Pokemon GO Battle League Cheaters: How They Did It

There's a way to effectively cheat your way to the top-10 ranking in Pokemon GO Battle League right this minute. To do it, all you need is a WHOLE lot of time on your hands and a willingness to lose a whole BUNCH of battles. There's a "hidden" reward multiplier in the game that activates the more times you lose. People that use this method are called "Tankers."

Tanking is a term that, in this case, means you've started a battle with the intention of losing. Tanking a match means you let your opponent win. The more you lose, the higher your "MMR" reward is multiplied. Pokemon GO Battle League has a ranking system which relies on MMR: Matchmaking Rating.

To encourage gamers to continue playing the game even if they're not... very good at battling, Niantic's enabled a "play until you win" system in Pokemon GO Battle League. Once you lose a few matches in a row, your match MMR starts to multiply. According to Trial4life on The Silph Road on Reddit, the hidden multiplier, reported by Lollersox about a month ago, is still quite active.

Once a player gets to a few hundred losses in a row, their multiplier goes up by a massive amount. Pokemon GO Trainers can get absurdly high MMR and get to the top of the league by just... losing.

Technically this is not against Niantic's Terms of Service, as far as we've been able to tell, so it might not be an official "cheat" as it were. But given the state of the Pokemon GO Battle League and the fact that people are, indeed, using this exploit, it might be time for Niantic to hit the pause button once again.

In other words: If the Pokemon GO Battle League is down again very soon, this is probably why. Cross your fingers there's a fast solution to the situation.