One Pokemon GO player found out the hard way that sharing your accomplishments on the Internet might not always be the best idea. After holding a remote gym location in Pokemon GO for over 3 years, a proud Redditor sadly lost the record to a cheater.
Holding a gym for any long duration is a difficult achievement, and to hold one for over 3 years in a row is nearly unheard of. Redditor BootsMade4Walking managed this accomplishment by capturing a remote gym near Lolo, Montana while they were stationed at a fire lookout tower there in 2017. The gym location is the result of a perfect storm: the closest town is relatively small, and the location is more or less inaccessible except by hiking. Unfortunately, a cheater in Pokemon GO managed to spoof their location and remotely access the location.
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Even though BootsMade4Walking was careful about hiding the location of the gym, a spoofer was able to determine the spot by simply studying the background of the photo. Luckily, the location meant that the poster was able to easily accrue over 50 thousand hours of defense, netting them a simple Platinum Gym Defender Badge. But, the most unfortunate part is that without their Reddit post, it's unclear how long the record would have stood.
While most of the comments were sympathetic towards BootsMade4Walking, the Redditor admitted that they had to "remove 3 different comments in this post with people sharing the coordinates," suggesting that there was more than one person interested in spoiling the fun. Despite spoofing posing a major problem since the game's inception, Niantic has been relatively helpless in addressing the problem, and spoofing is still rampant even in the current iteration of Pokemon GO. Essentially, spoofing allows a player to travel to any location in the world and capture Pokemon there. On the surface, this could be seen as a relatively harmless issue, it is often used to intentionally grief like in this particular situation.
Although the end of this story could sour the game for even the most die-hard Pokemon GO fans, there is plenty to look forward to as Niantic gears up for Pokemon GO Fest 2021, which will help celebrate the game's 5th anniversary as well as the 25th anniversary of the entire franchise. At the very least, BootsMade4Walking can breathe easy knowing they didn't lose the world record for longest gym defense to a spoofer since a commenter named Graulithe posted a picture of a Weedle that has been holding a gym for 1370 days straight—38 days longer than the original poster's Ninetales.
Pokemon GO is available on Android and iOS.