We’ve had anti-cheat in the game since day one and we’ve been improving it ever since. I think most of our players can vouch for it being very effective. We also built similar solutions for the trading system to spot any abuse of it.
We definitely knew there’s going to be cheaters and I can tell there are and that’s why having a good anti-cheat has been a high priority for us all along.
LostListener@piefed.social 20 hours ago
I don’t want to sound like I’m out to break your game, I have no such intention. This makes me immediately think of the tools available to Pokémon go cheating, specifically for hatching eggs which counts steps similar to this game. There is a tool called defit that’s designed to inject believable step histories to your google fit data to fool the game into believing you went on a 30 mile hike in the middle of the night. Pogo never managed to stop that despite cracking down on a lot of other tools. My assumption was always that the spoofed data landed too close to believable and they would have started banning legitimate players if they tried. Another comment here mentions your game requires google play services, so is it working with google fit data the same way as pogo? Is the defit data identifiable for you?
walkscape@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I don’t go to the specifics but I’ve met with people from Niantic and I can say they never really cared that much about cheating. WalkScape uses quite sophisticated anti-cheat and PoGo was always more interested in GPS spoofing anyhow when step data cheating is way easier to detect.
We use specific APIs when you use your steps from smart watches etc. so we can detect exactly where they’re coming from and we have a whitelist & blacklist systems for that in place so any weird apps will immediately get blacklisted and players using such banned permanently from the game.