Multiple Accounts
BigJoker107-PGO
Posts: 24 ✭✭
General question out of curiosity. If someone has two different emails to play Pokemon GO and use both to submit wayspots, but only use one for reviews, is that cheating? Let's say they don't want to cheat or break any rules, rarely play on the one that doesn't use Wayfarer, and are trying to play honestly, is that still wrong?
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According to the Terms of Service for Pokemon Go, yes.
Having two accounts is against the ToS of Niantic. Having two different mails but using one for PGO and one for ING is alright, but stupid.
Ok. Thank you for clearing it up. I'll pass it along.
Well, off topic but my launch Ingress account (which is linked to my main email) is broken and cant use Intel Map site. So I had to make a seperate account on a different gmail to use intel map, and then my main email got attached to a seperate Pokemon Go account at launch because launch day was so slow and buggy the servers were dying. So Facebook is my acutal pokemon go account. Soooooo. Id say "stupid" is more so Niantics fault.
Thats true. But this way was propably not how you wanted it. So in this case, its bas luck.
Out of curiosity why do you see having a very clear division between a persons ingress and pogo accounts by having different emails as stupid?
some people seem to be happy with accounts linked others simply want them separate.
I don't mean it like this, but for Wayfarer it's stupid since you have the same amount of nominations but need to review on two different accounts. This is way more time-consuming.
Not to mention there are already many cases reported that deleting an Ingress account linked with the same email you use to play Pokemon GO will make you 'banned' from Wayfarer even if you're still playing Pokemon GO.
And this issue is still unresolved until now, I guess?
If you never intend to interact with Wayfarer (including submissions and edits) then it doesn't really matter. If you do then you are cutting one of those games off from the benefits of Wayfarer. As accessing Wayfarer with both would be mulit-accounting Wayfarer, and thus cheating.
It is 100% unambiguously against Niantic's Terms of Service to use two accounts for one game:
3.1 Cheating
Niantic prohibits cheating, and we constantly take steps to improve our anti-cheat measures. Cheating includes any action that attempts to or actually alters or interferes with the normal behavior or rules of a Service. Cheating includes, but is not limited to, any of the following behavior, on your own behalf or on behalf of others:
You can confirm this here: https://nianticlabs.com/terms/en/
Ah I see what you meant to convey.
It does seem much safer to have clear water between the 2 games, so definitely not stupid - you just never know what weird bug Niantic can come up with next.
Personally putting in the effort via one game is more than enough 😂 and the in game rewards in the form of badges are of no interest to me. But I can see that if you value the badges then splitting the effort is pointless.
Not that Niantic seem to overly care when several Pokémon GO players boast about their five or six accounts.
Ingress players seem to care a lot more and I know that people will report their own teams.
It can cause issues with Wayfarer of course where you’ll review your own stuff. (I review my own edits all the time using my sole account but think that’s a Wayfarer issue)
And how to report multiple account users?
They should be reported in your in-app support with any accompanying screenshots/details.
Pokémon Go players do report this kind of behaviour as well. It just seems that Niantic is more proactive at taking action on Ingress rule breakers than Pokémon Go rule breakers, which is especially annoying given the amount of trouble that cheaters cause in Pokémon Go.
I’ve seen some Pokémon GO players report but not as many as Ingress players.
As for why action is taken less on Pokémon GO, I guess that’s a query for @NianticTintino to pass on to the relevant team.
The Team that we interact with may not have much/any say regarding scale, degree, or duration of punishments. For all we know, Giffard passes his report to the Trust and Safety Team, and they tell him whether or not they decided to take action.
We can only hope the players who tried to make what they thought were legitimate edits a long time ago got more lenient treatment than the St. Cloud gang or the personal portable-stop purveyors.
Dont worry about that kind of stuff honestly, you have no idea of how much people have two or more accounts in all games
ingress players have dozens of alt accounts especially for try to lift up farms, is not a pogo problem only, ingress has a lot its just the pop difference between ingress and pogo is abysmal
ingress players have dozens of alt accounts especially for try to lift up farms, is not a pogo problem only, ingress has a lot its just the pop difference between ingress and pogo is abysmal
It's definitely not a Pokemon Go problem only, but around here at least and in all other Ingress communities with which I have interacted, "backpacks" are discouraged to the point of ostracizing of players with proven alternate accounts. Our farms, on both factions, are made up of eight unique individuals deploying, or battle beacon/flip card usage. On the Pokemon Go side, our chats are rife with players asking people to add their alts as friends, or worse yet, asking people to add their spoofer accounts so that they can send out raid invites for regional raid bosses. The attitudes of each community are vastly different, and in fact that's why I identify as an Ingress player on these boards despite being a Level 50, daily Pokemon Go player.
I’d have to say that’s not been my Ingress/Pokémon GO experience regarding multiple accounts.
There’s been two cases I can think of locally during my time on Ingress. One where a player had a few accounts for each faction (I believe 3 ENL, 2 RES) and was reported by both sides and is now down to the one account (I think the one left is ENL).
The other one is still ongoing. Their faction know they do it. The other faction know they do it. Many in their faction, and the other side, have reported. As yet, no action. There are those in their faction who look the other way and help them field etc. though.
Now for Pokémon GO, almost all of my local players have one account for each team. Some have a “shiny only” account, or a “nundo only” account. But they’ll do raids and community days and such, so Niantic don’t investigate (This also includes the Ingress player that’s still ongoing, who will often fill a gym with six accounts, for one of the three teams so they’re on 18+ accounts). I even saw one gym a while back with <trainername> in and then <trainername2ndaccount> or similar. You can be as blatant as you want on that game by the looks of it, so long as you buy the occasional raid pass.
This is not my experience in Ingress. The community will react very negatively to players who use alt accounts to the point where you'll most likely be excluded from chats and OPs. I'm sure it happens but not nearly to the same extent as in PoGo where it seems to not only be common but also quietly accepted in most communities.
Different Ingress communities have different tolerances. Most are fairly strict about cheating, some will put up with some minor bad behavior like playing on someone else's account, and some will accept anything. In general the community in my area is pretty good but there's one area here that is dominated by a few people with multiple accounts who build EP8s as soon as you tear them down.
By contrast, most of the PoGo players I know don't even think that using multiple accounts is cheating. I've even watched one person take down and stack a gym that I just took down all by myself. It's one of the reasons I can't take PoGo seriously... it's no fun competing honestly against cheaters.
But back to Wayfarer, we know that there are some areas that are dominated by a few people each with several accounts, so much so that they make their own local rules. There's an example where that probably happened here: https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/2204/how-can-i-report-a-group
Instead of trash-talking one game over the other, blaming their game's playerbase for bad behaviors, can't we all just unite against the one group who makes all our games less enjoyable?
The DutchSpoofers.Has there been any know cases of Niantic taking action against multi-accounters in Pokemon Go? I've yet to come across any that didn't also cross the line of spoofing/account selling? It seems that rule is just there so they can have it in their back pocket if needed rather than actively reviewing and researching reports.
My local community has a problem with an individual that has four accounts and is quite inhospitable in gyms to the point that multiple people have reported and a few have left the game altogether and this is coming from a community that in general is rather accepting of those that have multiple accounts in general. So far the only response received is "yes that is against ToS we'll review"
@GearGlider-PGO Yes for Ingress.
Strangely, I suspect that spoofers improve my PoGo experience. If I want to raid like a fiend during raid hour I'll head across the bay to San Francisco, park my posterior within a block or two of Niantic's headquarters, and start spewing remote raid passes. Essentially every single legendary raid will get 10+ players and they often fill up within seconds... not just at the start of each raid's period, but the entire hour. That seems unlikely to be legit but I have no way of proving it.
Why do you think they're spoofing instead of using remotes passes and invites like you're doing? Or just being in range in general?
Yes, there's a huge problem with spoofing and multi-accounting in both games, but vocally making assumptions often about just one game while never making those assumptions about the other is exactly what I'm talking about when it comes to game trash-talking.
San Francisco is spoofing central. I went to the Embarcadero a few times to play in-person years ago, before remote passes were available, and every gym was under constant attack and every raid filled up multiple raid rooms within seconds. Three of my friends were with me (this was when Rayquaza came out the first time), we all went to start a raid at the same time and we ended up in three different raid rooms… and nobody else around us appeared to be playing. I would say there are at least several hundred Pogo accounts spoofing in SF at any given moment, and that’s probably an understatement; possibly a significant one.
As far as the original subject goes, every Pogo player I know has multiple accounts. I don’t personally know any Ingress players who are not first Pogo players.
I've seen multiple cases of people trying to report these players and being ignored.
Even spoofing is very hard to get punished in PGO. There's no visible logs we can use to report such as in Ingress.
Recently I was watching a video (no idea why Youtube suggested it to me) where a guy was "teaching" how to get all Furfrour's forms. He was just spoofing left and right in his 50 level account (videos didn't show his account name, of course). He basically spoofed to different continents in a matter of minutes to get all the forms, and even mentioned that after each change he was "soft banned" from catching pokemon for 2 hours (but as he didn't need to catch any to transform the pokemons it was not a problem).
Detecting these patterns is so easy that it is very hard to explain why Niantic don't detect and punish this kind of behaviour. Sure, as soon as you implement some controls people will start trying to bypass them, but you should at least try.
Ingress having all actions in COMMs makes it easier to spot the bad actors.
Its kind of funny how all of you -ING try to say ingress is just not a place where cheaters exist, and we always report, and blahablahblah...its called population just because 8 individuals in your hometown dont use alts doesnt mean the other 50 around the world do the same, one of the biggest differences between ingress and pogo cheaters is, the pogo ones openly admit while the ingress ones try to hide so hard even when its obvious and claim to every single ingress player is clean... and only pogo cheats...
in every single place ive been i can point alt account/cheater, sorry for dissapoint you all but i am an -ING as well.. dont try to hide the obvious, ingress has a lot of cheaters, but again is called population difference, is like for 1 each ingress player there is 10000 pokemon go players, with the comm especially you can even easily point out however its one of the most toxic chats ive seen in a game ''omg leave my farm'' ''omg i dont finish let me finish, where are you? are you spoofer? i am going to report you'' etc
so again i repeat myself to the topic creator, dont worry about alts, tons of people do it in all games and most of them just hide the fact or if its his friend they are like its ok to do it