To preface: No, i do not mean reporting the account or anything like thar
I mean, what can you really do with this whole spoofer hellscape that PB is in; It probably isn’t a secret that spoofers Are a problem in Pikmin and Scopley won’t prolly fix it in a Reasonable amount of time
I currently play in a city/capital area (on the outskirts of Prague), and even when I knew about the mushroom spoofing epidemic, I seriously wasn’t prepared that in a area that Multiple (aka more than two) people play in, that one day a couple of spoofers would crawl from the depths of heck itself (not testing this forum’s swear rules just yet) and bloom everything near where I live at 3-4 AM on the hour…
Something that probably isn’t limited to me specifically, as many more have struggled with spoofers and will probably keep struggling.
And so, finally: The question. What can you really do in this situation?
I know that the answer is really “Do nothing, as there’s really nothing to be done”, but this is more of a “How do you, Reader of this post from a forum for a nieche IRL walking game, cope in a situation such as this?”. There probably has to be something, and I wonder if anyone shares their hints or strategies to stay sane in these trying times
I know that I have put this yappily, and should have shortened this by multiple paragraphs… and yeah, but at 4AM after a mild panic caused by spoofers stealing everything here.. I hope it’s understandable
I love this game for the fact that it’s chill and hate seeing it go down the gutter like this, what do ye think?
Just past midnight they like to plant in my little coastal town in Aus. Only way I’ve found to mitigate some of it is force spawning flowers when and where I can to interrupt their route. But they don’t seem to be going anywhere. Makes it hard when you have the 2 hour flower weekends, have to be quick on the Monday to interrupt them.
As for the giant and elemental mushrooms there isn’t really a solution that I’ve found. Many of them take them just after midnight.
Usually for me towards the end of the month they taper off a bit but still very frustrating.
we may consider Pikmin bloom boycott day, like Pokemon NO Day few years back (2021-interaction distance change), perhaps Scopoly finally takes action (or at least consider?)
@ugkim unless literally Everyone stops playing PB on the day of the boycott, nothing will change
and since spoofers count as active players, they will also have to stop playing (which joining a boycott that’s trying to stop them… what a concept)
Also, if the boycott lasts One day, that also wouldn’t do nothing.. (we all know how corpos who don’t give a f–k aknowlage timed strikes… AKA just wait out the clock). The boycott would have to last multiple days or weeks, which… No.
All this considering Scopley would care about the state of this game and would fix the problems with it… No.
I noticed that they are slow cooking giant mushrooms over the weekend so my wife and I are sending our pikmins to those already targeted giant mushrooms and invite friends before they fill up the spots. At least they won’t be able to provide mushroom services to their clients.
Force blooming some of the big flowers is definitely a good way to “let them know there are players around,” but it’s not very practical as it costs so many petals and might not be able to retrieve the fruits (if it’s far away/or simply it’s late at night, got other things to do, real-life reasons…etc)
Those flower farmers “used to” hate people planting non-white flowers or “ruining” the big flowers reset time and forecasts, but after reading many posts and seeing the continuous spoofing problem, I don’t think the ones that kept coming back mind… and they probably are the ones having fun irritating us.
However, I think sparsing the bloom times could still help and at least “save” some big flowers from their “mass-blooming.” It could be hard especially around community day when most big flowers reset to leaf or bloomed at similar time, but still doable. (Downside: this takes much time and effort in keeping an eye out on the flowers’ statuses, also making it hard for ourselves when blooming flowers during daily/scheduled walk)
As for the shrooms: avoid “suspicious” players at all costs(namely most Taiwanese players.)
Hate to make such conclusion, but this is exactly the “not all __, but always __” situation. Most spoofers complaints came from posts outside of Chinese category, it’s quite obvious who’s the culprit here
I’ve seen many people avoiding or preventing inviting/sending postcards to newly added friends/strangers. Some have noticed that their neighborhood shrooms got taken more frequently by spoofers after inviting some Taiwanese players or sending “good-looking” postcards.
I myself now only interact with real-life friends and friends known for years. It’s pretty easy to tell where a player’s from and if they spoof based on the postcards+dates they send or the shrooms(if they ever invite)
If you’re a new player and want to expand your friends, keep track and nickname suspicious players. Be cautious when sending a postcard or inviting newly added friends to a shroom.
It’s pretty sad that we have to treat everyone in game like a fraud. Since Scopely does nothing in dealing with the spoofers, we have to be extra careful.
This works, too. But then the consequence is receiving little fruits…
Worse is when they send 5 multis occupying all the free spots with <100 attack points… that’s when it gets real tricky to deal with…