
Wizards Unite Is a Bloated, Slow, Harry Potter-Ified Pokémon Go - Tomte
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/06/wizards-unite-is-a-bloated-slow-harry-potter-ified-pokemon-go/
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pavel_lishin
I still miss Ingress, even if it was just a way to help Google map walkable
paths.

Every once in awhile I daydream about how to make an AR game that isn't
trivially spoofable with GPS hackery, and that rewards more social
interaction, even if it's not face-to-face. Only thing I've come up with is
placing physical objects you have to scan, that work like 2FA tokens that
display changing codes. Maybe even changing QR codes. With e-ink displays, it
might even be plausible to have them be battery-powered and long lasting.

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rtkwe
The problem with that is that game will have the Ingress/PGo/Wizards Unite
problem of limited activities outside crowded urban areas but 1000-fold
because you're adding physical infrastructure. And on top of the issues of
just getting them out there there's the other issue of just coordinating
placing all those locations and making sure your infrastructure doesn't get
ripped up for being an eyesore or for angering some local politician.

One alternative might be to combine multiple location sources, eg: GPS, local
wifi and cell tower data to cross check. Spoofing all those at once should be
harder but the OS would have to support lower level access to the location
info. In a similar vein there's probably some way to validate the GPS info if
the app had access to the incoming signals more directly as those and the
slight jitter coming from reflected GPS signals should be harder to spoof.

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pavel_lishin
I think Ingress actually ended up solving most of those problems - from what I
read on forums, it became more difficult to spoof your location, and they
would track the plausibility of player moves - anyone moving around faster
than a slow driving speed would be penalized.

And yup, it's a problem outside of urban areas. Honestly, if I were designing
an ARG game, I probably wouldn't even try, but explicitly limit it to dense
environments. Roll out in New York, Chicago, San Francisco.

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rtkwe
Yeah that's another option even if it doesn't totally eliminate the problem it
does severely hamper the power of spoofing. It does fail if part of your goals
is to geofence content like Pokemon Go does (did? It's been a while since I
played but I doubt they removed the region specific pokemon) since just
disappearing in one location and appearing somewhere else hours later isn't
that weird. IIRC in pokemon go some of the later GPS spoofers would have you
walk around a map instead of jumping instantaneously from location to
location.

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pavel_lishin
Oh, appearing and disappearing somewhere hours later was fine. But appearing
in Los Angeles, then five minutes later popping up in New York would earn you
a ban.

