Bot-herders fire fake GPS co-ords at Niantic to collect Pokémon

Well, that didn't take long: Pokémon Go players with sore feet and a case of sitzlust* are sending virtual robots out into virtual reality to catch virtual creatures and bring them home. Published “for educational use only” (read: “don't sue us, go after users”), the Necrobot at GitHub does all the messing about with Pokeballs …

[Chewi]

I saw this coming

You did too, right?

[paulf]

Re: I saw this coming

Perhaps I've missed something here but if you leave a bot to play the game for you with minimal flesh sack interaction perhaps you weren't that interested in the game in the first place?

I don't know as I've not played the game (too much real world stuff to do!). Is it like the bots in WoW in that you can use a bot to grind for Pokémon then sell them to other players in the real word for real cash?

[tmTM]

Re: Perhaps I've missed something here

Game accounts are selling online, some for quite significant amounts of money.

[Olius]

Re: I saw this coming

Nope - I was too busy. I put my "sawitcoming" bot on it instead but he didn't report back in time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Necrobot?

Seriously? The grave image that conjures up is alarming!

[frank ly]

Damn

"... if the bot moves too fast, the game will notice and kick a player out."

There goes my idea to develop an autonomous drone to play the game quickly. Hmmmm, does anyone know the 'speed limit' for a ban?

[SkippyBing]

Re: Damn

It's not below 30 as I've happily played it sat in the passenger seat driving round town. I mean someone else was driving, not that I was driving from the passenger seat and playing pokemon. And by happily used I mean caught some monsters, it's a bit too fast to get stuff from a pokestop.

[Omgwtfbbqtime]

Re: Damn

Not below 70mph - passenger seat on M1. Not a lot of time to click the toon before its gone though.

[Tim Jenkins]

Re: Damn

30 is too fast to count towards the walking you need to do to incubate eggs, though.

Did see one tip that suggested leaving the app running while at your desk, and GPS drift will add some metres to the necessary kms, but that's not working for me so far...

[Ammaross Danan]

Re: Damn

Ceiling fans induce GPS drift well enough though.

[Big O]

Ingress

It's been happening for ages in Ingress with little sign of it being dealt with (On the other hand a wave of legit players did get banned). Worse still there's a market on ebay for the in-game items. Either play it properly or don't bother!

[tiggity]

Re: Ingress

As another ingress player, I'm assuming there is a market as in game comms still gets frequently spammed by item sellers.

In the same way email spammers persist, bot operators in ingress only need a tiny proportion of players to pay for kit to make a living.

As for POGO

There may be an existing market in selling ready made accounts with players already at top level / with powerful pokemon / having caught various rare pokemon etc. These could be sold to someone who wants a high status account without the legwork - once you get beyond POGO L20 then levelling up is a big slog (In Ingress bot operators sell ready made L16 (max level) accounts)

If the game introduces the ability to trade pokemon then the bots could be quite a money spinner, in the same way ingress botters offer (for cash) kit drops, in POGO some pokemon will be rare and only readily available in certain places, in most locations your average player unlikely to ever see one - bot operators could harvest these rare items and make them available to players (at a nice profit)

[Velv]

Ah, reminds me of the old Spectrum days where the challenge was a short romp through the loader programme to get all the goodies instead of playing the game.

[Dale 3]

I can see how this would be useful. I would love to be able to play some of the modern games that people talk about, but unfortunately I'm not a gamer, my PC is too slow, my reactions slower, and I generally get killed within the first 15 seconds. I wouldn't mind having a bot which could play the games for me and just send me an email every so often telling me how often I had won. Then I could go back to reading Reddit or something.

[Sleep deprived]

Autoplay mode

In a previous century, I had a Mac (SE/30!) with a game that involved flying a paper plane amidst air currents. That game had an Autoplay mode, which I could launch and then move on to other real world stuff. I found this was the ultimate function of a machine designed, after all, to free us from menial tasks in order to leave us with more free time.

[Grubby]

Call me old fashioned

I prefer the good old days where a couple of pale kids who'd spend every waking minute of the past year playing Sonic would compete to win a golden joystick from the giant head of an astronomer.

[inmypjs]

If you don't want to play...

the stupid game there is a much simpler solution than getting a bot to play it for you.

[Immenseness]

Re: If you don't want to play...

I agree totally. Now, I must just go and program the recorder to record all the TV I don't like and play it back when I am not in.

[rmason]

You can go one better than this.

Not only can you spoof your GPS easily enough (on Jailbroken iThings, or any android) but there's an app floating about that allows you to search the pokemon-augmented world for the exact pokemon you desire. The search returns the pokemon in question and it's precise GPS location.

As has been said though, other than flogging them/the account i'm not entirely sure why you'd want this, you either want to play/enjoy playing it or you don't.

[Gene Cash]

GPS/Wi-Fi conflict for fun and profit

Google has the bit where they track you and correlate the wi-fi locations with your GPS. I've had it disabled for privacy reasons, but at a local pizza joint, I enabled it for the heck of it.

If you're relatively still, the game interrogates the location about every 15-20 sec to reduce stress on the battery. For some reason, the Android GPS system does not cache satellite information so it has to reacquire each time.

The eatery has a metal roof, so this reacquire takes a chunk of time. In the meantime, it uses Google's guess for the wi-fi location, which is about 200 meters away. This meant the whole time I was eating, my "player" automatically ran between 2 locations 200 meters apart about every 20 seconds. By the time I was done, it'd racked up several kilometers.

I didn't plan that, but I'll take credit for it!

[Tromos]

Shortcut software

PRINT "Congratulations, you are a level 40 Pokémon master"

[Alistair]

apparently

The lazy way to incubate eggs involves the dog or the cat. Or both.

Or a ceiling fan

Or a roomba

... or both.

and if you happen to be utterly sick and twisted, all four.

[Number6]

I think our dog is about ready for this feature. She would approve of avoiding the next planned death march in pursuit of Pokemon.

[razorfishsl]

Seriously after watching a bus load of people with this 'skinner box manipulation'

The only valuable lesson I learned was how accurate the Geo-location is.

Do you really want a company tracking your exact geo-location, where you shop,live ,drink?

Seems 90% of the population is quite happy to have a dog lead shoved up their ass.