Pokemon GO developer Niantic is still standing strong against unauthorized third-party apps and the players who use them. However, it has recently decided to show some leniency to some banned players who may have been unwittingly wreaking havoc on Niantic’s servers.
The accounts in question were most likely using apps that allowed players to find Pokemon. These so-called “add-on map apps” are user-created tools and caused tons of headaches for Niantic.
In a blog post on the Pokemon Go website, Nianitc CEO John Hanke explained the impact of those add-ons on the Pokemon GO servers.
“Some players may not have realized that some add-on map apps do more than just show you nearby Pokémon,” Hanke states. “Each end-user app can be used as a collection tool by the app creator, invisibly collecting and forwarding data to the app creator with or without the knowledge of the end user. These apps can have an effect similar to DDoS attacks on our servers.” Essentially, the offending apps would collect user data and send it to Niantic at a rate that Niantic’s servers had trouble handling. It’s that kind of server impact that led to Niantic shutting down PokeVision, a popular Pokemon finding tool.
The problem is that users who used these apps did not know of the impact the apps were causing on the servers. Niantic later dropped the banhammer on those users, and the users were confused by the ban.
“Because of this,” Hanke said, “we have had to ban some accounts associated with using these add-on map tools, leading to confusion by some users about why they were banned. This is a small subset of the accounts banned.
“As a result of some changes made to our infrastructure, we are now able to unban this set of accounts.”
Hanke made sure to note that this unban will only apply to accounts that Niantic determined to be using those Pokemon tracking apps. Accounts that used bots that helped them “remotely capture Pokémon, battle or deploy on Gyms, or harvest resources from PokéStops” will remain permanently banned. Those are considered out-and-out cheating, and Niantic has no remorse for those who cheat in Pokemon GO.
