Cheating Survey Results

Spoofing, buying/selling accounts lead the way.

Posted by eric654256 on February 15, 2019

Here are the survey results for cheating in Pokemon Go. After the survey was posted on Reddit and Twitter, about 950 people filled out the form.

As with any survey, the results only reflect the population that could have filled out the survey, namely English speaking Reddit and Twitter users. As with any negative behavior survey, there is potential for bias and not being truthful. And because the survey was voluntary and anonymous, there is also a self-selection bias and submitting multiple times. In addition to other problems, you're crazy if you do anything scientific with these results.

What did people consider not cheating?

Lets take a look at the bar chart for not cheating answer, which combines the maybe answer with yes. The top 5 least cheating

  1. Using a Pokemon Go Plus or Poke Ball Plus
  2. Using Pokemon rankings and suggested lists
  3. Playing while on self powered transportation
  4. Using IV Calculators
  5. Playing while on motorized transportation
Though rankings and suggested lists are both created through (possibly) cheating, I guess using them doesn't count as cheating for most people. Using IV calculators might possibly violate the terms of service, but most people don't think it is cheating.

What did people consider cheating?

Again, lets look at the same not cheating answer but on the other side. The top 5 most cheating

  1. GPS Spoofing
  2. Buying or selling your account
  3. Sharing accounts or multiaccounts to help with Gyms
  4. Using scanners to find Pokemon
  5. Sharing accounts or multiaccounts to help with Raids
If you look at the chart, spoofing and buying/selling accounts are very much cheating. There is a drop off with the next three.

Most Controversial?

For this, I took out "maybe" and compared "yes" with "no". Those that are close to 50% are controversial.

  1. Using a modified PoGo+
  2. Decompiling the Game Master file
  3. Decompiling the APK (teardown)
  4. Sharing accounts or multi-accounts because of boredom or raids
  5. Using scanners to find Pokemon
  6. Using information from decompiling the APK (teardown)
  7. Using a Go-Tcha

Personal Comments About Each Section

Everyone seems to agree spoofing is cheating. But most people don't think that the game needs to be walked/run, I assume because there are speed limits.

Using scanners depends on the use. While some find any scanner to be cheating, most think finding Pokestop, Gyms and Raids to be ok. Many people draw the line at finding Pokemon

As expected almost noone thought a PoGo+ or PoBa+ is cheating. Though many people thought modifying it is cheating. Many also thought the Go-Tcha is also cheating, but not as many.

When it comes to sharing accounts or multi-accounts, most people thought it was cheating. Though some people are split depending on the reason. Raids or Boredom seems acceptable, and Gyms are not

Though half of responses say that decompiling the game master file is cheating, most do not think that rankings or IV calculators are cheating, which requires someone else to decompile the game master file. There are interesting analogies to other areas of life: if you're playing a team game and you know your teammate is cheating, would you be happy about winning?

Decompiling the APK is a similar ethical delimma, but was phrased differently and both responses containing APK teardown. Half of the responses say decompiling is cheating, But this time, a similar number say that using the results is cheating. I wonder what would've happened if I said "Preparing for < blah blah > feature being released"

When it comes to research tasks, there is the same delimma. In this case I forgot to ask about packet sniffing, but I assume half of the people would say intercepting the data network traffic from the phone is cheating (packet sniffing). Almost noone thought that details about reserach tasks is cheating. As before, I wonder what would happen if I had drawn a more direct link between the two.

Types of cheaters?

We can try to group the users by using k-means clustering. The most natural split is into two groups, more or less strict about cheating. The most strict group gives a higher cheating score to every answer than the less strict group.

If we split into 3 groups, there is still a more strict and less strict no-cheating group. But now we see a group that is strict about sharing accounts and multi-accounting, and GPS spoofing. This group is less strict about Pokemon rankings, research tasks or scanners as cheating, which makes sense because they are commonly seen on Reddit and Twitter.

If we split into 4 groups, I see the middle group splits into two parts. I see an anti-decompile group that is different from the anti-sharing-multi-account group, but otherwise similar.

Comments or Suggestions

If you have any comments or suggestions, please follow up on this subreddit post