Update: More bans have happened with the start of the Gigantamax Gengar event. Bans have not been removed two days later at the time of writing (7:00 pm GMT, 1st November 2024).

Niantic were probably hoping for a bit more success with the launch of Gigantamax Raids today in Pokémon GO. Instead, social media has been awash with complaints that they were too hard, and many reports of unexplained strikes and bans that are only now beginning to be lifted.

This weekend was the debut of Gigantamax Raids, featuring the forms for the Starters from (supposedly) everyone’s favourite generation: Blastoise, Charizard, and Venusaur. A small hiccup kicked things off with the battles not starting on time in New Zealand (the 153rd time New Zealand players were subject to glitches that only affects them and surrounding regions), but to be fair it was quickly fixed this time around. Some players were wary when announcements of the event stated that they would allow for up to 40 Trainers split across 4-player groups, with at least 10-30 people required to win. Sadly for many people these bosses proved too difficult to beat. It certainly wasn’t impossible, but crucially to win the following generally was required:

• Teams of at least 15 people required
• These players needed to have invested in Dynamax Pokémon – both evolving and powering up, and even some players spending resources into the Max Heal and Max Shield moves
• These players also needed to coordinate not just in the same place and time, but also communicate about details such as how to separate into correct groups, and who picks Max Heal or Max Shield options within each group during specific parts of the fight.

For a game that is viewed pretty casually by most of its playerbase, and trained on regular Raids which does not require this level of preparation (for many, mindless tapping with auto-recommended teams suffices), this was a recipe for failure. Then there’s the matter of incentive – these battles were at 6* difficulty, a big jump from the dead-easy 1* and more tricky 3* battles thus far. Given previously obtained Dynamax Kanto Starters cannot currently Gigantamax, some players did not care to obtain more Dynamax Starters (by and large the only viable option in some of these battles), let alone invest in them with limited resources and time (some requiring particles capped at 800 a day without paying for more, and upgrading moves requiring XL Candy, a rather rare resource), and without easy access to Community “Day” (legacy) moves on evolution. A more in-depth breakdown on the issues is given here. Another aspect is that these battles already have several bugs, as noted by Niantic.

But this was small fry compared to the other issue today for Pokémon GO players. Suddenly reports came in across social media about strikes on their account, and then bans. Some of these players affected were on their way to gatherings for taking on the Gigantamax bosses.

Ban waves have happened before, and usually are for people who had been cheating, often caught spoofing their location. But not always – for instance, players had previously been banned for playing on older versions of iOS. The volume of bans today, with hundreds of accounts already seen, and multiple messages sent to Niantic Support‘s Twitter account, suggest that many of these were false positives. Cases have included children with Niantic Kids accounts.

But players remain in the dark as to why they were given strikes or bans. Many were told this:

“Your appeal is closed. We’ve previously conducted a full review of your account and we informed you of our decision, which is final. Any further inquiries into this case will be ignored.”

Efforts have started to try to figure it out in lieu of any information from Niantic, but no common thread has yet been confirmed. Some players have now reported having their bans reduced to 1 day or entirely overturned, but they must have a bitter taste of being banned in the first place, and on contacting support being told the decision was final.

Niantic only recently, some 12+ hours after initial bans and after informing players bans were final, said they “apologise for the inconvenience”. Other mobile game apps give out apology rewards for far less egregious errors than falsely banning their userbase in this manner.

Niantic are yet to issue a statement on the feedback to Gigantamax battles.

Edited by Aldo and Sheep.

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