July 7th was a normal day in my life. Wake up, sit in traffic, get to work, work, lunch, sit in traffic, get home, sleep. But sometime in between get home and sleep, I downloaded Pokemon GO. And since then it has not only changed my life, but millions of others.
For those of us who don't know what Pokemon GO is because they have either been camped out in the middle of the Amazon or don't have a Facebook account (the memes), it's an augmented reality game where Pokemon are overlaid the real world using your phone's camera and you have to catch them by flicking Pokeballs at them. The goal is simple: to catch them all and to be the best, like no one ever was.
The game was awesome. You walk around, catch Pokemon, visit Pokestops. All of this would give you experience and you level up. Simple. Or it should have been. The in-game tutorial was virtually non-existent. It left people to figure out everything for themselves. And while that is not always a bad thing, the horrendous amount of glitches made it even harder to understand what exactly was going on. The app would crash every minute, and all we got from Niantic was silence.
This made no sense to the users. This was a hugely popular game, with over 15 million daily active users as of July 13. By now,number is probably already double that. Why were the users' problems not being heard and replied to? This game nearly doubled Nintendo's stock price, and Niantic was reaping in over $10 million a day from this. Yet the user base, that was making this possible, was simply left to their own devices. Now, we did understand that Niantic did not expect this much demand. Their servers were almost always down during the initial week of launch. They had to actually delay launching in order to resolve server issues, not that it helped in the least.
In the absence of anything official, a large swath of online tools were used to coordinate players. Everything from easter eggs to attacking strategies were online on Reddit, Facebook, Discord, etc. However, the one thing that stood out the most was online maps that had locations of Pokemon spawns. Pokevision was perhaps the most famous and reliable one, as it told you the Pokemon as well as how long it will be there. The Silph Road created the Global Nest Atlas, so that you can see what Pokemon nests are near you. All of this was to substitute for the broken tracking feature in the game. First it would work. Then it would sometimes work, and then it would always say everything was three steps (roughly 90 meters) away. The game was broken, but the online community had found a workaround to help players to go catch them all.
But it was too good to be true. Pokemon GO was updated for the first time, and it destroyed everything.
All the Pokemon became harder to catch. I would find myself using 4-8 Pokeballs to catch a CP 81 Pidgey, while just one Pokeball would be enough to catch a CP 265 Pidgey. The Pokemon you catch would suddenly become different Pokemon. The time you have to throw Pokeballs at the Pokemon is barely three seconds long, so you can't actually wait for the perfect throw. Then they disabled the in-game tracker. this was not much of a problem, given the fact is was not working properly anyways.
But what they did next was inexcusable: they sent cease-and-desist notices to apps like Pokevision. The same app that was used by over 50 million people to find Pokemon because the in-game tracking was not working. Their excuse that it was cheating was a joke. Pokevision was never supposed to be a permanent thing.(The creator said as much) It was like a band-aid on a scratch: a temporary solution while the in-game tracker was fixed. But Niantic sending the cease-and desist notices was ripping the bandages off before the skin below has healed. Now anyone who wants to fill out their Pokedex, and actually catch them all is running blind, with no way of knowing where to go.
Because of all of this, I am seriously considering quitting the game till it is fixed. What is the point of playing Pokemon Go, if you can't catch Pokemon?
