new forum account, but I've been training and botting since the beginning. These informations are what I have found to be true on a personal basis. Bans are only bans if you get a message that says 'this account has been terminated due to violation of terms of service' as a pop-up message when you try to login. In the beginning, 'failed to retrieve game data from server' was the ban message.. currently, 'failed to retrieve game data from server' (FtR) is the suspension message. (as an update, niantic has altered the text to read 'failed to get game data from server') the difference: Suspension - you have lost access to the account for an indeterminate length of time Ban - you're done, make a new account If you receive a 'FtR' message, 99 times out of 100 your account is fine, just make a new account and bot that for a while and in 2 to 4 weeks your original account should be accessible again. My theory: while botting, your account meets certain pre-determined conditions. PGO's algorithms detect said mystery conditions and 'flag' your account (warning message). since you're botting, you can't see the message and the behavior may (or may not) repeat. a second 'flag' is set on the account and scheduled for personal review by niantic. Your access to the account is suspended while they investigate why their system flagged your account. it takes a while since there are so many flagged accounts to wade through but eventually they get around to it and slash a few pokemon before removing the flags. your account is now unflagged but you still do not have access to it.. that should be returned in a few days at the next 'dump cycle' where the system releases all the unflagged accounts (think of a shipping truck taking a load of unflagged accounts back to a receiving station) - you now have access to your accounts again. Before PF I was running PGBot which had a flag detector built-in and would give you your flagged status when you logged in. flagged or unflagged react the same when logging in to PF. The system I had in place before coming here was the following: Never bot your main(s) make a lot of accounts. my current count is 45 (43 active). run one account for 4 to 6 hours then stop and move on to the next account. if an account goes 'FtR' on me, I take that account out of my account list and put it in an FtR list, then check it once a week. eventually I can log in again and it goes on the bottom of my list of accessible accounts. if an account gets 2 or 3 100iv 'mons, I level them as high as the account allows and set the account aside to wait for trading, whenever that comes out. I then make a new account. I have accounts that have gone 'FtR' 3+ times and come back to me. In the past 6 months I have not received a single ban. The only accounts I have ever really received a ban on were the first two I made when the game came out. Slashed 'mons take up space - you can't really do anything with them. best to just transfer them out and move on. In my experience, if you catch a 'mon and do not evolve it, you have a 33% chance of it getting slashed in the next couple months. If you evolve it, the chances of it getting slashed drop to about 12.5%. Hatched 'mons do not get slashed. Currently it doesn't matter where the egg came from as eggs are counted as pokemons by the game but treated as items or candy. if your bot walks enough to hatch it, it is counted as a legit 'mon and will even pass review by niantic. candy wont get slashed. even if you get FtR'd after catching/transferring 100 chanseys at an event and using their candy to evolve your legit chansey, your legit chansey is not in danger. These are just my personal observations, experiences and theories based thereupon. I'm sure they will help someone so I thought I should post them here. Consider it my 'hello everyone'.
dude WTF i had given up on several accounts where i got the msg "failed to retrieve game data from server" or something like that.... now because of your post i check one more time and WTF i can log in to an account that got banned... or whatever it is then 3 weeks ago... now i am confused for sure lol, gotta start my theory making all over again... Edit: okay so 2 of the accounts i just dumbed on this is back upen thats awesome indeed!! i cant help but wonder thou, the accounts i made ages ago when the game came give a message as well -> "Unable to authenticare. Please try again" any ideer what this means?
failure to authenticare is a very old way of saying ban, iirc.. I seem to recall something along those lines in the forums right after the game came out and people first started poking around with it. for the record I believe the game sees hatched 'mons as 'lured', same as ones spawned at a pokestop from a lure module or an incense.. ergo I don't believe those are at risk the way normally spawning 'mons are. IDK, just a crackpot theory on that one. I'll need to play around with PF a bit more. (edit: hatched mons are not 'guaranteed safe'.. though I have never had one get a slash, I have heard of others that have been). Super glad to hear you got some accs back man! I can only imagine how many players give up on 100iv 'mons or high level accs because they don't know about this stuff. Here's hoping this thread gets stickied to help more people!
glad to hear it m8! keep after those last two, they should be back sooner or later. ^_^ most likely sooner, by the sounds of it. I don't believe there's a truly set time, I have some accounts that have been out for twice as long as others before I regained access to them. I've been noticing an uptick in unslashed shiny raichus and slashed shiny pikachus from the past few accounts I've regained access to, leading me to believe if you evolve pre-FtR you have a higher chance of 'mon survival than if you evolve post-FtR/pre-slash. I believe that slashes don't always appear immediately after you receive your account back.. so evolving 'mons right away would be unwise. better to transfer the ones you know would be slashed and get their candy, or just wait and see.
Just found another 2 accounts to be finally unlocked Amazing, one of them had 3x 100IV mons on it guess ill be stashing thatone
Nice find! I'd double check to make sure they're not slashed and barring that, definitely store that acc until trading day. (whenever that is >.<)
have an account that was banned almost a year ago and it still shows "can't retrieve game data". based on given "true" information here, i contacted the support and they told me it is banned. So the information here is just wrong!
No it's not. On my side here the "Long gone" Accounts from the release times show the "Failed to retrieve game data" message but they got the "you have been banned" e-Mail from niantic. The other Accounts, that are accessible again, only showed the "Failed to retrieve game data" Message in the app but never recieved the ban e-mail. So i still believe this is correct information from Senpaii. Did you check for the E-Mail DaSoul?
If you read ALL the information here (especially the first couple sentences) you'd know I was referring to recently banned accounts. I too have a couple accounts from the beginning that are banned and not merely suspended. (and damn I wish I still had them..) <3
isnt 4 to 6h too much? Im boting oike 40mim per day only... I have no main acc, and im botting in 2 acc (1 lvl 15 now and 1 lvl 24) only 40min day still fine for now I guess
Well PF ran in 2 traps from niantic since release if i remember correctly so i think 4 out of 6 is a really good quota. And "back in the days" i'd run PF 12-16 hours straight a day. They deserved to be banned ;-)
Hatched 'mons do not get slashed. Ok, well i actually have 2 hatched pokemon that got slashed. These are the continent pokemon from New York and Tokyo. (im from Amsterdam) No lies here, i think they didnt believed me i was making a world trip Also im very sad that my first bot account (necro bot) got banned and sadly still is banned it had 7 100 IV pokemon, had all of the pokemon that where out. Besides that, i once ran a account for more then 11 hours by accident cause i forgot to turn the PC off this account is still active without slashes and is currently lvl 38. All the info you provided seems legit besides the fact of the hatched pokemon cant be slashed. I for one just use 1 account at a time to bot with, make it 40 and make a new one I run my bot 2 times a day for 4 hours with 2 hours in between, 3 got banned in the necro bot time, and the PF accounts (2) are still up and running without any problem. So on this day i have 3 lvl 40 accounts (included my main) and 1 lvl 38 so when that one hits 40 i have 2 left to keep my gym protect at all times. I was sick and tired to be one of the few Valor players here while those yellow and blue losers kept taking the gym next to my house haha Thank god botting works so i dont need poke friends My main is FINALLY lvl 40 since last week (without cheating once cause i put like 100 euro on it to boost my poke and item space) I dunno if trading ever comes, cause it be weird and VERY unfair. Why ? well besides the fact i dont know how they will do this, but it would be very weird to trade a lvl 40 maxed out iv100 blissey to a lvl 10 account... Or will they downgrade to lvl 10 when traded ? how does this work ? Cause lets be honest, i can just use one of my lvl 40 accounts to make good pokemon and provide lower lvl account with sick pokemon and that would be just sad for legit players. And not to mention how much money you can make with trading sick pokemon to legit players. And what happens when the pokemon would be slashed in your inven but you traded it before that happens? will it get slashed in his/her inven ? I mean trading would prolly make this game worse then better if you ask me if it would work like that.
highest I've ever run recently was 11 hours but only cause I got busy IRL and couldn't get home to turn the bot off. didn't get banned for it, anyway. back in the day I ran that bastard for several days straight. totally deserved the e-boot. xP ohhh damn.. here I was hoping that all my hatched 'mons were safe. perhaps it has something to do with how they were hatched? or running too fast, or travelling from city to city too fast? (I generally wait 48h when switching countries).. would be fun to try to pin down what conditions cause a hatched 'mon to be slashed. Whenever I get an FtR block they hatched never get slashed and several of the map-caught usually do.. though again, this is just what I've experienced. I'll edit my bit about hatched mons though based on your infos. regarding trading, it's a genius move for rural players who may not have access to plane tickets, bots or a vehicle to travel to different biomes.. plus it would be very simple to enable. they want to make so you can't trade with someone not nearby.. easy enough to manage. Also I would recommend setting a trading leve limit, so players under say, level 20 can not trade. (couldn't trade right away in the games either iirc) two people find one another IRL, each one enters the others username into a 'trade zone' box (or they just hit a button marked 'go trade!' and enter a 'trading hall' then find the other person.. I like the first way better tbh).. the game checks to make sure they're less than 10 feet apart, then continues.. higher level pokemon could be 'scaled back'.. making their stats the same as the trainer level +2 (or +1.5, whatever it is nowdays.. ik +2 is possible), but as the trainer levels, the pokemon does as well until it reaches its max level it was before it was traded.. or they could just make so the traded pokemon is still the original higher level. I somehow doubt it would make a game-changing difference. or hell, make it misbehave like the original games. in the same aspect legit players also have access to iv checkers.. so they could check their own 'mons and though it would be more effort.. they have access to the same infos we botters do. I can see the slashed pokemon thing being an issue, but maybe trading would protect a pokemon somehow.. like the source at the bottom of the pokemons info screen would be 'trade' and the city it was traded in? 'laundering' the catch, if you will. I mean I think botting ruined the game for legit players far more than trading ever could. Personally I'm looking forward to trading 43 accounts worth of items and pokemons to 2 or 3 main accounts (whichever 3 are the highest level once trading hits..) The only thing that concerns me is this pokemon bank link between sun/moon and go.. I have a ton of hacked mons (dark/ghost lucario with wonder guard and stats in the high 600 to low 800s for example and a completely custom moveset).. once that happens whats to prevent people like me from learning how the pokemon moves transfer from game (4 moves) to phone (2 moves) and using that knowledge to give transferred 'mons completely custom movesets, or at least get the perfect attack / defense moveset each time.. combined with insane stats (if that aspect is transferable, which I assume it would be but can't say for sure) and a pokemon ability (which they may or may not add to the game in later generations).. essentially making pokegods? hell, at that point.. why am I botting now? I can just trade over a full pokedex and a few pokegods from the 'bank' and hold a gym for a week with a thoroughly broken magikarp. (ok that might actually be fun..) would definitely kill the game, though.. (though the locals in my area who still play can be counted on my fingers.. compared to back when I started at launch when it was in the dozens) gratz on getting the main to 40 btw!
well i live in a big city and these gyms are highly contested. I think i get 50 coins if i stay in there for 4 hours orsonever really checked it tbh cause it costs me a lot of max revives. I think its a very bad idea to put in trading cause either you can launder or ppl will get upset if they get bot pokemon I think its better to put in a battle system to be able to battle nearby ppl who play it with offcourse a invis mode if you dont want to be bothered Anyway its fun from time to time to play this but in the end why even play it in the first place cause eventually i quit haha Thnx and good luck
I really couldn't care less if my 'mons are legit caught or botted, as long as they aren't slashed I can't tell the difference either way anyway. Maybe the botted ones aren't as bad iv-wise as the self-caught ones? though I did legit catch a 98iv Yanma the other day.. xP sucks to have gyms contested so hotly. gym update works better for cities.. (getting paid for time defended instead of trying to capture several gyms before claiming PC) total crap for rural areas now, you can't get paid at all. tfw you have a magikarp that has held a gym for 27+ days... ...I just want to transfer my 43 accounts worth of pokemons onto whichever 2 accounts are the highest level when trading is released. Saves me the time of logging out of one account and in to another to drop the regionally ideal defending 'mon in a gym.
Interesting positions you are all taking, actually for once instead of a raging flame wars thread, this has been quite nice to read! keep sharing your information and thoughts guys <3
I find positivity and optimism breed reactions similar in nature, and providing help in place of derisive dismissal breeds warm familiarity and a positive environment for creative discourse with the goal of communal advancement. Granted some may see such things as base escapism but when you see the alternative it becomes clear which will lead you to a better outcome. I'm sincerely glad you noticed. Plus I didn't see much in the way of scientific styled analysis so I thought I should contribute. I am here to help in my own way, after all. d(-_o)
wrong it's the api that is detected this is common knowledge. scanners and botters know this it common knowledge at this point.. android spoofer are being warned they probably use satellite data for that. iOS doesn't give this info away so iOS is still safe.
