Pokemon GO Job Post Hints At Anti-cheat Changes

Update: There are mixed reports about what the job listing and coding may imply for future updates, and this article is purely a report on the Pokemon GO community's speculation.

Cheating in Pokemon GO has been an issue since the game's creation, and Niantic has been taking steps to prevent potential opportunities for foul play such as spoofing a player's location. With the newest update for Pokemon GO, a data mine of the APK gives hope that there may soon be even further actions taken to take out potential cheaters.

With every update that is released, players will occasionally data mine the APK to dig deeper into updates and look for potential changes in the future. The most recent 0.63.1 update was dismantled in the Reddit Pokemon GO community known as r/TheSilphRoad, and after some code was discovered that mentioned the phrase "ANTICHEAT," the community began theorizing what the purpose behind the code may be.

The "fail" code's full text read "ENCOUNTER BLOCKED BY ANTICHEAT," and was listed under the "Encounters" section that deals with the Pokemon encounters. The poster of the APK breakdown, u/dronpes, gave insight into what it might mean.

"This may be the fail code triggered when a Pokemon encounter begins at one location, but a capture attempt is made far away from the starting location. Or, it could be an entirely different mechanic!" user u/dronpes said. "We're excited to see these measures beginning to be explicitly tackled by Niantic. Hopefully many more anti-cheat measures to follow!"

Throughout the rest of the thread, users expressed similarly hopeful thoughts on the possible anti-cheat measure, commenting that it would be a welcomed way to combat location spoofers while also noting that the current anti-cheat system in place has been getting better and will hopefully continue to do so.

If that wasn't enough to get the Silph Road community riled up, a post one day later on Thursday generated more excitement about the potential anti-cheat measures. User u/ReBootYourMind posted a link to the job listing section for Niantic where a listing expressed the need for a Machine Learning Engineer within the company. While the lengthy posting may not make much sense to those outside of the tech community, in-the-know members within the Reddit thread discussed what the job listing could be for. One of the biggest theories was that "Machine Learning" and the job description essentially meant more anti-cheat methods in the future as u/ReBootYourMind said it essentially boils down to "Detect and ban cheaters."

Members of the community were skeptical, however, saying that it could mean anti-cheating actions, but it could also mean several other things as well. The poster defended the claims made in the thread by asserting that cheating was one of the biggest issues the game faced, so it would make sense that they'd take on that issue with a dedicated position.

More will be reported should any additional information arise concerning the anti-cheat measures.