Reports were circulating yesterday that Legendary Pokemon Articuno had popped up at a PokéGym in Ohio. Well, it would turn out that developer Niantic has denied this and said that it has had nothing to do with the rare bird’s appearance. Geek.com reached out to developer Niantic and received the following response.
The Articuno “was not from Niantic. it’s either a spoof or someone hacked the game,” but added that the company is still “looking into it” and there aren’t “clear answers at the moment.”
weird shit man…..
The person’s story was such bullshit anyway. The game just came out so bugs and issue’s are going to happen.
Ok
client-side you could inject any data you want, when you dissemble the source-code, and run it locally by side-loading your phony version of the game. However. For it to actually be stationed at a gym, or to make it appear in the wild, you would have to hack into the servers and plant it there… I guess the first thing happened, which can’t be avoided but it’s not really a threat to the game… if it’s the second Niantic needs to fix their security asap because it could do serious harm to the game like deleting pokemon from other players or entire accounts……
A few GPS spoofers checked out that gym and she’s not on it with an Articuno. The hackers outed the photoshopper. Nice try though!
I heard the opposite, actually. About a dozen GPS spoofers on Reddit visited the gym and saw the Articuno was actually there, shortly before Mystic was knocked out of the gym. If what you’re saying is true and they’re not just late to the party, then this could have been an elaborate prank full of false witnesses.
If it’s a photoshop thing, no real harm done.
If someone actually hacked the thing to put Articuno into the game, wow. Niantic needs to fix that ASAP. Get help from Nintendo & GameFreak before someone decides to take it a step further and actually fuck with other people’s shit. If people think I’m whining/hating on this game now, just wait til innocent people have their shit stolen because Niantic fucked up somewhere.