'Pokémon GO': Niantic Sanctions Cheaters With Misbehaving Pokémon

By Jessica Ferrera, Christian Post Contributor Sunday, June 25, 2017

Niantic, the developer of the hit mobile gaming app "Pokémon GO," has recently announced that cheating trainers are going to be sanctioned with misbehaving Pokémon.

Earlier this week, Niantic confirmed what many trainers and fans have been expecting for months: the addition of Raid Battles and the improvement of Gym features.

These updates provide people with more reasons to play "Pokémon GO" as well as offer several new areas that trainers would definitely want to dominate. With that, the use of third-party apps that act as cheating engines has been rampant.

A Niantic staff member went on the "grassroots network" of "Pokémon GO" players on Reddit known as The Silph Road and said: "With the announcement of Raid Battles and the new battle features, we are staying true on our commitment to ensuring that Pokémon GO continues to be a fun and fair experience for all Trainers."

The Niantic personnel added: "Starting today, Pokémon caught using third-party services that circumvent normal gameplay will appear marked with a slash in the inventory and may not behave as expected."

Niantic continued the announcement by expressing gratitude for the excitement that followed the addition of the newest gameplay elements on "Pokémon GO." However, they reiterated that they are committed to "maintaining the integrity of our community."

Niantic confirmed to Kotaku that the Reddit post was legitimate and that is all that they had to announce at that particular moment.

The need for more details was apparently caused by the lack of specifications on how the Pokémon would misbehave for trainers found cheating on Raid Battles and other gameplay features.

With that, several Reddit users from the same thread had witty hunches or recommendations on how the Pokémon would act out.

One presented the possibility of Pokémon running home from Gyms and subsequently getting its level reduced by one. One trainer also joked about the likelihood of a Pokémon "eating" other characters stored in a cheating trainer's inventory. Some reports also suggested that seeing a randomly confused Pokémon could be a funny sort of punishment.