A Pokémon Go player who attempted to earn over a million XP a day was "soft banned" from the game after it mistook him for a cheater.

Go player Jimmy Derocher devised a circular route for his challenge that went through several clustered Pokéstops. By placing lures on every stop, using lucky eggs, and repeating the loop every five minutes he hoped to prove to Niantic, and other players, that amassing huge amounts of XP was possible without cheating.

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Pokémon Go has suffered regular problems with cheaters since launch. Enterprising coders have developed bots which automatically play the game in their absence, tricking the Go servers with false GPS data and allowing them to automatically farm pokéstops and Pokémon.

One player managed bring his account to maximum level using this method in hours, rather than weeks or months.

Since then, Niantic has cracked down on cheating and implemented several automatic measures that prevent players from abusing their systems. It seems that Jimmy was caught by one such anti-cheat measure, which blocks suspected foul play after a certain daily XP limit has been breached.

According to Jimmy, who was live steaming his attempt on Twitch, everything was going swimmingly until after the 13th hour, when every Pokémon he encountered started to run away with no chance of capture.

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"In a sense I was trying to prove to Niantic that their limit was actually hurting players who play efficiently," Jimmy told Kotaku.

This is what is known as a "soft-ban" which doesn't kick players out entirely, but cuts off features instead. In this case, Pokémon catching – a rather vital part of the game that encourages you to 'catch 'em all', we'd say.

"I'm a bit of a hardcore gamer and I play somewhat efficiently, but the point is that I shouldn't be hitting a 24 hour ban limit in just over half that time," Jimmy added.

"Bots are far more efficient than humans are, and I think the effective soft ban was put in haphazardly...hurting a lot more players than I think they expected."

Jimmy even tweeted at Niantic to try and get the soft ban lifted.

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. Hi @johnhanke - I'm reddit user /u/jdero pgo: "Derocher" - 25% stream donos to charity - whitelist my inc softban?https://t.co/OUtmRx8Pf5 — Jimmyisabot (@jderoc) August 18, 2016

We don't know whether Niantic responded, but he was able to donate some of the money raised by donations to his Twitch feed to charity.

Pokémon Go abusers are rightly getting permanently banned from and having their accounts disconnected, but Niantic clearly needs to adjust its systems so they don't penalise the most dedicated players.

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