Earlier this week an individual who has been a respected member of the community for years, Blastermane, was banned from the competitive side of the game Geoguessr for two games in which he allegedly cheated.

However, if you look at the games it is quite obvious that the ban was false. 

These are the games in question:

https://geoguessr.com/duels/07009522-c04d-4e6f-819a-cac1ec5a906b/summary

In this game the last round was considered suspicious, in which Blastermane got an almost perfect score in Wyoming. If you look at only the guess, it might be suspicious, but the town name was visible just a bit outside of the spawn and Blastermane has spent hours on improving his regionguessing in the US. Recently he had spent several hours on studying the state of Wyoming, which caused him to know where this town was. Even if he hadn’t done this, it is still very much possible for an experienced player to locate this, as it is a medium-sized town that doesn’t require a lot of zooming in on the map to be visible. 

In conclusion, this guess is not suspicious at all if the developers had bothered asking Blastermane how he was able to achieve it, as they could’ve easily been able to confirm that Blastermane is an experienced player when it comes to regionguessing the US overall and Wyoming specifically. 

https://geoguessr.com/duels/cc39ba78-895f-4f56-993a-fdffb4762a7b/summary

The second game is even less suspicious, and I struggle to comprehend what could even be the reason for this game to be considered suspicious. Blastermane put down solid guesses in the final two rounds, but any experienced player could confirm that they are both relatively easy to achieve for a seasoned player like Blastermane.

The first location is within a small and very recognizable area within Peru that most good players would know about, but apparently the devs don’t. A 13km guess in this region is not suspicious, as the region is very small. 

The second location is within one of Australia’s bigger cities. The thing with Australia’s big cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth) is that there are considerable distances between both of them, and because of that they look really different from each other. This makes it relatively easy for an experienced player to guess in the right one on no move, and with moving on it makes it even easier. Just within a few streets you can not only see at least half a dozen well known clues for Queensland and the city of Brisbane specifically, but also the city name, and not just once. This makes this round far from suspicious and to be fair, quite a standard Brisbane round.

In conlusion, Blastermane is a respected member of the Geoguessr competitive community and has been for years, but he somehow got banned for these two games that contain not a single round that I would consider suspicious. The Wyoming round was in a state that Blastermane had practised extensively, and had a city name really close to spawn. The Peru round was in a small and very recognizable area, in which a 13km guess would not be considered suspicious by someone that has a good understanding of what is within the realm of posibilities in Geoguessr and the Australia round is even quite standard. None of these rounds should get anyone banned, not even a player with not a lot of experience, as you simply cannot possibly conclude there to be sufficient suspicion for a ban, and Blastermane is FAR from an inexperienced player. Another conclusion that I can draw from this, even though this was known before, is that the Geoguessr developers don’t know what is possible in their own game.