3 weeks ago I made a post on Pokémon Go, calling it a revolution and proudly claiming that "Pokémon Go is definitely here to stay", regardless of the various glitches and server issues. The game has continued to remain one of the most hotly discussed topics in the world since then, but the reasons for the same has turned around 180 degrees. And here I am, putting up a post stating all the reasons why Pokémon Go has gone from the social gamer's dream to a party of hate and regrets. Needless to say, the post that follows can be summed up in one sentence: If NianticLabs, the developer of Pokémon Go, continues on their current path, in a few years we will be reading articles on how the ignorance of the developer crashed and burned the greatest revolution in smartphone gaming history.
Niantic underestimated the size of the Pokémon fanbase
This was the first mistake Niatnic made. Almost every issue the game initially faced was attributed to the servers being overloaded with players. In a recent interview with Forbes, Niantic CEO John Hanke admitted that within two weeks the Pokémon Go userbase was as large as it was expected to get halfway through next year. While the game becoming a viral sensation and millions of players hearing of 'Pokémon' for the first time jumping on the rollercoaster was certainly unexpected, Niantic's lack of preparation created the first wave of problems for the game. It didn't help that Niantic didn't communicate at all. Many were frustrated by this, but most of us only expected Niantic to add resources and get the problem fixed ASAP. This seemed to be the case as server issues seemed to appear lesser and lesser, until...
The GeoBlock
Although the game had not been officially released in most areas of the world, millions upon millions of players downloaded the apk or changed their app store location to play Pokemon Go immediately after the initial release. This was going just fine, until one fine day half the world woke up and found that they could not play the game anymore. Niantic had imposed a GeoBlock on unreleased regions to stop the players from accessing the game, probably to reduce the server load. This move in itself is just fine and seemed sensible, except after the block, Niantic is simply refusing to release the game in the blocked regions. While players in the U.S, Europe and Oceania clamor and rant about the game being broken, some eagerly awaiting players in Asia and South America haven't even clocked a minute in the app. The number of countries the app got released in after John Hanke promised to "add new countries every day" at the San Diego Comic-con last week? Zero. This makes even less sense when you consider that Asia has been the largest market for mobile apps for quite some time now. Some users on /r/PokemonGo are going so far as to suggest Niantic is racist, with the game being released only in all white dominated areas so far, along with Japan and Hong Kong.
To make matters worse, Niantic being Niantic has maintained a perfect silence on it's release schedule, as it has on everything else, adding fuel to the already mounting frustration. For all we know, John Hanke might be throwing darts at world map to decide where to release the game next. (But even then his aim would have to be really, really awful.). But the tragedy doesn't end there. Some countries are partially geoblocked, meaning the game can be played in some regions of one country while being blocked in others. So a massive amount of players are seeing their own friends and family play the game, hold down gyms, and collect enough Magikarp candies to evolve it into a Gyarados and shoot up their levels and combat points into the stratosphere while not being able to play themselves. If you've experienced anything close to this, you will know how dreadfully bad this feels. This in turn has lead to...
GPS spoofers
On a game that literally rewards you for moving around long distances, faking your GPS and playing the game while chilling in your house might be the ultimate sin. As is the case with all games, the presence of people who would rather rely on hacks than play the game the way it's meant to be played was inevitable in Pokemon Go. But thanks to Niantic, Pokemon Go has seen a massive wave of spoofers and bots in the past few weeks. Due to the geoblock, several players who simply cannot wait any longer are forced to spoof their location to play the game. In fact, the swing of the general opinion on the morality of spoofing going from "absolutely unacceptable cheating" to "pretty much okay since Niantic does not care about us anyways" over the past week in /r/PokemonGo's Asian community, is incredible.
GPS spoofing is becoming common among trainers living in rural and suburban areas as well, since the game has a very poor distribution of PokeStops, Gyms and Pokemon nests as opposed to Urban regions where the density of PokeStops is so high that many can access them from within their homes or offices. Niantic has already started handing out temporary bans (and reportedly some permanent ones also) to spoofers, but in the end they have no one to blame but themselves, with the massive delay in release schedules giving players no choice but to either lose their interest and move on, or to GPS spoof their location. Niantic, of course, being Niantic, has not communicated and their stance on this is very much unclear. But seems like the global release will continue to be delayed, as their developers are busy giving us...
Useless updates
However, the latest update released on 31st July has been the primary source of havoc among Pokemon players, and the one that made us all suspect that Niantic truly had no idea what they were doing. Apart from adding fancy post-creation character customization, the update removed the Pokemon tracker (more on that later), drastically dropped the catch rate for Pokemon (Upto 50%, according to some reddit users), increased the chance for Pokemon to break out of Pokeballs, and increased their flee rate, and made Pokeball mechanics much harder to use. (The amount of Pokeballs you get from PokeStops had been reduced in the earlier update.) That CP 74 Zubat that you would've caught in a single throw now takes 4-5 Pokeballs before you can get it. That is, if it didn't flee already.
In a single move that can only be seen as something to force players to buy Pokeballs with real money, Niantic has added a much hated "pay to win" aspect to the game. Not to mention the various other bugs that plague the game, like the game freezing when Pokemon are caught, has not been resolved yet, and several players also had their progress wiped for no reason at all. Niantic, yet again, being Niantic, has not communicated anything, has not said anything about the Pokeball mechanics, and doesn't even act like they're aware that an update that felt more like a feature-removing downgrade has been released. (They did put up this post to address the progress wiping issue for some users, though.)
But if the Pokeball related changes got millions of trainers infuriated, here's what truly pushed the Niantic-hate over the edge:
The ingenious 'fix' of the 3-step glitch
Since the game's release, the objective of Pokemon Go has been to "Catch 'em all" and to hold down gyms, with many anticipated features like player v player battling and trading still yet to be added. One of the core aspects of the game and the primary reason that made the game enjoyable was the nearby Pokemon tracker, which showed how far a Pokemon was from you by displaying one step (very close), two steps (close) and three steps (not so close) next to the Pokemon's sprite. But just after a week following the game's release, the feature broke. Or it was removed to reduce server load as calculations that track the relative positioning of Pokemon to a player is likely resource-intensive. But all Pokemon now showed up as being 3-steps away, regardless of how far it actually was. The game quickly went from Pokemon hunting to walk around and pray you run into the Pokemon you want. Despite a core feature being broken, the community retained it's patience (At least, the majority did.), hoping for a fix soon. Niantic, however, in classic Niantic style refused to even acknowledge the existance of the bug. (John Hanke eventually admitted the bug when questioned about it at the SDCC last week.)
But the internet is full of amazing people, and several developers together created tools like PokeVision, which showed the location of Pokemon near your area and the time for which each pokemon would spawn, using data pulled from the app. Trainers flocked to it and used it to compensate for the broken tracker.
But in the latest update, Niantic and it's devs came up with an ingenious fix of the tracker glich: They removed the tracker altogether. Instead of trying to fix the bug (Or add more resources and turn the feature back on), It was made a feature. Niantic, being Niantic, did not share any info about this 'fix' and everyone is still kept in the dark on whether this feature would be added back or not. But in a move that seemed farfetch'd even for Niantic, all tracking tools like PokeVision was simultaneously forced to shut down, leaving players around the world with no reliable method whatsoever to catch Pokemon. This pitifully stupid move was summed up in this tweet by former Pokemon developer Yang C Liu:
Niantic also removed the game's battery saving feature, offering no explanation for it at all, and not even mentioning it in the release notes. It was only inevitable that there would be a...
Community reaction
The series of unfriendly and thoughtless changes from Niantic was not taken lightly by the Pokemon community. Hundreds of thousands of players left the game, stating that the game had degraded to a money-farming stunt without purpose or direction. Several more players from geoblocked regions decided not to hold out their hype till the game's release, which seemed nowhere nearby. Niantic's social media accounts and email contacts became flooded with people expressing their frustration. (Niantic's reaction was to disable comments on it's various social accounts instead of replying to the complaints.) The app's rating on various app stores plummeted, with over 300,000 one-star reviews logged in Google Play Store. The app's fate in Apple's app store was worse (The ratings of an app is wiped clean every time an update is released in the app store), with the rating falling below two stars. Niantic's response to this was re-releasing the update in the app store without any significant changes in order to wipe all the negative reviews.
Thousands of users also requested refunds on their purchases, and when players found out that emails to Niantic's support mail returned an automated reply that said they weren't monitoring their inbox, a violation of policies of both app store and play store, several reports were given against the company. The game fell from 1st to 4th place in the Japanese app store, where it was expected to remain at the top longer than anywhere else, with Japan being the birthplace of Pokemon.
Conclusion
The world witnessed the greatest reaction to a smartphone app release ever when Pokemon Go hit the stores last month. In such a short period of time, the world is also watching the greatest collapse that the stores have ever witnessed. Niantic's refusal to communicate at all is amazing and bizarre. Casual players of the game are angry at the removal of key features and updates that fail to address known issues, while more than half the world complains about the game not being released at all. With the huge amount of negative reputation the app has since gained and the massive player-bleed, more hardcore fans as well as marketing professionals are left open mouthed at Niantic squandering the potential of the app. When an app based on a unique concept gets taken up by tens of millions of players, you'd expect the developers to capitalise on it and make sure it retains it's playerbase and popularity right from the start. But with Niantic, all that's left now is a series of burning questions:
- Is the removal of the tracker temporary or a permanent feature?
- Are the new modifications to Pokemon catching here to stay?
- Does employees at Niantic think Asia and South America are not part of planet Earth?
- How can a team that can develop a revolutionary augmented reality app not know how to tweet?
- Why isn't Nintendo or The Pokemon Company nonchalant about the whole issue, concerning themselves only about the upcoming release of Pokemon Sun and Moon?
- Will we have to wait till next year's comic con before we get something useful out of John Hanke?
- Will the phrase "pulling a Niantic" be used to refer to companies that squander concepts with huge potential in the future?
Niantic's statement
Since the writing of this article, Niantic, much to the surprise of everyone, has released a statement on it's official Facebook page:
While the statement itself doesn't solve anything, Niantic finally making an attempt to communicate with it's player base is refreshing. Although the various other bugs and the Pokemon catching mechanic modification is not mentioned in the post, we now know that the tracking feature is likely to be added back in the future. And Niantic are apparently aware of the existence of the continents of Asia and South America. While a time frame of release would have been nice, this gives us hope that the game would eventually be released globally.
In a single Facebook post, Niantic has alleviated large amounts of frustration of the Pokemon Go playerbase. Hopefully, they have learnt their lesson and will continue to keep the trainers updated, instead of leaving us in the dark again.
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