Regardless, the team behind MyGoBot seem relatively confident in their ability to thwart any anti-cheat methods Niantic may lay down in the future. “We have been in the botting industry for a while now, and we have thwarted anti-cheat for years,” said Jake. After working on bots for Runescape and Clash of Clans over the past two years, Jake believes that, so far, “Niantic’s anti-cheat is very sad compared to some others. Everything they have been adding in, has been easy to thwart (with the help of the community).”
(Update: To be clear, the MyGoBot developers are only speaking for themselves here. For their part, Team Unknown 6 say they do not directly condone botting, and intend for their decryption efforts to primarily aid in other types of third-party applications)
“It probably took [Niantic] hours, if not days, to write the encryption for Unknown6,” Jake continued. “It took us three days to crack. This is just a never-ending game.” (Niantic has not responded to a request for comment from Ars about its cheat-detection and prevention technologies).
“Assuming your product is undetectable would be a surefire way to run into issues down the line,” Explicit added. That said, despite the recent down time, Explicit seemed to stand behind MyGoBot’s front-page assurance that “it’s safe to say MyGoBot will continue being stable with consistent functionality for the foreseeable future.”
“Basically, in this game of cat and mouse, it just goes back and forth without any clear winner,” he said. “Game developer steps up to combat an issue. [Hack] developers work around it. Rinse and repeat.”
Editor’s Note: Thanks to Cheesy Noob, Keyphact, globeriz, HatchingEgg, MMM, Tal, Unni, Waryas, wchill, xssc, and the rest of Team Unknown6 for assistance on the technical bits in this article. Thanks also to reader Joseph Chapman for frequent tips on the state of the Pokémon Go hacking scene.