This Pokemon Go Player Found A Tricky Way To Cheat The Game

If you want to capture all of the Pokemon in your region within the free-to-play Pokemon Go app for smartphones, you may have to travel around a lot... by foot. One enterprising gamer decided that just wasn't going to cut it, and he found a way to cheat by using a drone.

The Daily Dot is reporting that Reddit user hyperion995 made a post over on the Pokemon Go sub-Reddit where he simply asked "Is this considered cheating?"

There's no text in the post other than the question, and he links to an imgur gallery containing a series of photos showing a laptop, a smartphone, a tablet, and a drone.

Hyperion995 essentially hooked up his phone to the drone, used some duct tape to hold it in place, used the remote and a compass to guide it, and battled other Pokemon through Pokemon Go by having his computer remote access the phone, not unlike the remote play for the PS4 or the Xbox One's remote play through Windows 10.

The app that was used was called AirDroid, and it was designed so that you can access the phone even when you're not near it or have it in your possession.

"But how did hyperion995 guide the drone?" you ask. Well, he apparently tried keeping it within view but used the tablet cam to monitor where it was flying.

The responses elicited from his little antics were quite hilarious. Some people joked that it was like a scheme Team Rocket would employ to capture Pokemon, while others joked that this wasn't an average "every day lazy" but that it was an "advanced lazy".

The drone flyer and phone was essentially used to cover areas that hyperion995 couldn't reach or didn't want to reach while playing Pokemon Go. And despite a lot of people saying that it was "lazy" or "cheating", the reality is that it requires a bit of intellectual know-how to pull it off successfully without damaging the phone, damaging the drone or losing sensitive information.

Ultimately, it boils down to whether or not this kind of "cheating" was worth it. And if hyperion995 was able to capture some rare Pokemon that were outside of his grasp (or outside of walking distance) I don't really see it being a bad thing. Besides, it's a really cool way to integrate using a laptop, a phone and a drone.

The scarier part of the story is the Daily Dot reporting on people using Pokemon Go while driving. Now that is absolutely dangerous to an extreme degree. Attempting to catch Pokemon while you drive is a hazard not only to yourself but to others around you. When comparing cheating by using a drone to driving while attempting to capture Pokemon, I would say the drone cheating is by far the more preferred option of the two.

Of course, though, there's always the risk of the phone dropping out of the grasp of the drone, at which point you could end up with a broken phone, or worse yet someone could grab it off the ground and access your info. The safer bet to playing Pokemon Go is probably to avoid using drones and most certainly avoid playing while driving.