People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones

Official excuses

Information to all ENL agents.

When a RES agents starts talking to you regarding the bans in our faction, these are the official excuses from the ENL HC that you should use to defend our spoofers/multiaccounts:

- The agent was wrongfully banned by Nia Ops (Do not engange in discussions that every automatic ban was manually reviewed TWICE)

- The agent was banned because (s)he dropped keys to another agent (This is true. Do not drop keys to other agents. It has been confirmed that this is true)

- The agent was banned because my kids played Ingress on my phone

- The agent was mass-reported for cheating by RES and then wrongfully banned

Yours truly,
ENL HC
ENL GBG

Goodbye to our fallen soldier

Our campaign "Free asterisken" only just got started before asterisken got a reply from Niantic on his appeal on the ban. Later that day he issued the following statement

Nu har jag fått tänka och har bestämt mig för att inte börja spela igen. Niantic lyckades med det bloggen aldrig kom nära med. [...] Tack för gott spel.

Rought translation "I've thought about this and have decided not to start playing again. Niantic succeeded with what the blog never came close to [...] GG."

The blog is a bit curious about this statement since we have only looked out for our agents since day one. When our agents are refused representation in the sit reps, the blog is there to make it right. We will never hesitate to defend our own players or to give those damn Norwegian Vikings a good slap.

We are also curious about how asterisken would continue playing since he was banned? We would not like to believe that our dear sheriff would start a second account to keep playing since this would violate the ToS.

With that said we wish our former agent good luck with whatever projects he undertakes now. You will be missed. (No, not really!)

We are also curious on our readers take on this. Did our dear agent really cheat or did Niantic commit a horrible mistake? Please discuss in the comments below.

A clarification on Niantic bans in Ingress

No Ingress player has ever been hard banned (i.e. unable to play the game) due to unfounded reports from other players.

If a players is reported by another agent and Niantic takes action, the accused player will be soft banned (i.e. can logon to the game, but is in observer mode. Hacks do not give items and XMPs do no damage). There are no known incidents where a player has been hard banned immediately due to (unfounded) reports by other players.

(Suspected) cheaters are known to be hard banned.

If you try to view the profile of a hard banned agent your scanner will display "Scanner running hot".

If no plausible explanation for a ban can be found, blame the other faction for mass-reporting.