The alleged risk of using a well-known Pokémon Go exploit is causing widespread confusion among the game’s community, fuelled by a dire warning from a senior player that supposedly originates from the app’s own development team.

Said warning states that Pokémon Go’s developers are aware of the exploit in question — which allows users to interact with in-game locations from further away than normally possible — and consider it “a violation of the Terms of Service of the game.”

Continued use of the exploit is detectable by the developer’s anti-cheat teams, the warning goes on to claim, and risks users’ accounts being flagged for cheating — an offense that can eventually result in a permanent account ban.

The appearance of this message, and the claim it is being passed on from Pokémon Go’s makers, has sparked a firestorm of debate, primarily over the rights and (mostly) wrongs of this exploit being viewed as cheating in the same vein as more nefarious tactics.

Many players have said that this “trick” simply makes use of a unintended bug in how the game functions, and is not comparable to the tools some players use to actively break the game, such as by using third-party apps and hacks to spoof their location.

There’s also a debate over the veracity of the message itself — both over its origins, which appear to be from a senior player marked as a Community Ambassador who has spoken to the game’s developers, and over the likely intent behind what was said.

To understand the nuances here, it’s worth taking a look at the issue in more detail. At a base level, the exploit allows players to access a raid lobby slightly beyond their normal interaction radius via a Daily or Premium Raid Pass, rather than by using a more expensive Remote Raid Pass.

Performing the exploit — referred to locally among players as “flying,” “floating,” or “tricking” — is clearly not intended behavior, but can hardly be considered game-breaking. Accessing a raid lobby that’s less than 100m away but slightly out of your normal range is considered by many players to simply be a convenience — and potentially an aid to taking part in more raids overall, even if this is done so without the top-tier Remote Raid Pass.

That said, a simple glance at the game’s Terms of Service (TOS) shows that, according to the letter of the law, this could indeed fall under the game’s description of cheating as it stands.

IGN contacted the Pokémon Go development team to ask about the origins of the warning, whether the exploit was indeed considered cheating, and what actions players might expect if they continued to use it. In response, a spokesperson pointed us back to the game’s TOS document, and specifically its section on cheating, which we’ll quote below.

Now, it’s entirely possible to see how this exploit could fall under the TOS’ definition of using “techniques to alter or falsify a device’s location” and therefore — again, according to the letter of the law — is something that could be considered cheating.

But by pointing IGN back to its TOS, the Pokémon Go development team is also — deliberately or not — highlighting something potentially crucial around this issue’s enforcement. And that’s the fact that, once again, according to the letter of the law, playing with multiple accounts is also considered cheating — despite it being something that a percentage of the game’s playerbase does, with absolutely zero infraction.

What this may all ultimately boil down to is someone purportedly asking the Pokémon Go development team for its view on an issue that the game’s makers would obviously never sanction, but which seems unlikely to suddenly result in waves of players being banned. And yet, because of the murky origins of the warning, and because nuance can be difficult when messages get passed over the internet, players have now been left aggrieved and concerned.

Will the exploit stick around in the game forever? It seems unlikely. Will players suddenly find themselves banned for using it while it’s still possible? This seems unlikely too. But, we should state, this is just one reading of the situation, in lieu of any formal statement being provided — something which, if formalised, would likely only prompt the need for actual enforecement, which the majority of players seem to be against.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social