That’s it. Pack it up. We can all go home now. Someone has become the very best—the highest level has been reached in Pokémon GO. A full Pokédex had apparently already been logged (as full as you can currently get in a single region, anyway), but now we know that level 40 is the highest level your trainer can reach in the game (currently), and it means lots of experience points and some powerful Pokémon.
It also means lots of cheating, which comes as no surprise to those of you who’ve been playing near-constantly and still haven’t come close. Redditor _problemz, who claims to have accomplished the feat, doesn’t condone cheating out of anything other than curiosity, though, doesn’t play at gyms, and is apparently getting their account deleted by Niantic. That’s also their reason for not revealing the specifics of the bot used to do the power leveling: They don’t want other players doing the same thing and mercilessly lording their super strong Pokémon over innocent players.
That’s probably already happening anyway, as there are mapping services out there that will locate Pokémon for you to help catch the best ones, but that at least still requires the game to be played. Cheating to level 40 doesn’t come cheap, either: Lucky eggs, which double experience points, also came into play in _problemz’s methods—131 of them, to be exact, which would have been bought through the in-game shop.
_problemz also discovered that the number of experience points necessary to reach new levels becomes staggering as the player approaches level 40. In all, 20 million experience points are needed to reach the top level. Catching a Pokémon you’ve already caught before gets you about 100 XP depending on catching bonuses, so that needs to happen about 200,000 times—though that number is reduced by bonuses from catching new Pokémon, hitting Pokéstops, Lucky Eggs, and other ways of gaining experience.
So now we know what our goal is, fellow trainers. Getting there … that’s quite another matter.
(via The Verge, image via The Pokémon Company)
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