You can’t set foot in a park or take a walk around the block without hearing things like “Oh! A Ghastly!” or “Oh… Just a Pidgey…” nowadays. Why? Why, because of Pokemon Go! This augmented reality game took the world by storm almost overnight and people all over the world are getting up and getting more exercise than ever and it’s even been reported to be helping some people with depression and other mental health issues by getting them to go out and socialize and make friends. The whole point was to give you a real-life version of the games we all enjoyed in our childhood and now well into adulthood. This sounds like a lovely thing and a fantastic game, but is it already dying?
The consensus among a lot of the players recently is yes. When the game was first released it was extremely buggy and crashed a lot, but you still had the ability to track certain Pokemon around your neighborhood just like they do in the movies and games. It worked at first, with tiny little footprints showing you when you got near and or farther from them, but suddenly, the feature glitched. The masses’ remedy to this was something called PokeVision that would scan your area and show you exactly the Pokemon that were around you. It was fantastic. It fixed the problem that people were having with the game and it let you find Pokemon that you hadn’t found before. Then Niantic shut it down and took away the footprint tracking. Now you have a football field sized area in any direction of where the Pokemon could be. It angered many people, myself included. It doesn't sound so bad, but if you walk in the wrong direction and lose track of the Pokemon, by the time you circle around, it's gone and you've lost it.
They claimed that Pokevision (referred in their brief as third-parties) was “interfering with our ability to maintain quality of service for our users”. They and some of the users are saying that being able to track down Pokemon ruins the fun; that knowing where they are is “cheating.” But even Ash had help! Throughout the series, there are dozens of times where people have flat out told him where he could find certain Pokemon. Anyone remember the Tower of Terror episode where the bearded man tells him “Ghost Pokemon are in Lavender town in Pokemon Tower” to help Ash defeat Sabrina? How much more pinpointed of a location could you get? It’s the same with PokeVision! PokeVision is our mysterious bearded man! So why would Niantic sabotage a good thing?
Most companies reach out to their user base because they know that without the users, there is no company. They ask for ideas from the users on how to improve their interface and use those ideas to improve. Niantic, however, has an infamous reputation for refusing ideas, being uncommunicative, and also, just being downright hostile.
For example, Niantic has another game in their repertoire called Ingress. It’s the same as Pokemon Go, but with portals and hackers and other such sci-fi things. An XDA Recognized Developer Brut.all, was the person that created apktool back in 2010 for reverse engineering app files, so he’s a fairly intelligent computer programmer! Brut.all created an open-source modification of the official (and closed source) Ingress application that “optimized” Ingress better than Niantic could optimize their own game. The modification, called Broot Mod, made the game playable at ldpi and mdpi resolutions by scaling down graphics, had options to disable the various fancy graphic animations that the game insisted on having, and had a handy inventory management chart. This is just a fancy way of saying that he made a lot of Quality-of-Life changes that made the game monumentally more playable and enjoyable.
A smart company should have jumped at the chance to work with him and improve their game. Was this the case? No. They issued a Cease and Desist notice. The same thing that they have now done with PokeVision. It practically killed Ingress and it’s doing the same to Pokemon Go. It may hang on a little longer than Ingress simply because it is Pokemon, but all in all, Niantic didn’t learn the first time and unfortunately, if they don’t somehow placate their user base, Pokemon Go seems doomed to go the way of Ingress; a spattering of hardcore fans, but otherwise, unfortunately dead.
Let’s hope the outcry from avid PokeFans like you and me can spur them into bringing back the ability to track Pokemon and some much needed Quality-of-Life changes outside of some minor character customization so that we can be the very best!
