Online multiplayer games such as Pokemon GO and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite have grown more popular over the years, and have attracted a problem with cheaters. Cheating is nothing new to video gaming and certainly not for modern-day multiplayer titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. That often makes devising anti-cheating efforts a major priority for such games.
Recently Niantic, developer for both Pokemon GO and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, released a statement to update players on its anti-cheating efforts. According to the blog, the company has issued punishments to over five million cheaters across three titles since the start of 2020, including the game Ingress. Out of those various punishments, only 20 percent involved permanently banning cheaters from the games.
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Niantic provided updates on the progress of its anti-cheating efforts, which have proven successful so far in reducing cheating in its games. According to the blog, the company saw 90 percent of casual cheaters stop cheating after receiving their first warning. This is encouraging to Niantic, as it wishes to balance out how it punishes casual cheaters in the games versus the more egregious cheaters.
Even with its current success, Niantic is still working to improve its anti-cheating efforts in several ways. Part of this involves growing its team of developers and investing in new emerging technologies that can help enhance its current detection and enforcement capabilities. It is also working to improve its system of detecting cheaters by using player feedback to increase accurate detection and minimize false positives. This should help keep regular players from being misidentified as cheaters.
One of Niantic's latest anti-cheat efforts involved launching the new Fast Track process for Ingress players to use. The process will allow the game's players to request quicker manual intervention against any reported cheaters. The company has received over four thousand Fast Track requests since the process's launch, with only 70 percent eligible for review that resulted in action against the reported players.
The company is working on adding more security measures to reduce active cheating efforts, such as spoofing remote Ingress Portals during Ops. It will share more information in the coming weeks on the Ingress forum and its other social channels. The company highlighted that it has been quiet for a while on its anti-cheating efforts, and explains it did so to avoid giving cheaters information to use against its current detection mechanisms being developed for games like Pokemon GO and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.
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Source: Niantic