Beware of fake beaches (Pokémon Go) | Hacker News Reader

Beware of fake beaches (Pokémon Go)

community.openstreetmap.org

93 pointsaendruk33 comments

Do not adjust your set: this is a forum thread from April 2024 about Pokemon Go players trying to cheat by getting geospatial data changed. Equal parts hilarious and sad.

That's not even the half of it - I saw a player the other day with six phones, at least one of which was concurrently running three copies of PoGo. Nine accounts! See also people cheerfully announcing online that they spend $100-$200 per week playing that game... It's quite incredible how deeply hooked some people are.

There will always be Whales in gaming. I don't know which is healthier (but only between the two): pay $100-$200 per week and play 4-5 hours, or pay monthly $10 and plan 3h-5h on weekdays, 10h on weekends? (latter is my WoW addition from back in the day - I haven't played WoW for more than a decade).

It's all about the thrill and the FOMO (brain chemical manipulation at its finest). People should definitely try Chess.

I don't know if I would recommend chess to people who struggle with online addictions. 3 minute games and ELO make it feel pretty similar to other hedonic treadmils.

> Nine accounts! See also people cheerfully announcing online that they spend $100-$200 per week playing that game

sounds like that person was making 900-1800$ a week just by walking around with 6 phones :)

meanwhile I'm paying for the privilege of carrying one

Hehe I hope so but since players are usually spending the money buying game items instead of paying others to play for them, I suspect it's far more likely that person is one of those big spenders...

Surely Niantic Labs should freeze their copy of OSM data to prevent this kind of abuse.

Yes, they should. Even if they delay use of updates by some months, that should be enough to make it not worth adding fake stuff.

I wonder if this is possible at the server side. If niantic clients are identifiable, maybe OSM can serve them an old copy.

Why would the use the live database instead of importing snapshotted dumps?

Because Devs are lazy. Same reason time servers get hammered instead of companies setting up their own. From other comments, it sounds like Niantic do snapshot though.

I would assume Niantic and every other serious OSM user has just downloaded the OSM dataset and uses a local copy. Even most OSM smartphone apps do that.

My experience of OSM smartphone apps is that while they do cache map tiles, they also update stale data within a timescale of hours.

Yeah that's what they do, unless something changed.

I haven't been paying attention recently, but it used to be pretty common to see big threads discussing the impact of an update.

Hmm, how often do you think they do it? If it's already months, and people are still posting fake OSM data, that's evidence against my hypothesis above

For Pokemon go, it could be once per year:

Aug 2023: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/1646shv/open_...

Oct 2022: https://pokemongolive.com/en/post/mapupdates-2022/

Pikmin bloom updated once at Feb 2024 after launch at Oct 2021:

https://twitter.com/NianticHelp/status/1760694331466224078

Wow I'm amazed if people are creating fake beaches and waiting that long to use them. Or do they know in advance when the update is going to happen?

The funny part is they almost certainly do, historically the geodata in niantic’s games has been months or years out of date — so all this vandalism is for nothing.

TL;DR:

Online game company Niantic Labs uses OSM for a game, restricts certain features to beaches and other natural and artificial elements.

Then, Niantic Labs users edit OSM to add fake natural formations to game the system. Beaches and parks are added to cities where they don't exist.

OSM community tries to tackle the phenomenon by guiding users to correctly edit map features before reporting them.

I remember in Ingress a few people managed to convince Niantic that their garden gnome was a landmark statue.

It was almost a requirement to hit certain achievements.

Ingress is/was a wild game, with an avid community but also crazy chalenges, like keeping control of a portal every single day for a full year.

"Guardian" no longer exists, as it was causing (slightly more) toxic play. It was retired in 2018. Very annoyingly, when I was just a few days away from getting the maximum of 150 days.

Thanks for the correction, yes Guardian was "only" 150 consecutive days. I mixed it up with Sojourner which is 360 days, but has no location requirement.

Analogy: this is like editing Wikipedia articles to add fictional data, because you play a game that consumes that Wikipedia data and the fiction benefits you in the game.

Wikipedia calls this "Vandalism", and it's definitely true that the downside in general far outweighs the benefit to the person making the map edit. Externalities and mis-aligned incentives.

It's called vandalism on OpenStreetMap too. New users often make mistakes though and some Pokemon Go users might become more productive when they realise the map is used for other things too so a bit of guidance can be useful as the changes get reverted.

I wondered why there was a beach with the name of a private person in the house next to mine.

> There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is other people! —JPCAS

I never realized pokemon Go used openstreetmaps. Why not just the Google Maps API?

I'm not sure the Maps API gives you access to the raw vector data.

Also, at least the last time I checked, the Google Maps API was exorbitantly expensive. Niantic would likely get a discount, but avoiding this exploit doesn’t override all of the other benefits of OSM.

IIRC many of the original employees were ex-Googlers and the original Ingress game did use Google Maps data so at some level they were able to get what they need. I think there were rumours about them using undocumented abilities too in the early days, but my memory is fuzzy at this point. They moved to OSM later.

I think Niantic was a company within Google originally, then it spun off into its own thing when Google restructured with Alphabet.

Since the Google Maps price increase it is hideously expensive to use at any large scale.

Company I worked for moved away from gmaps to osm.

The migration was a pretty smooth process.

Honestly happy with it. Dont see the point using gmaps - but maybe the purpose has not tied me that I have to.

osm is pretty sweet, imo. Much, much cheaper as well!

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