Pokemon Go is a broken game. Despite its huge success and swelling popularity, there are a myriad of issues with it that developer Niantic Labs is failing to fix on all counts. Not only is this becoming increasingly frustrating, but it’s also costing people real money as a result of its constant server crashes and assorted array of bugs.
Since its launch, Pokemon Go has suffered from two major flaws. Firstly, its servers are prone to crash at the drop of a hat which, aside from being irritating, is also costing players money as items such as lures and incense only work for a limited period of time – if you drop a lure at a Pokestop and then the game’s servers go down, the game won’t return that lure to your inventory even though you won’t be able to make use of it. Secondly, the game frequently crashes after throwing a Pokeball at a Pokemon, meaning that players have often found themselves squaring off against a rare find, only to have it escape as a result of the game freezing.
Now a new problem has presented itself, with the game’s tracker failing to correctly display the distance between the player and the Pokemon they are hunting. When working correctly, the tracker displays the distance of Pokemon using “footprints,” with one footprint indicating that the Pokemon they’re looking for is close, while three footprints indicates that it is a reasonable distance away. However, a recent issue with the tracker has seen all Pokemon marked with a distance of three footprints, thus completely undermining the entire concept of the game.
This issue, and the frustrating ambiguity of the tracker in general, has led to people visiting third-party sites such as PokeVision.com which utilizes Niantic’s API in order to create a more detailed map of players’ surroundings. While this technically qualifies as cheating given that PokeVision outlines the exact location of rare Pokemon, it’s currently filling the void where a functioning tracker for the game should be, as Niantic continues to fail to release improvements in favor of releasing its broken games in other regions, increasing the strain on its servers in the process.
The situation isn’t exactly helped by Niantic’s radio silence regarding these problems, either. Whereas most games with troubled launches will use platforms such as Twitter to keep players in the loop regarding patches and fixes, Niantic is instead busy tweeting Soulja Boy:
@souljaboy what’s the highest CP Pokémon you have @souljaboy?
— Niantic (@NianticLabs) July 20, 2016
Pokemon Go is currently managing to keep players invested in it despite these glaring issues, though it’s only a matter of time before people eventually grow tired of the copious server crashes and bugs littering the game. Hopefully Niantic eventually opts to keep players in the loop regarding their plans to solve Pokemon Go‘s growing number of problems, and the developer will conclude that refusing to talk to their community is not the best course of action.
