"PSA: The most PROBABLE outcome from the ban-wave, STOP PANICKING"

#PokemonGO: I’m going to start off by saying I’m probably going to be down voted to hell with this post because of some aspects but I still feel like it needs to be made. PoGo communities everywhere are in a state of uncertainty because of the tweet made by John Hanke where he broadly said that cheaters would be dealt with. Source In most of the threads I’ve read about this (on various websites) it seems to be taken in two different ways. Either 1) “OMG am I going to get banned permanently cuz of that one time I went through that tunnel and it soft banned me for a minute?!?” or 2) “Good now ALL of the spoofers and bots will be gone.” Although I’m unable to confirm any of this 100%, Logic and reasoning don’t see either of these as being very probable outcomes, and the true answer will fall somewhere in the middle. I’ll explain further. For the first concern people have regarding this announcement, the whole, “Will I get banned if I’ve been soft-banned a few times already?” question. The answer to that is more than likely NO. If I was a betting man, I’d put the odds of the average joe getting soft banned a few times while in his car or riding the train at less than 1%. Why? These soft bans of a few minutes or less are there as more of a deterrent much like speed bumps are on the road. They will force you to slow down if you want to play the game and are very minor. Even racking up 100’s of soft bans while playing in your car is very likely not going to flag your account for anything. Now you might be asking, “What’s the point of soft bans then? They seem useless in helping Niantic find out the cheaters?” Well to this I say, soft bans can last a long time, up to a few hours in fact and those are the ones that Niantic is going to be looking for. This is where things get tricky. The ban wave is almost certainly going to be hitting all of the botters who have reached levels that are still unobtainable for players due to excessive exp, as well as the people who are teleporting country to country or out of country once or twice a day to somewhere like the Santa Monica Pier. That being said, people that are spoofing “safely” are probably going to get ignored just like the rest of the population with some soft bans here and there. By safely here I mean people who are waiting ample amounts of time (30-40 minutes) before moving to a new location in their city to catch pokemon (To compensate for actual travel time). It’s even possible for them to spoof to other countries and seem legit if they wait 10-12 hours (to account for travel time), and then stay there for a few days and not just teleport back home after an hour. The truth here is that there will be NO FEASIBLE WAY for Niantic to ban ALL of the spoofers without incurring a lot of collateral damage in forms of people getting soft bans while driving etc. In a perfect world, yes, anyone who isn’t playing legitimately would be banned instantly but that’s just not the case here and it is something that we’re going to unfortunately have to deal with. Just like with everything, there will be cheaters, scammers, or what have you. TL;DR: 1) Stop panicking and getting hyped about bans, chances are that you won’t get perma-banned if you’ve been soft banned a few times while driving, flying, taking the train or w/e. 2) Bots that have an incredibly high level, or spoofers teleporting around the world multiple times are almost certainly getting banned 3) Spoofers that are doing it “safely” are unlikely to get caught. Edit: Reading comments here honestly feels like a re-hash of the whole "You're going to get banned for downloading the APK ahead of time" propaganda that spread like wildfire as the game was rolling out. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2aXNaB9