Pokemon GO Player Loses Arena To Spoofer After Holding It For Over Three Years
After more than three and a half years, Redditor and Pokemon GO player u/BoostsMade4Walking has lost control of an arena out in the woods in Lolo, Montana. Shortly after reporting they had surpassed 1332 days of holding the very same arena, the player took to Reddit to share their achievement. As with all nice things on the internet, someone was able to ruin the fun and was able to find the location simply based on the provided picture posted for proof by BoostsMade4Walking and used a spoofing tool to end the streak.
In an edit to the thread, BootsMade4Walking shared that they weren't too upset about having lost the arena and were rather flabbergasted that someone was able to find the location simply based on the picture they provided. BootsMade4Walking, who is a moderator on r/pokemongo even shared that they had to remove the coordinates of that specific gym three independent times.
According to the player, the reason the arena was able to stay up as long is due to its remote location deep within the woods in Montana. "I use to hike a ton. It is about 20 miles into the wilderness. [The] only people that see it are firefighters and backpackers" BootsMade4Walking said in a Reddit reply, adding that they had been working on the fire tower adjacent to Lolo when the Peak Fire broke out in mid-July, 2017 which went on for several weeks burning more than 218 km² of land.
Other Redditors weighed in and shared their frustration with someone making the effort to ruin the fun for the Pokemon GO player. Fortunately, other users like u/Graulithe shared that their records with an even longer duration of 1370 days were still going on, strutting hard towards the four-year mark with their Weedle.
A remarkable aspect about these runs is that the theoretical limit as to when a Pokemon could've even been placed in a gym is June 2017 as an update to gyms came to the game at the time, throwing all holding Pokemon out of the arena. Therefore only Pokemon after that date are eligible for this duration with both Graulithe and BootsMade4Walking being close to maxing out the duration they could've held the gym for.
It's likely that other players around the globe are sporting similarly impressive feats and streaks in Pokemon GO, though none have publically announced them like Graulithe and BootsMade4Walking did. Perhaps that is the best way to protect those records in the first place.
Image courtesy of Niantic
