How Walken Counts & Validates Steps

Step count play a special role in the game and is crucial for a player to upgrade their characters. Steps are also one of the component that influences players' chances to win a race. The collection of data about one’s steps begins from the moment of registrationin the game and creation of a wallet. Moreover, every time the application is launched, it synchronizes with HealthKit (for iOS devices) and custom step counter (on Android devices) and updates one’s step count, calculating more gems as reward if there are new steps. It should also be noted that steps collected by wearable devices (Apple Watch, FitBit, Garmin, etc.) are also synchronized and converted into gems when the player launches the application.
Steps play a crucial part in our gameplay formula, yet not all steps can be counted. We are well aware that there might be a huge temptation to cheat and game the system, and are continually upgrading and advancing the steps validation algorithms.
Please mind the 10K Daily Step cap: players can convert only first 10000 steps into GEM daily, maximising health benefits and contributing to the game economy sustainability.
How does the step counting work in Walken?
For iOS devices:
Walken syncs with the native application Apple Health and collects steps and distance data;
the data collected does through the custom step counting and validation algorithms;
once the processing is completed, the resulting steps are displayed on the Statistics screen.
For Android devices:
steps are counted and collected by a custom step counter;
the steps collected go through validation and the resulting amount of steps is converted into Gems and added to a player's Gems Wallet.
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With that in mind, the total amount of steps walked may happen to be higher than the amount of validated steps, and gems are paid for validated steps only. This is possible when a share of total steps failed to be varified and subsequently was not counted. There are several possible reasons:
Firstly, the algorithms recognise the steps entered manually. Such steps are cut out and are not added to a total step count.
Special attention is paid to the user’s movement speed: if it exceeds 20 km/h (12,4 mph), then steps obtained at that time are not counted.
Finally, we carefully check the presence of the sample in the database to avoid adding steps from one device to different accounts several times.
Walken relies on algorithms that detect and cut off simulated steps;
Please bear in mind that Walken advocates for a fair competition and makes a lot of effort to detect and prevent cheating. 
⚠️ Should there be any cheating or violation, a player's account may be permanently banned.
Last modified 4mo ago