Users who faced Pokémon Go bans two weeks ago could see their respective bans reverse, says developer Niantic in a blog post.
Niantic CEO John Hanke addressed the most recent issue the popular augmented reality game has been facing. That is of course the banning of players who might have violated Pokémon Go’s terms of service. Violating the terms of service includes using tools that puts unnecessary stress on servers, and gives an advantage in the game. Plenty of players used PokéVision, a Pokemon mapping app that accurately located pocket monsters for you. Niantic of course ceased access to the servers for location apps, effectively making them defunct.
Lesser known location apps also did this and sent information to Niantic’s servers. Hanke said in the blog post when third party apps do this, it resembles a distributed denial of service (aka, DDOS attack). Because use of location apps resembles an attack on the servers, users found themselves banned, confusingly.
“Because of this 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,” Hanke writes. “This is a small subset of the accounts banned.”
Currently Niantic are looking to rescind Pokémon Go bans for some users who didn’t know they were violating the TOS. “Add-on maps which scrape data from our servers still violate our terms of service and use of them may still result in an account ban going forward,” Hanke continues.
Those who scraped data or even used tools to play in other parts of the world, will continue to see their accounts banned.
“Our main priority is to provide a fair, fun, and legitimate experience for all players,” he concludes, “so aggressive banning will continue to occur for players who engage in these kinds of activities.” Hank concluded.
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Via Pokémon Go Live.