- Cate [Intoku, WA, 🇺🇸]
I have been deeply disturbed by so many of the revelations that have come out of the Brokers Guild leak. The sheer number of agents involved, including many that I considered colleagues. The fundamental disconnect between how my player community and other player communities I have worked closely with view this game we love and how the community leaders in the Brokers Guild view it.
But there is nothing more sickening than the argument I’ve heard in a few places that the Brokers Guild was fundamentally on the side of the Right, rooting out cheating that endangers the soul of Ingress.
*The Guild is not an anti-spoofing league, nor are the tools it built tools for catching cheats.*
A bot that spits out lists of the oldest portals owned by a specific agent, or the oldest portals in a geographic area is not for catching spoofers.
A mod scraper to spot VRLA being deployed is not for catching spoofers.
A counter that tallies your guardian hits in terms of how many of your opponents’ days you have wasted is not for catching spoofers.
Automated alerts that push to every RESWUE client in your community when your local opponents are throwing a flash farm are not for catching spoofers.
A heat map of an individual player’s commonly-visited locations, complete with times of day, is not for catching spoofers.
Augmented reality gameplay is new and exciting territory. Yes, we all put our privacy on the line a bit every day that we play Ingress. But we also get to help define the cultural norms on using one another's location information. There has been some back-and-forth this week about whether x specific feature of #RIOT is technically within bounds of the Ingress TOS. Or whether Niantic is aware of some features that are clear TOS violations but tolerates them because they’ve been used to catch spoofers. Fine, if some of this is happening with Niantic’s blessing, they just have to say so.
But so much of what is revealed in these screen shots is so far outside of the bounds of moral behavior. No one ends up in a Slack by mistake — you have to explicitly accept an invitation, and it is clear that one of the requirements for membership in this Slack was registration with your real agent name, spelling quirks and all. Joining the Brokers Guild was a conscious choice.
And once in, well, we can all see from these screenshots what the members saw, in public channels inside that Slack. Guardian hit requests, complete with automated lists of which Brokers live nearby. (The deals being brokered were guardian hits, not spoofer stings.) People helping each other set up bot access in other chat platforms to propagate scraped data to their local communities. Agents building portfolios of players whose every move they wanted to stalk.
Somehow, the hundreds of people in that Slack, even if they weren’t all participating, stayed silent about what they saw there. That is destroying the soul of Ingress.