It’s been a while since I got stuck in a Pokemon game. The modern iterations of Game Freak’s genre-defining monster catching series are either too easy, or I’m too old. Maybe it’s both. The games aren’t taxing any more, not like Whitney and Miltank, Sinnoh’s final Cynthia battle, or even just trying to take out Brock with your Charmander back in 1996.
Has there ever been a time when you’ve been so stuck that you’ve had to call for backup? That friend on the playground who was the only one who knew what Natures were, or that parent who turned out to be even more clueless than you were? While you’re more likely to have experienced this feeling in Dark Souls than Pokemon, we’ve all wished that we could hire a hitman to take out a particularly difficult boss, right? A homing briefcase to conquer Ornstein or Smough, perhaps, or the telltale red dot of a sniper rifle on Misty’s forehead. If your daydreams are as messed up as mine, then I’ve got good news: there’s a community of Pokemon hitmen thriving on Reddit at r/PokemonGoHitlist. The bad news? They only take out your own Pokemon.
This isn’t a resource for beating boss battles, these assassins are less like Agent 47 or Let Me Solo Her and more like the gun you aim at your own head to guarantee a big insurance payout. They’re Pokemon Go players, specifically spoofers, who will knock your Pokemon out of a Gym on request.
Most Pokemon Go communities are anti-spoofing. It’s cheating, after all, and takes all the fun out of the game. They hack their phone’s location to go anywhere in the world without moving, giving them access to every Raid and every regional exclusive at the tap of a button. What’s the point in hunting shinies from your couch? You can do that in the mainline games, but Go is about exploring. There’s a consensus that spoofing ruins things for everyone… until you need their help.
Pokemon Go players, especially those in rural regions, often have a Gym problem. Putting your Pokemon in a Gym is the only way to get free coins, which you use to buy Raid Passes, premium items, or cosmetics. The longer your Pokemon is in a Gym, the more coins it gains, to a limit of 50. You can only earn 50 coins a day, no matter how many Pokemon you have in Gyms, and you can only collect your coins when they’re knocked out. Ten different Pokemon knocked out of Gyms in the same day? Tough luck.
This leads to a couple of different tactics. If you’re in a city or populous area, you likely stick a strong Pokemon in the Gym, so that it can tough out a bunch of battles and harvest as many coins as possible. If you’re in a rural area, you can chuck any old 12CP Caterpie in a Gym and it’ll stay there for weeks. This is when you need a hitman.
To get those 50 coins from little old Caterpie, it needs to be knocked out of the Gym by a rival team. And if you’re really rural, nobody comes past and therefore you can’t earn your coins. Any travelling Pokemon Go player has had that experience before, whether it’s waiting a week for your prized shiny Salamence to get knocked out of the hotel Gym or – in my personal experience – waiting for 72 days for a Kangaskhan to be knocked out of a farmhouse in the Australian outback. This is where the hitmen come in.
The kind people over at r/PokemonGoHitlist will knock out any Pokemon of your choosing, providing you give their hitmen a description of the Pokemon (a shiny Pidgey) and the co-ordinates of the Gym. This is one of the few Pokemon Go communities that embraces spoofing (“Spoofing your location? We don’t judge here.”), largely because it’s a last resort for many people. If you need those coins to join a raid, or your favourite Pokemon is lost in Gym limbo in perpetuity, it’s time to call in the big guns. And it just so happens that the big guns don’t play by the rules.