"Did Niantic give up on fighting spoofers?"

#PokemonGO: It's almost 3 years since the game launched, and this is almost exactly as long as spoofing being a major issue in this game. It's also almost a year since Niantic announced their "3 strikes policy".I would love to link to the actual announcement, but it seems like they took it down(which is weird considering much older announcements are still there). It seems that that announcement, alongside the temporary bans wave that came with it, were the last action Niantic took against spoofers.​I think that the problems with spoofing are quite obvious, but never the less:- It's against the TOS, and more importantly, the spirit of Pokemon GO.- They can take the place of legit players - in gyms where there are big communities over very few gyms, in EX invitations, and sometimes in regular raids they can take the place of players who are actually there(especially if for some reason some of the players refuse to split up or open a new lobby.- It's not uncommon that they harass other players, by taking down all of their gyms(even if they are spread across several cities) between 23:00-00:00, or shaving them and filling up the gyms with the same colour as the player that is being harassed(so they can't even retake any gyms).- Seeing how much easier it is for spoofers to play, and how spoofers suffer no repercussions, actively encourages legit players to start spoofing themselves. Every community I saw that was "accepting towards spoofers" pretty quickly became "let's get real, everyone here spoof at least sometimes".- Legit players suffer from some of the "anti cheating" measures(like the ban on all rooted devices).​Unlike other forms of cheating(like account sharing or multi accounting, where it might be hard to distinguish those from different family members playing on their parents device), Niantic already showed they are capable of detecting spoofing(they gave them warnings and temporary bans). And in their other game, Ingress, spoofers are getting banned pretty quickly after they start spoofing, and other forms of cheating can get players banned.So at this point, why aren't Niantic doing anything about spoofing in Pokemon GO? Did they see the bottom line, that spoofers also spend money on the game, and decided that the Pokemon GO community would just accept that the existence of spoofers is just a force of nature?​Originally postedon r/TheSilphRoad, but u/ZoomBoingDing doesn't believe that the fact that the fact that Pokemon GO gets over run by spoofers, might be an important issue when it comes to "building the Silph Road network". via /r/pokemongo http://bit.ly/2Pnrr60