"Here's how you stop botters; coming from one."

#PokemonGO: I know I am not popular the moment I announce that, yes, I run a bot. However, take solace that I run an ethical bot. Let me explain.This bot is for academic purposes. I find it more enjoyable to build an AI that finds new, interesting, rare pokemon. I am a collector of sorts. I also study patterns in the things I find (are IVs truly random is a question I've been battling now). How and why are weights / sizes important? Why are they shown at all? And when I figure out this information, I plan to release it to everyone. But I need to collect thousands of the same type of pokemon to see this.I do not battle Gyms.... sort of. I can simulate a gym that isn't on the map for anyone but me and fight that. Think of it like a punching bag for pokemon to see how well they hit.That all being said-- I don't expect you all to approve of my actions. You play the game one way, I enjoy it another. But we do both love this game.And we both hate botters.I follow two rules: My bot never obtains anything illegitimately ("hacked" pokemon/items are useless to me as I can't learn much from what I made), and no other player should be hindered by this bot's progress.That means no fighting or claiming gyms that any other player can reach. I used to look for gyms in areas no one would go (middle of ocean, antarctica, canada... kidding on the last one) but now I can simply spoof a gym and so have gone with that.People who break those rules-- ruining the game for everyone-- disgust me. It's a special breed of laziness to take software other people made and use it for an advantage over those who play regularly and have a natural disadvantage. At that point, you are not winning. You're masturbating.So here's how Niantic can single handedly make bots irrelevant:Tiered Gyms.We divide the player population based on level.The top 1% of players (almost entirely bots, for example levels 35-40 at the moment), get their own tier. The gyms will be shown to them, and they can fight them, but their battles are separate from everyone else's. There is nothing a bot can do to get around this, since their level is stored inside the server and not editable otherwise. This also makes the value of high-level account plummet, which are currently being sold for hundreds of dollars.Then we have the next 20% of players. There will be some bots here, sure, but these are players who are capable of fighting them as well. levels 25-35, for example.The next 60% of players (15-25 or so) are in the "average player" tier. They are the bulk of the player base, it would seem. There are almost no bots in this area, as running even a relatively dumb bot gets you a level per day or more in this region.Everything else (5-15) is a Beginner class. This allows people to get used to gym fighting before they're running teams against those who have had the game forever.Why this solution?Security is a cat and mouse game. Niantic can make better security all day long-- there are people who make money off botting and so long as that is true, they will pour resources into this arms race. Just look at /r/pokemongodev right now. Niantic just broke every bot in the world, and to quote one dev, they are "going to war."This balances the game play in such a way that it improves player experience by letting them keep a gym longer (with less competition in the area), and keeps bots out forever while not requiring them to come up with increasingly clever security. Then they can focus on improving the game, and even collect the information the bots dig up to study their own algorithms and improve the game further. After all, if 2 bots are waging war, a thousand battles a day at the same gym, you'll have way more information on the power levels of the pokemon involved than if 2 humans had battled a dozen times with the same pokemon. This sort of information is gold for balancing fights.Anyways, thanks for reading. I hope you forgive my trespasses and take the idea as it is meant-- a well intentioned solution for both ethical botters and the player base as a whole.EDIT: As someone else has pointed out, this is a suggestion made previously. Please support the other post as well. http://ift.tt/2aLO1Cq via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2ay2e9i