Shadow Banning -- When Pokemons Are Out There But You Won't See Them, It's Maddening

I’d say, this has gotta be one of the quickest song parody I ever wrote!

From an idea posted yesterday on our local Pokemon GO Facebook group, the first verse came out within an hour, over lunch. When inspiration strikes, there’s no stopping it, even when eating 🙂

In the 3 hours that followed, I cooked up the next verse and chorus.

And later that same day, the skeleton for the second section was there.

Today, I put in the finishing touches to the parody lyrics to ensure it has the usual WittyCulus quality you’d come to expect.

Wow! I must say it again! I amazed myself this time 🙂

So, what’s behind the inspiration for this parody?

Just a few days back, the Pokemon online community was abuzz with a new penalty on recalcitrant players bent on undermining the game. At least that is the perspective of Niantic, the company which developed the ever-popular Pokemon GO game app and platform.

As it was, Niantic — and The Pokemon Company, the rights holder of the Pokemon franchise — had intended a mobile game of fun and surprise. But many players decided it was better left to their own devices!

So they resorted to third-party tools like maps which showed where all Pokemons can be found, IV calculators, GPS location spoofers, etc, to try to outsmart the game and gain an unfair advantage. So much so that what started as a casual exploit became a habit; a right even, to some!

Players no longer wanted to just go outside to seek monsters randomly and catch those deemed inferior (in terms of their characteristics, as dictated by the IV — so called “individual values” — stats).

Instead, they could be selective with the help of those tools and decide on which Pokemon they want to go after, whenever and wherever it is opportune. Especially those rare monsters which many regular players find hard to obtain!

Of course, Niantic didn’t like that their baby was being abused. In fact, the exploits can’t be taken lightly as they impact the game provider’s servers and can overwhelm them, causing undue issues to players worldwide. Thus, it is understandable that some form of response was needed.

And so, warnings had been issued to players detected to have flouted the Pokemon game’s Terms of Use, asking them to stop. Selected accounts were issued with hard bans.

Certain players also experienced “soft” bans in that game play would become restricted temporarily — but soon, workarounds were available to overcome such bans.

Some third-party services were rendered useless with API and other changes to the game. This crippled the advantage-seeking players, albeit for a short while.

Still, the abuse continued. It was really a cat and mouse game between players and the PoGo developers.

But this time round, Niantic seemed to have upped the ante. As reported by observers at reddit.com, there is now a “shadow ban” on certain PoGo accounts such that players aren’t able to see most of the Pokemons available for catching. What they’ll see instead are plain Pidgeys, Rattatas and Zubats!

Wow, that certainly was a clever move and a very damaging one.

Who knows what’ll come next…

Now that you’ve got the full story, it’s time to unveil the lyrics to my latest song parody, aptly titled “Shadow Banning”, for your enjoyment 🙂

This references Andy Gibb’s mega hit “Shadow Dancing”, which is a personal favourite. Talent runs deep in the Gibb family, of which The Bee Gees are part of and Andy is their younger brother.

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Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing” needs no introduction. This pop song from 1978 reached #1 in the US Billboard Hot 100 charts and stayed there for a good 7 weeks! Discover more about this platinum record at wikipedia by clicking this link.

It is sad Andy departed this world on March 10th, 1988, at the young age of 30. Otherwise, you can expect many more Gibb-signature songs which the music world has come to love!

Let’s have a listen to “Shadow Dancing” on YouTube. Later, you can replay the video and sing along with my parody lyrics 🙂