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[HeisenbergLannister]

Pokemon Go is becoming a footnote in how not to handle a popular game.

Can't wait when they suddenly do a 180, give everyone free items, practically beg everyone to return to playing, and then wonder what the hell happened when the game doesn't come close to reaching it's peak again.

 

[Darryl M R]

LiveMap desktop app still works, but it sucks that pokevision is gone.

Can you link me to the desktop client download for Mac users?

--

Also geez I would argue that the majority of loyal players/CUSTOMERS are the ones that would be using these third party apps.

 

[Durante]

They've also made the catch rate much lower for pokemon. You will be forced to use many more pokeballs to catch weak level pokemon and often times they flee

Even lower?

I stopped playing the game after three days when I found the clear taint of bad F2P design in the catch rate for slightly higher level pokemon. Boring.

 

[Joni]

Here we go.

A battle between purists vs cheaters.

Oh, they haven't punished the cheaters. The bots that automatically play the game and GPS spoofers are still working.

 

[Mr-Joker]

John Hanke, CEO of Niantic, also helpfully confirmed that he has no idea whatsoever what people were enjoying about his game:

Hanke previously told FORBES that he was “not a fan” of Pokémon locating services and hinted that a shutdown was coming.

“People are only hurting themselves because it takes some fun out of the game,” he said. “People are hacking around trying to take data out of our system and that’s against our terms of service.”

I get a feeling that Niantic never cared about the Pokémon IP and was more interested in using it make a boatload of money.

They've also made the catch rate much lower for pokemon. You will be forced to use many more pokeballs to catch weak level pokemon and often times they flee

And there is it, the bullshit "Free" to start mechanic designed to try and get you pay for items.

I will probably end up getting rid of the app when Sun and Moon release and I have transferred the Pokémon over.

 

[gardfish]

Seeing a rare Pokemon popping up on my radar and tracking it down, sometimes with the help of complete strangers, was the fun part of this app.

Pinpointing their exact location was less fun, but at least enabled me to keep finding new Pokemon.

Without either of these options, I don't think I'm going to keep playing. I have ~90 Pokemon in my Pokedex right now, which should mean there are around 50 Pokemon I haven't seen yet, but with the exception of when I was in NYC last week, the only new Pokemon I'm getting are from eggs (and even that's a crapshoot). Otherwise, I'm running into the exact same dozen or so Pokemon that I've already fully evolved over and over and over and over again, and the rarer ones pop up so infrequently that it isn't feasible for me to evolve them. And now that there's no way to figure out where a rare Pokemon even is when it shows up on my radar, it's just downright frustrating and discouraging.

This game either needs more Pokemon, or it needs a way to reliably track down things you don't have yet. Otherwise, it has just stopped being fun.

 

[Teknoman]

Ok this lowered rate stuff is spiraling out of control faster than that regain a thrown poke ball stuff...

 

[demosthenes]

Yesterday there was an event at the University of Buffalo. If I had to guess there was probably 750+ people there while I was there from 7-9. They were giving away free drinks, had prizes, had charging stations and the range of people went from kids, college students, families, just everyone. They had a laptop setup with Pokevision too. When an Abra popped up they announced it and there was a mad rush for it. When a Nidorino popped up, same thing. It was really cool, I don't see how Pokevision hurts the game at all.

edit: Whenever someone is trying to tells someone else how to have fun, the only thing I can think of is "you're doing it wrong".

I've noticed a load of trash pokemon escaping or breaking out of the balls since the patch, pretty sure a 15 CP weedle took 4 bloody balls. So I was wondering if something was up or if I was just unlucky, I guess this is legit if others have noticed the same thing.

I can confirm this too from last night. I had 200 balls between Poke/Great. I ended with 60 despite constantly hitting Pokestops. Was using multiple Pokeballs on what seemed like everything except CP10.

 

[Kawngi]

If they were going to shut down 3rd party trackers, they certainly could've improved the radar crap. Sigh. Submitted for a refund on the money I've spent on this.

 

[RoyalFool]

Is that confirmed, because aside from footprint removal, I haven't had any trouble. Caught Pokemon all the way home from a late night park run earlier.

I've noticed a load of trash pokemon escaping or breaking out of the balls since the patch, pretty sure a 15 CP weedle took 4 bloody balls. So I was wondering if something was up or if I was just unlucky, I guess this is legit if others have noticed the same thing.

 

[Red]

I get a feeling that Niantic never cared about the Pokémon IP and was more interested in using it make a boatload of money.



And there is it, the bullshit "Free" to start mechanic designed to try and get you pay for items.

I will probably end up getting rid of the app when Sun and Moon release and I have transferred the Pokémon over.

Transferred what Pokémon? Nothing about how the games interact has been confirmed.

 

[Durden77]

If the fix the in-game tracker, I am pro-banning stuff like Pokevision. But with the in-game fucked, they probably should've just let it be until it was fixed. I still wouldn't use it.

 

[Gorillaz]

They've also made the catch rate much lower for pokemon. You will be forced to use many more pokeballs to catch weak level pokemon and often times they flee

Lol

this shit aint making it out of the summer with these changes

 

[Nintendoga]

The point of the app is to walk around and find Pokemon and even make new friends along the way so it never really mattered to me how people did it, using pokevision or not.

But outright blocking those apps and removing your own tracking system ingame is god awful. I'm fine with walking around to find a Pokemon that I know is right near me or in my general direction. I'm not fine with walking around with zero indication that I'm going in the opposite direction away from the Pokemon I just hopped outside to catch. This was a garbage change and hopefully someone like Nintendo or TPC steps in and says "Hey, that was pretty fucking stupid. Wanna bring that back?"

 

[Haines]

I don't understand the backlash.

It's not part of the game. They are in the right to remove it and allow themselves to make the game they want.

It's like this game made people forget that a game like this takes a while to get to where the devs want it.

That said, game is generally lame anyways.

 

[L95]

I admit, maybe I'm jumping a bit, but I wonder if they'll introduce an item that makes the footstep tracker active for a certain amount of time or something. <.<

Making pokemon overall harder to catch sucks, though I haven't been able to play recently so I haven't experienced it yet.

 

[charlequin]

How was this enjoyable?

With some form of tracking -- again, maybe the exact level in Pokevision was too much, but the alternative is nothing -- there's a a big incentive to find places in your local area that spawn certain types of Pokemon and travel to them. With the ability to spot spawns nearby there's a good reason to go to parts of your own neighborhood you don't normally go to when something cool is there and maybe find something cool in the process (there's a great little falafel place three blocks from where I live that I never saw in two years here, then discovered while chasing a rare spawn.)

As it is now, there's no reason to do anything. If I see a guy on my "Nearby" map, he could literally be anywhere in a mile radius around me, and he'll definitely despawn within 15 minutes; without any directional or distance information, my chance of finding it is effectively zero. So: why even go out?

I have found nothing to suggest there is any public API for Pokemon Go. It doesn't seem like they were allowed to use it, the extra traffic was possibly unwelcome, and the sprite rips sure didn't help. There's no need to dig into the gameplay aspects, it was problematic application for much broader reasons.

Of course there is. Take a five-minute break from reflexively defending anything in Nintendo's orbit and justifying any publisher action on pure "well techically they're allowed to do it" basis, then look at the problems this actually causes for the game -- you know, the thing actual human beings presumably choose to do for enjoyment.

The game was unambiguously designed with tracking in mind -- the beta version had meter distance from Pokemon so you could actually directly find your way towards them. Over time they've removed all this functionality from the game, and these third-party apps were filling the gap. If they're using the APIs incorrectly, why kill them off before at least announcing a fix for the actual in-game tracking? Why not release a new set of public APIs so you can have control over the detail level of tracking apps without killing them off completely?

 

[old]

They should have. That's cheating.

 

[Vanillalite]

I don't understand the backlash.

It's not part of the game. They are in the right to remove it and allow themselves to make the game they want.

It's like this game made people forget that a game like this takes a while to get to where the devs want it.

That said, game is generally lame anyways.

That just means they released it half baked cause they were in a rush to get it out. They released too early.

 

[EulaCapra]

Ugh. I would feel better if Pokemon had longer spawn durations. Like a solid hour for uncommon ones instead of popping in and out in 15 minute intervals.

It's a social game. Nobody's got time to alert the web/walk a couple hundred meters in less than 15 minutes.

 

[Wyndstryker]

They launched this app too early.

They originally thought it would take a year to be popular, not 3 days so they were completely blindsided. So whatever they had planned was over the course of a year.

 

[bananafactory]

Well, I'm done playing Pokemon Go then.

I played for a week "natually" and caught nothing but Rattata, Pidgey, and Weedle.

The fun for me was racing around on my skateboard trying to find a Pokemon that most of the time didn't even show up in my 'nearby', but that I saw on Pokevision. Obviously I respect the fact the a developer has every right to determine how their game is played, but since I was only playing to find and collect every Pokemon I could, the game is basically dead to me for now.

A shame since it was the most fun I had with anything this year. Hopefully they come up with an in-game solution that will bring me back.

 

[Falchion]

I had lots of fun with Pokevision, especially since at this point I'm just trying to fill out the gaps in my Pokedex.

 

[Phu]

I admit, maybe I'm jumping a bit, but I wonder if they'll introduce an item that makes the footstep tracker active for a certain amount of time or something. <.<

Making pokemon overall harder to catch sucks, though I haven't been able to play recently so I haven't experienced it yet.

Instead of me just not opening the app because it's still busted, a move like that would just have me wiping the game off my phone.

 

[Teknoman]

I admit, maybe I'm jumping a bit, but I wonder if they'll introduce an item that makes the footstep tracker active for a certain amount of time or something. <.<

Making pokemon overall harder to catch sucks, though I haven't been able to play recently so I haven't experienced it yet.

They better not, or else that would truly kill things.

On the harder to catch rate, I just caught a couple local pops, and one took two balls tops, was an orange ring ratatta. I think that's just user panic.

 

[FantasticMrFoxdie]

Seeing a rare Pokemon popping up on my radar and tracking it down, sometimes with the help of complete strangers, was the fun part of this app.

Pinpointing their exact location was less fun, but at least enabled me to keep finding new Pokemon.

Without either of these options, I don't think I'm going to keep playing. I have ~90 Pokemon in my Pokedex right now, which should mean there are around 50 Pokemon I haven't seen yet, but with the exception of when I was in NYC last week, the only new Pokemon I'm getting are from eggs (and even that's a crapshoot). Otherwise, I'm running into the exact same dozen or so Pokemon that I've already fully evolved over and over and over and over again, and the rarer ones pop up so infrequently that it isn't feasible for me to evolve them. And now that there's no way to figure out where a rare Pokemon even is when it shows up on my radar, it's just downright frustrating and discouraging.

This game either needs more Pokemon, or it needs a way to reliably track down things you don't have yet. Otherwise, it has just stopped being fun.

I just hit lvl 21 and the fun has been hitting walls. I wish they added more items/fun things or something with these updates instead of this nonsense.

 

[demosthenes]

They originally thought it would take a year to be popular, not 3 days so they were completely blindsided. So whatever they had planned was over the course of a year.

I will never understand thoughts like this. They were making a game that consistently sells 10 million copies, has a cartoon spanning 2 decades, has near 20 movies. How it never once occurred to them in their calculations that it could blow up just seems like really poor management.

 

[dc89]

Shut it down. The game is done.

 

[BitStyle]

Can you link me to the desktop client download for Mac users?

--

Also geez I would argue that the majority of loyal players/CUSTOMERS are the ones that would be using these third party apps.

Here

Just grab the latest release for your OS

 

[bananafactory]

Seeing a rare Pokemon popping up on my radar and tracking it down, sometimes with the help of complete strangers, was the fun part of this app.

Pinpointing their exact location was less fun, but at least enabled me to keep finding new Pokemon.

Without either of these options, I don't think I'm going to keep playing. I have ~90 Pokemon in my Pokedex right now, which should mean there are around 50 Pokemon I haven't seen yet, but with the exception of when I was in NYC last week, the only new Pokemon I'm getting are from eggs (and even that's a crapshoot). Otherwise, I'm running into the exact same dozen or so Pokemon that I've already fully evolved over and over and over and over again, and the rarer ones pop up so infrequently that it isn't feasible for me to evolve them. And now that there's no way to figure out where a rare Pokemon even is when it shows up on my radar, it's just downright frustrating and discouraging.

This game either needs more Pokemon, or it needs a way to reliably track down things you don't have yet. Otherwise, it has just stopped being fun.

Nailed it. I've caught everything that normally spawns except for the super rare ones that spawn maybe 3 times a day in the city, without any way of knowing when and where.

The rest of the Pokemon I need to evolve have insane requirements, I need like 400 Magikarp candies but I catch maybe 1 per week here. Yeah, no...

 

[BoboBrazil]

Is that why a level 15 took 4 balls yesterday?!

Yep.

Is there any concrete proof of that? There's a lot of rumor about how systems in this game work but the APK teardown doesn't mention it and without some numeric proof I'm not going to assume this is true.

It's kind of one of those things where there is smoke there is fire. There are tons of reports of people having this happen that it had to have happened. I think some apps can actually pull capture rate and flee rate percentages from the servers so it's definitely a thing that exists in the game server side.

 

[Levi]

Welp, I uninstalled. Everyone in my office who still plays uses GPS spoofing, the rest of us have given up.

No in game or out of game tracking? So the only way to find critters is randomly or by spending money on a lure? Fuck that.

 

[Nintendoga]

I also don't get people saying this is cheating.

Cheating are the people using gps spoofing or "walk anywhere" to catch as many Pokemon as they want outside of their area. This could be considered nothing more than a radar or hint system for the game. You still walk towards the Pokemon in real life, you still catch them legitimately, nothing ill about it.

 

[SynthFetish]

They've also made the catch rate much lower for pokemon. You will be forced to use many more pokeballs to catch weak level pokemon and often times they flee

I noticed this, took 8 pokeballs to catch a CP 60 Pidgey. Not sure why they want to kill the game off so soon.

 

[SpacePirate Ridley]

And me and my group of friends have stoped playing all together. And not the only ones, funny this being a game about encountering with other people, you can speak with them and lets say nobody is happy with this decission.

Doesnt surprise me TPC choose this oblivious/incompetent people to develop their game, as they are very much like that themeselves.

We will probably only come back if their own locating pokemon method is fixed in less than a week or pokevision resolves the new code and returns again. Pretty sure if they wait much more, we will not give a fuck anymore, because too much time would have passed.

EDIT. Didnt even know about the new catch rate. Jesus christ. They cant even be happy with a lot of money, they want ALL the money. Goong to be funny when players are cut in halve in less than a month if they continue with this shit.

 

[zulux21]

I've noticed a load of trash pokemon escaping or breaking out of the balls since the patch, pretty sure a 15 CP weedle took 4 bloody balls. So I was wondering if something was up or if I was just unlucky, I guess this is legit if others have noticed the same thing.

it's likely not legit.

I ran into this with another game I play Marvel Puzzle Quest all the time.

when it was more popular anytime a new update would come out people would go on and on about how the computer was getting more cascades than usual even though nothing was changed.

with a game like this you can run into a string of bad luck with catching stuff, and when you have so many players undoubtedly some of them will run into that bad luck right after an update and then it will also get passed around that it got changed. You have people then focusing on it more, and in general people have a much better memory for remembering recent bad events than recent strings of good luck.

you know what else keeps showing up right after updates right now.
that ditto is in the wild.

also, unlikely to be true.

if the game is cracked open and shown to have decreased odds of catching it would be one thing.

but I would trust other's feelings about the catch rate about as well as I trust the creators of the game to put a working tracker back in the game right now

 

[Nightbird]

.

 

[Kyleripman]

Yeah this is frustrating. Only hurts the community building up around their game.

 

[Ridley327]

I also don't get people saying this is cheating.

Cheating are the people using gps spoofing or "walk anywhere" to catch as many Pokemon as they want outside of their area. This could be considered nothing more than a radar or hint system for the game. You still walk towards the Pokemon in real life, you still catch them legitimately, nothing ill about it.

That's where I'm at. Me knowing whether I need to go up or down the hill my house rests on for something is so minor compared to people GPS spoofing to wander into Times Square when they're actually in Peoria.

 

[jax]

I admit, maybe I'm jumping a bit, but I wonder if they'll introduce an item that makes the footstep tracker active for a certain amount of time or something. <.<

Making pokemon overall harder to catch sucks, though I haven't been able to play recently so I haven't experienced it yet.

If they want to accelerate the games death to instantaneous instead of over the course of a few weeks, this would be the best way to do that.

 

[Amherst_Wind]

They've also made the catch rate much lower for pokemon. You will be forced to use many more pokeballs to catch weak level pokemon and often times they flee

Totally anecdotal but I'm Lv19 and I just had a 15cp Ratatta break out of the first ball I used and then immediately flee... yeah.

 

[W1SSY]

Because surprise, what you consider "fun" may not line up 100% with what someone else considers "fun". If they like playing the game with the aid of Pokevision, who is anyone to tell them that they're wrong to do so? Nobody forces you to use Pokevision, so you play the game how you enjoy it and let everyone else do the same.

Well I believe if anyone has the authority to decide how you play the game it would be the developer. They obviously view this stuff as unfair advantage and against the spirit of how they designed the game.

Does it really? You've been able to pinpoint where a Pokemon resides at in the mainline games since the original GB releases, where they tell you which route they're hiding at if they are able to be discovered freely in the region.

If anything, Pokevision and the like have exposed how garbage the updating is for Pokemon in an area, since you can have some that would have expired 5 minutes ago still appear in the rotation in the app. Where's the fun in that?

Knowing the route a pokemon appears on is not the same as knowing it's spawn point and timer. I do agree that the in-game tracker is broken and needs to be fixed but replacing it with a gps app that lets you see everything in detail is not the solution. Pokevision gives too much information.

 

[SmokedMeat]

All this time I could've been cheating to guarantee myself some Pokemon? Fuck.

 

[pompidu]

This should be a warning tale to other developers, don't be a garbage studio and ignore one of the main reasons of playing the game.

Maybe all three companies have no idea what they are doing and just throwing shit at the wall, and ignoring all the stuff that sticks.

It's kinda funny how incompetent they all are.

 

[bananafactory]

Knowing the route a pokemon appears on is not the same as knowing it's spawn point and timer. I do agree that the in-game tracker is broken and needs to be fixed but replacing it with a gps app that lets you see everything in detail is not the solution. Pokevision gives too much information.

I do agree with this, despite the fact I've been using Pokevision exclusively. There needs to be some middle ground between what the game gave us and knowing exactly where things are.

 

[Teknoman]

Well, I'm done playing Pokemon Go then.

I played for a week "natually" and caught nothing but Rattata, Pidgey, and Weedle.

The fun for me was racing around on my skateboard trying to find a Pokemon that most of the time didn't even show up in my 'nearby', but that I saw on Pokevision. Obviously I respect the fact the a developer has every right to determine how their game is played, but since I was only playing to find and collect every Pokemon I could, the game is basically dead to me for now.

A shame since it was the most fun I had with anything this year. Hopefully they come up with an in-game solution that will bring me back.

Wouldn't playing "naturally" still have netted you them? Grated you wouldn't be aware of the direct spot, but going to places outside your normal routes, if those routes weren't getting you things you wanted, was the point of the game.

Regardless of what side of pokevision app style use any of are on, Niantic needs to be more vocal and get an improvement or fix out fast.

 

[kinggroin]

Like banning abortion without a proper unplanned or unwanted pregnancy support system or contingency.

Edit: I'm way off base here aren't I?

 

[Red]

Like banning abortion without a proper unplanned or unwanted pregnancy support system or contingency.

This is one of the worst comparisons I have ever seen, kudos to you.

 

[Cess007]

How was this enjoyable?

It was more enjoyable that walking under a weather of 115° (as in my city) for hnours with no longer a direction as to where to go to search the Pokemon that appeared on my radar.

They've also made the catch rate much lower for pokemon. You will be forced to use many more pokeballs to catch weak level pokemon and often times they flee

.... that would explain why lots of low CP Pokemons yesterday were taking an insane amount of Pokeballs to catch.

 

[SinCityAssassin]

Poke vision didn't even work half the time for me, so I'm not bummed. But I would need a non bullshit reason for it cutting off access to third party apps. Are they also stressin servers or is the API use entirely separate from them.

Like banning abortion without a proper unplanned or unwanted pregnancy support system or contingency.

What the FUCK.