main one with 90m AP, because of spoofing, of course he then created account D.
If you get a warning and an account suspension, creating a new account is against the ToS and cheating. Because they've told you your account is coming back. So if he continues to use A and C and D, then he's going to get banned again, permanently.
The point of the strike system is to give people a chance to think about what they've done before they get permanently banned. Doubling down on cheating will result in getting the accounts permanently banned.
It's not the strike system's job to make people better humans, but it's a great way to find out if they are.
After being falsely accused and receiving a warning I'm kind of glad the three strike system is in place despite the negatives. Especially when you can't explain to NIAOps what actually happened. (Well they appear to ignore - decision final blah blah).
(This was a real world event that got me falsely reported, not an in-game thing).
I wish there was a way to present this case to someone cause this is clearly an abuse of the system. I don't think the ingame support works for it because when reporting for multiaccount it asks for a place and hour of the incident but when upgrading resonators and mods there's no register of it. Sadly there is no way to talk with a human about this case, just bots.
Yeah, I can't really suggest anything with specific cases. If Niantic was catching people effectively, the strike system would work (in its goals at least) though.
Like seriously, today I passed around his zone and every portal had three lvl 8 resonators and five lvl 7 resos, all fully shielded, how do play against all that without spending extra resources? there's no way.
The pithy answer might be, "Play smarter, not harder."
If "his zone" is not strategically significant, spend your effort elsewhere. (And keep in mind that easy access to high level gear is irrelevant if it doesn't actually get used anywhere that is strategically significant.)
If it is strategically significant, I have no good answer.
I'm tired of writing about the fact that there are "indestructible portals" or rather the software that allows them to be made like that and the cheaters who use it. I come to the portal to the agent, I try to demolish it in the middle of the dead of night, and it immediately instantly recharges, resonators are delivered to it, and so on. It always has 4 shields.
Then an agent from this portal comes to me and in 2 seconds demolishes my portal, which has 2 very rare shields. The portal that I am actively charging at the same time suddenly turns gray and then abruptly turns blue with modifiers and resonators installed. We wrote a bunch of complaints about such agents, and nothing in response, they continue to play further.
An air defense siren is howling over the city, calling to hide in a bomb shelter, and the capture of portals is in full swing across the city. Cheaters fly like I don't know who. Or, for example, a curfew is underway in the city, territorial defense patrols are walking around the city, and cheaters are flying over the city. And it can't be fixed, absolutely impossible, nothing.