GPS spoofers aren’t just cheating themselves—they’re undermining one of Pikmin Bloom’s core ideas: that Big Flowers and coins are supposed to encourage you to go outside, explore, and build your own little adventure through the real world.
Instead, you can often see obvious straight-line paths jumping from Big Flower to Big Flower, cutting directly through buildings and other impossible terrain. By the time legitimate players actually reach those places, the flowers have already been bloomed by someone who was never physically there.
More importantly, this makes a mockery of the coin system. Legitimate players have to actually walk, plant flowers, manage petals, and spend time outside to work toward their daily coins. Spoofers can automate that process and effectively guarantee the daily limit in a fraction of the time.
So is Scopely Explore (sorry you inherited Niantic’s problem- it’s now is your problem) actually supposed to be monetizing this system and taking it seriously? Or does allowing this to continue year after year send the message that everyone else’s effort is pointless and that we should all just be using GPS spoofing to max our coins every day?
It also makes flower petals feel like a pointless reward. Why carefully collect and manage petals for exploration when someone else can bee-line from flower to flower and bloom everything before you even get there?
At some point, allowing spoofing this openly doesn’t just affect individual players. It undermines the entire premise of a game built around physically going outside and exploring.
As a separate suggestion: if GPS spoofing genuinely can’t be stopped after 3+ years, then why not level the playing field and give everyone some form of location-spoofing ability?
At this point, spoofing is already being indirectly permitted through lack of enforcement. The only difference is that legitimate players are punished for following the rules while bot users get access to an extremely powerful feature for free.
If that broken advantage is apparently here to stay, then maybe it should become an actual game mechanic—something legitimate players can earn, unlock, or use within limits. At least then the people who have actually spent years walking, planting, and playing the game properly aren’t the only ones excluded from it.
