Throw us a bone Niantic - make it so on Excellent throws a Pokemon can't run away even if it escapes, so players would always feel like their fate is in their own hands.

From a practical standpoint, it wouldn't make much difference.

I coauthored a pretty popular bot for a popular game years ago. I won't go into details but I later regretted it (and that's it's own story). With that said...

As a bot writer, my guiding principle was to emulate human behavior and social engineering as much as possible to avoid detection. Humans aren't perfect, so bad bot design would be to make a bot that was always perfect. Time is on your side as a botter.

As my bot became behaviorly very identical to a human, I eventually came to realize that what people actually hated is the idea that someone was botting/cheating. When they had no idea it was happening, they were much happier.

So...from a philosophical standpoint, it's the "thinking about what botters are doing" (real or imagined) that bothers people. So my advice is to not alter what you want out of a game based on what you think botters may or may not do.

Cheats will exist and prevention circumvented wherever there is interest and determination.

Sure, ban waves happen, but it's mostly just a Public Relations thing. Again, time is the one thing botters have in quanity. So even when banned, the only thing lost is time and the bot just goes back to work from level 1.

Ultimately, if you let it bother you, you'll just lose enjoyment for the game.

That said, I DO encourage you to be vocal about reporting it when you see it happening. In the majority of cases (in games, in general), most bans are player reported.

/r/pokemongo Thread Parent