I was loving it. The bot was a game within a game. It became something different to what Pokemon Go was meant to be, but it was intoxicating. A lottery system where winning was not a matter of 'if', but 'how much'. Leave it running and come back later to see what prizes had been collected. My collection rapidly became nothing but excellent specimens across the board and plenty of rare Pokemon I'd never encountered on my 'real' account, which was now looking rather neglected -- were my Pokemon IVs any good on that account? I didn't even know. The real Pokemon Go wouldn't tell me.
Then the bot stopped working, It always had an issue with crashing after a couple of hours, Authentication would drop and wouldn't reconnect without a little manual witchcraft iphone case jumpstart, You just had to remember to check in and reset the bot, But this time it looked permanent, Niantic Labs, the company behind Pokemon Go, was cracking down on bots and had added layers of security to the system to prevent these unauthorised systems from accessing the game, I was level 28, Two levels short of my goal, but still 500,000 XP short, Five thousand Pokemon catches away..
I checked the bot update page hourly for any news on a fix. I was feeling way more upset about seeing my cheating come to an early end than I should have. The community building the bot was hard at work looking for angles to break an encryption system Niantic had put in their way. Within four days the bot was working again. It seemed there was nothing Niantic could do to stop the cheaters in their tracks. I breathed a sigh of relief, updated the app again and got back on my journey to level 30. I made it. But..
Level 30 arrived soon after, The magic milestone of 2 million experience points, Getting to level 30 is the same as getting to level 21 nine times, NINE, TIMES, Did I really want to put in the same amount of work I'd put into getting to level 21 another nine times over? It just didn't seem worth the effort, The biggest trick my emotionless bot pulled was never getting bored catching the same cheap Pokemon over and over again, Every catch added up, a few XP at a time, toward that climb up the ranks, Human me was tired of catching Zubats, the most common thing in our area of town, My bot was sitting on a mountain witchcraft iphone case of over 5,000 Zubat candies..
The top of my 'real' collection. It isn't the best collection in town, but it's mine. The rush of the automated climb to 30 meant the moments in between didn't exist. The following weekend I went back out for a walk with my kids and my level 21 'real' account. We wandered local streets, caught Pokemon, watched Pokemon flee, manually spun the PokeStops. We hoped for something special to appear. We laughed. We played. After disappearing down the stat hole and chasing the thrill of playing numbers, coming back to the real experience of Pokemon Go was fun again. It was fun like at the start, when we didn't care what level we were, we just had some fun catching Pokemon.
