Drama with Spoofers/Trading

Spoofers, hackers, cheaters, no matters what Niantic do, they will always exist.

I agree on most you said but for me trading, as pvp, it has to be released as soon as posible, we, the legal players, deserve that feature, just because there are hackers and cheaters there is no excuse to stop bringing features into the game. Spoofers benefit from free coins, from high iv/cp mon, from a complete dex with all region exclusives, from all stops they want, dust, mons...If they also benefit from everything that is currently in the game what could be worse? They already can have EVERYTHING, trading and pvp will only bring more action and fun to us, not to them.

So for me they should implement trading and pvp for sure, just make it a phone to phone close action, for example you have to be within 100/200m away from each other to actually trade or battle. I believe they will do it do this way, someone at Niantic said it in an interview and I think it is a good idea.

The problem with banning spoofers is, finding real undisputable evidence of cheating, and no, screenshots or video is not enough, I've been "teleported" by the game for over 2 or 3 minutes with no apparent explanation other than GPS drift (we are talking about 1 or 2 km here, I didn't even know where I was in the city), and if they start banning accounts, regardless of wether they cheated or not, it will lead to people that do not cheat leaving the game, because their friends were banned, hurting the overall health of the game. What's needed is here is prevention, and that's easier said than done.

It's certainly not 1%. I feel like it's more close to 50-70% in my area.

I think it would not be that difficult to stop spoofers. I just don't think Niantic has decided it is high enough priority to commit the needed programming resources to it. They could write the speed limit code more carefully than the current soft-bans. Pay careful attention to distance, time, etc. so that it is nearly physically impossible for someone to move or jitter in such a way without spoofing. Then a warning followed by hard ban. Sure the cheaters will scream louder than others - but Niantic just took on the screamers with the 3rd-party warnings. As always there would be special cases that Niantic would need to commit resources to investigate. But they are making good money to pay for such things and I doubt it is coming from spoofers.

GPS information is already scrapped from Google.maps and google maps already has altitude information. If they tied GPS coordinates with altimeter information then spoofing wouldnt be possible. All these spoofer apps dont have altimiter info they just hack the GPS coordinates. Sure many people with cheap phones and people on computers without altimeters wouldn't get to play but who cares about that. I feel like this would be easy to program into the game.

1% cheat...if only it was that low a number.