NIA's anti-cheat promises through a 2.5 Mach Legend



Originally from the Beijing Resistance, translated by Anonymous



It's been more than 20 days since I sent the first cheater report. Until this day, I'm thinking that if this guy didn't spoof to another country to take down strategic portals, maybe I would still be writing more cheater reports everyday (in the Judicatory of Argent Dawn).

My Tickets (created x days ago)

In this article, I would like to present the 16-day-long struggle of a normal player against a spoofer and the fact that NIA ignored and didn't care about spoofers or obvious evidence of cheating.

Ingress Prime Roadmap

2o days ago, the Beijing Resistance account published an article stating that @Apado has been moving around in the game too quickly to be a real-world agent. A glance at the article is enough to see that this is nothing about so-called "GPS drifting". How can you drift onto a Resistance durable every time? This is more than certain a spoofer.

According to the information provided, I described the cheating activities in detail and submitted a support ticket. I didn't think too much, because from my point of view, this should be a quick matter to deal with, since NIA promised that they would read each support ticket quickly, thus such blatant cheating should be dealt with as soon as possible.

Real world told me a different story: that I was too naive and that this is only the beginning.

NIA carelessly denied any action towards this account.

It's ok, since some of the Enlightened bosses (can't find a better English word for this, sorry / Translator) are very against a public social media account disclosing information on cheaters. Alternatively, they tell newcomers to the game that this is all nonsense or they believe that "maybe this guy is really a general aviation pilot". They don't appear to have anything against the report channels their own faction opened up, though.

So, even though in the report ticket, information such as how long it would take a normal person to make this movement and the normal means of transportation needed is clearly included, maybe the NIA also believes that this guy is an advanced airplane pilot, or maybe they don't know anything about Chinese air route restrictions or private airplane ownership situations --- perhaps a speed of 480 km/h is quite acceptable.

The same day at 11PM, @Apado went strolling in the Forbidden Palace.

"Entry into xxxx out of open hours." What stupid words.

Whoops, wrong picture. Here it is:

@shizhao (ENL): I believe that taking portals while violating real-world rules is no different from a spoofer

So the second report was born, but the NIA sent me this second email, possibly based on the consideration that "He may be a staff at the Palace" or "He may be flying a helicopter above the Palace at that time":

Note the date difference

That morning at 5AM, @Apado reached Baima town, Lishui district, Nanjing and took down a Resistance strategic at the speed of 410 km/h.

You can probably already guess the result. With a speed not as high as last time, the cheater was ignored by NIA. After all, he is a private aircraft owner.

Still, note the date

That night, @Apado went to Japan and killed a Resistance durable in Kaminoyama City. If you are not familiar with the name, this is a small city about 60km west of Sendai. The city boasts the largest amusement park in northeastern Japan and a castle named Tsukoka-jo.

Probably due to moving internationally, this time he reached a speed of 660 km/h. Normally that would count as some hard evidence, but NIA taught me a lesson: Just because someone did something you can't imagine doesn't mean it can't be done.

Date, again

Maybe the NIA just doesn't know much about air travel between China and Japan. That must be it! Maybe they believe that both Xidan, Beijing and Kaminoyama, which has a population of less than 40k, have international airports and have an air route between them. In addition, the Japanese must be so proficient in flying that they would build an airport in the mountains to test out flying skills.

The next day at 7PM, @Apado arrived at Ruoqiang county, Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. It's ok if you're not familiar with this place. All you need to know is that in 1900, Swedish explorer Sven Hedin discovered to the West of Lop Nur the ruins of a city later confirmed as Loulan, where the ancient Silk Road separated into a North and a South branch.

This time @Apado took off from Beijing as well, taking as short as 45 minutes, reaching a cruising speed of 3000 km/h.

Well...

Where did the speed lock mechanism go? Is it normal in NIA's mind to play Ingress while traveling at a speed of 2.5 Mach? Even the Concorde won't reach this speed, you'll need a Mikoyan MiG-31 for that.

Against the rules or not, it's at NIA's discretion

Later, @Apado went through a temple in Japan at night. In order to avoid NIA's ignorance of Japanese conditions, I searched for the temple's official English site (enduring some discomfort) and pointed out the hours of the temple:

Of course, this is again ignored by NIA: maybe they think that since this guy can visit the Forbidden Palace at night, it's no big deal for him to walk into a closed Japanese temple at night either.

Uh..

To be honest, at this time I have already realized that the NIA are not reading the reports seriously. This is just another Cheater - NAnaDOdo or Cheater - DeepAzon. The NIA's outdated cheat detection mechanisms just can't detect such spoofing at all, and the NIA OPS just won't take your reports seriously. Just when I was almost convinced that he's going to become a new legend of the spoofing world and was ready to give up, an American Resistance agent came to us.

@Apado took down one of the Resistance's Alaskan durables. The Resistance there quickly submitted a report through the quick report channel, but the NIA still didn't do anything about it. They found the article Cheater - Apado on the internet and started looking for Beijing Resistance members in different Resistance groups to seek more information.

The portal taken down was closed off due to season reasons, so the Resistance there wanted to recover the durable with the account NIAGameMaster. But in NIA's rules, even if @Apado got banned because of multi-accounting, trespassing, gear purchases or anything else, they won't recover the portal. NIA only restore the portals that are taken down by spoofers, which means that the Resistance has to first convince the NIA that this is a spoofer. No matter how god-like this guy is moving in the game, nothing can be done if the NIA doesn't officially recognize this.

So, with the old supersonic movement evidence in their hands, the Alaskan Resistance started to negotiate with the NIA along with a new piece of evidence: the fact that he moved to Upolu Island 3 hours after appearing in Alaska: more supersonic travels.

Here's some more Ingress geography for those who are still reading: Upolu Island is one of the main islands of the Independent State of Samoa in southern Pacific Ocean, and is 7200 km away from Alaska. Usually you won't see this place in the maps, but those days the island is as visible as daylight on the intel maps, because @Apado made a few thousand-km links from the island.

23 hours later, my last cheater report ticket was closed with again the standard reply:

But this time, before the ticket is closed, Resistance agents from Alaska were able to confirm that the spoofer was banned.

This means that all reports submitted through normal channels are proved useless and meaningless by the NIA themselves.

Many thanks to the NIA for their "careful" review of my reports and their "dedicated" reply. I'm so sorry that I've been wasting your time.

Had he not spoofed a durable in the US, we may still be seeing his figure and his endeavors around the world somewhere. A spoofer who can't be dealt with through either support tickets or quick channels.

What's the difference between this one spoofer and anyone else? Most spoofers try to hide the fact that they are spoofing by not speeding or acting strangely, which can become evidence against him. This "player", however, plays the game based on the principle of "Report me please". Each time he becomes active, he leaves behind tons of evidence for report.

诚然，不是所有的作弊者都数据异常，遇到技术足够好的玩家就可以完全绕开猩猩的反作弊机制，这也可以理解。然而 NiaOPS 这种对现实证据完全无视，对举报证据根本不予参考的行为，距离猩猩承诺的“玩家每个举报都我们都会仔细查阅”差距有点太远了。

It is understandable that not all cheaters have abnormal data and that skilled players are able to easily go around NIA's cheat detections. But the NIA OPS completely ignores real-world evidence and takes no actions based upon these reports: this is just way too far from the promise that "We read carefully every report submitted".

No wonder they say that they don't need evidence for the reports. All you need to do is to suspect a player, because they just won't read anything even if you really put in some evidence!





Oh, and here's a little extra stuff.

Since no one has actually seen the portal "楼兰故城遗址" (the aforementioned portal in Xinjiang), I wanted to know who was the actual person to visit the place and submit a portal there.

After some asking around, I found this in a interesting Telegram channel:

Considering the past actions of this agent and all the portals he submitted around the country in weird positions, let's put this picture into a search engine:

Search results...

An article with the pic...

Oof.

Translator's notes:

Thank you for reading this long article! I translated this purely out of the motivation to make Ingress a better, cheating-free game. I hope my English is fluent enough for this to be comprehensible. May this help Niantic members become more aware of their problems and fix them, soon(TM). Peace.

Original webpage: https://bjres.net/2018/12/10/%E4%BB%8E-2-5-%E9%A9%AC%E8%B5%AB%E7%9A%84%E4%BC%A0%E5%A5%87%E7%9C%8B%E7%8C%A9%E7%8C%A9%E7%9A%84%E5%8F%8D%E4%BD%9C%E5%BC%8A%E6%89%BF%E8%AF%BA/



