‘Pokémon Go’ player cheats his way to the highest level possible

By now just about everyone has played Pokémon Go. Like all Pokémon games, catching ’em all, completing your Pokédex and leveling up your trainer is a painful grind.

Reddit user “problemz”wanted to know what it’s like to reach the game’s highest level. But instead of playing the game nonstop like any self-respecting Pokémon Go player would, he says he cheated his way to level 40 using a bot.

The feat is the “world’s first” that we know of. We’ve seen level 30 accounts and thought that was intense.

Reaching level 40 requires gaining 5 million XP (experience points) from 39, according to _problemz. “That last Level was even for me and my little bot a pain in the ass,” the user wrote.

From start to finish, the user said it took a total of 20 million XP points to advance to Level 40. The bot he used (naturally, he’s not saying what it was) earned about 280,000 XP per hour.

To put that into perspective, I needed 15,000 XP points to jump from level 14 to level 15. I could barely get that in half a day, let alone an hour.

In Pokémon Go, the number of XP points needed to level up increases with each level.

He also claims he didn’t battle at any of the gyms because he didn’t want to take the fun away from the game for anyone.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably thinking about quitting, since guys like this are the ones who ruin games by cheating.

According to _problemz, he doesn’t condone cheating and he only, well, cheated for research purposes to “see how far i can push with the given Tools”.

He also claims he didn’t battle at any of the gyms because he didn’t want to take the fun away from the game for anyone. “I find it disrespectful and disgusting” to do that he wrote. He encourages players to “play legit or dont [sic] play”.

He even went so far as to request that Niantic, the developer of Pokémon Go, delete his besmirched level 40 account. Niantic is reportedly in the process of doing just that, according to a screenshot of an email the Reddit user posted.

The moral of the story? Being the very best in Pokémon Go is a pain in the ass. Good luck, trainers!