Niantic has put out a statement for their Pokemon Go players in light of “various ‘exploit’ posts”, and that they have disabled all Pokemon Go Battle League battles until further notice. However, the company did not specify what the exploit was.
“As a team, we believe there is a ‘contract of trust’ in Go Battle League: you should always feel your knowledge and skill determine the outcome of your battles. Cheating directly attacks this trust contract, and we have zero tolerance for it,” wrote Niantic.
While the company didn’t write about the details of said exploit, Pokemon Go fan and YouTuber JRskatr shared a video yesterday showing an exploit he found in the Pokemon Melmetal. He said that in the exploit, Melmetal is able to use its charged move, Rock Slide, far more often. This gives players using Melmetal an extremely unfair advantage.
There are also players on Twitch who’ve shared videos battling with the same user from JRskatr’s video. The user in question also rose very quickly to the top spot on the leaderboard over the last two days.
“Because of this zero tolerance policy and the current situation, we’ve disabled Go Battle League. We’re equally serious about our policy of never commenting on the details of investigations into individual accounts,” wrote Niantic.
The company also shared their process for when the possible exploit is identified.
- Analyze the issue—Rash action (i.e. no analysis) can solve the immediate issue; however, it leaves the door open for the exploit to return in the future.
- Determine severity—Based on their analyses, they will determine (a) the level of technical knowledge needed to abuse the exploit and (b) how badly the exploit harms the integrity of Go Battle League.
- Mitigate accordingly
We don’t know yet when Niantic will enable Pokemon Go Battle League yet, as there is still “plenty of work happening behind the scenes”. However, they will only enable the feature once they are “confident the ‘trust contract’ will be honoured”.
