Pokemon Go shuts down third party trackers like Pokevision.com

[Phoenixstarz]

The biggest problem I would like to see niantic sort out is people GPS spoofing, I just went out for a 2 trek to take 5 gyms and on 2 of them it said someone was battling the gym and they put a Pokemon on the gym but there was no one else around

 

[Sirindu]

This is an amazingly silly thing to get upset about.

Pokevision wasn't a part of the creator's vision. It was at best in a grey area of Pokemon Go's TOS agreement. I don't care to judge whether it was cheating or not, though at first I thought that it was. I understood it's usefulness for some people while the three-step tracker was broken. I totally get that. But overall it would have lowered the experience of the game in the long term. I completely agree with the CEO's comments.

Now, I get that some felt it made the game more fun for people who lived in more rural areas that really need the three-step tracker or something in its place. I get that. I don't know what to do with that. The reality is that more people are playing in cities and for those people it significantly devalues the experience.

Also, this idea that Pokevision made the game more communal?

What?

Pokevision made it so that you didn't have to talk to anyone to find Pokemon. Just turn on your app or whatever and it tells you where the Snorlax is.

No. That's not more communal.

The experience I and so many other people have had is one of talking with people when you're out and asking, "hey, where did you catch that Pikachu?" That's community. Don't need an additional app for that and if anything I see the app as something which hurt community.

~

Regardless of all these points and whether you agree with them or not, this is just silly to be so upset over. The communication from Niantic hasn't been great so far, that's true. But it was really good in their previous game (Ingress) so I'm willing to guess that the lack of communication in PoGo so far has something to do with the absurd records they are breaking with this game and subsequent traffic.

 

[Phoenixstarz]

I live in a rural area, where I live most the Pokemon spawn in a small area expect for a few random spawn points around the edges of town. At level 22 if I'm walking around I very rarely see any Pokemon that I need for candy and haven't seen a new Pokemon for 2 weeks. I've read a number of people say that once they hit mid 20's level the game gets very boring and I think I can see why, it's easy to put a lot of effort in for barely any reward, you wouldn't need pokevision at a lower level since most the Pokemon you see are either new or you need the candy but with pokevision I could see whether there were any rare/new Pokemon around.
Also it definately was a communal app since you could only scan a small area at a time so we needed lots of people to scan different areas at the same time so we could scan a larger area between us.
Despite pokevision being taken down it wouldn't stop me playing but I can easily see many people being demotivated by it.

 

[Sirindu]

I live in a rural area, where I live most the Pokemon spawn in a small area expect for a few random spawn points around the edges of town. At level 22 if I'm walking around I very rarely see any Pokemon that I need for candy and haven't seen a new Pokemon for 2 weeks. I've read a number of people say that once they hit mid 20's level the game gets very boring and I think I can see why, it's easy to put a lot of effort in for barely any reward, you wouldn't need pokevision at a lower level since most the Pokemon you see are either new or you need the candy but with pokevision I could see whether there were any rare/new Pokemon around.
Also it definately was a communal app since you could only scan a small area at a time so we needed lots of people to scan different areas at the same time so we could scan a larger area between us.
Despite pokevision being taken down it wouldn't stop me playing but I can easily see many people being demotivated by it.

I still don't get people saying it was a communal part of the experience, but I never tried so maybe I shouldn't judge that part. It just doesn't make sense to me.

But like I said, I feel for you and people like you living in rural areas and I get how it helped. But it was NOT the right fix for your situation because it went against the developer's intentions for the game. So it shouldn't surprise or shock or appall anyone that it is gone.

 

[AutumnOwl]

I wouldn't have minded Pokevision going down if they actually fixed the tracking system first. Hopefully when it's fixed it's more efficient and informative. Wandering aimlessly isn't very fun (indicating the direction toward the pokemon wouldn't hurt).

 

[Afterglow Ampharos]

The Pokemon GO trackers they shut down were pinging their servers in order to track the specifically spawned times of various pokemon. This is a form of infiltration into their servers that is causing problems such as lag and also acquiring information from the data.

This is useful information! If Niantic had released that information, instead of Hanke saying he considers it cheating the player out of getting the full experience of the game and saying that Niantic were going to do something about it... Well, if they had done that, I would have been much more understanding about their Cease and Desist.

Nests are everywhere, I really doubt they are exclusive to only two countries, the only way I could imagine that would be possible is if it was a feature that was implemented in a later patch, and a different country got the game later and would need to wait on an update, but based on my understanding of how the game works, that should not be the case. You're playing the same game we are playing dude, the only difference I imagine is you're in a different server due to being in a different country.

Actually, this is not technically true. My American friends reported their footprints being fixed (displaying one, two, and three) while up here in the North mine was still threes-only. We are not playing QUITE the same game. Honestly I had never heard of nests before today, they simply aren't a thing I've been exposed to yet.

Last is your accusation that their current nearby list gluing people to their phone screens. That is NOT on Niantic. People glue their faces to their phones no matter what is on them.
Blaming Niantic for something that is absolutely out of their direct control is silly.

My point still stands that the system Niantic put in place in the Nearby tab requires constant monitoring of your screen to track down a 'mon.

Whereas a system that gives you a destination or even tells you it's to the east would require far less. That is something they could have kept in mind to make their game safer, since they know full well that this is a walk-and-game kind of app.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not making any excuses for idiots who exercise patently unsafe behaviour. But when you as a game dev drastically increase the time required to look at the screen while tracking a target's distance from the player in a travel-oriented mobile game, your players cannot HELP but take their attention away from their surroundings more often than they would otherwise. It is not avoidable. I myself nearly got run down by a bicycle while standing still on the side of the sidewalk.

Pokevision wasn't a part of the creator's vision.

Neither was Serebii and Bulbapedia and I'm not hearing any controversy on them. (Yes I understand that they don't piggyback on data, but that was a bit of necessary evil if you want to give players a guide to where to find Pokemon in an ever-changing game. In the main series, guides can list Pokemon locations as a static thing) and no one calls this out as a cheating sin. What I'm trying to say is, there's a double standard here. Fan-made supplementary material has never been an issue before.

Then again, if it was solely because of a server stress issue as Mister Coffee said, this point I've made is moot. But, the server stress issue was never made widely public information as a reason behind the Cease and Desist.

 

[Mister Coffee]

This is useful information! If Niantic had released that information, instead of Hanke saying he considers it cheating the player out of getting the full experience of the game and saying that Niantic were going to do something about it... Well, if they had done that, I would have been much more understanding about their Cease and Desist.

Well... you do realize that you posted an article with that exact information in it in your very first post for this thread. I mean it's right there near the bottom of the article and you can even read about the Ingress lag and how they dealt with it by searching for more related info.

Spoiler:

https://kotaku.com/pokevision-and-other-pokemon-go-trackers-seem-to-have-b-1784602025

"[...]While it would be easy to paint Niantic as the villain here, it's possible that the situation with Pokémon Go tracking websites may be more complicated than it appears. Looking back at Ingress, Niantic's previous game, we can see that Niantic has actually experienced this exact problem before. Like Pokémon Go, Ingress also had fan-developed mapping services, and these reportedly taxed servers so much, they ended up making the experience worse for everyone. Ingress was also a significantly smaller game than Pokémon Go.[...]"

 

[Phoenixstarz]

I still don't get people saying it was a communal part of the experience, but I never tried so maybe I shouldn't judge that part. It just doesn't make sense to me.

But like I said, I feel for you and people like you living in rural areas and I get how it helped. But it was NOT the right fix for your situation because it went against the developer's intentions for the game. So it shouldn't surprise or shock or appall anyone that it is gone.

We used to put down lures and when the lure finished all the players would pick a different street to scan on pokevision so we could scan the whole town for Pokemon at once.
From what I've experienced the game is completely different if you play in city compared to being a rural player.

Like i said earlier it may be niantics game but if they expect people to pay money to them then there should be some wiggle room for what does the paying customer actually want because ultimately if the game if going to be viable long term then it needs to keep its more active players since there seems to be a point that once you catch the Pokemon in your area and have hatched most the common eggs then the game starts to get more frustrating than fun

Also about nests I can confirm there are loads of nests in UK, just not near me though :D

 

[Irisasborisas]

They sure are doing a good job at shooting themselves in the foot.

Agree. How the hell i should find any pokemon better then pidgey or rattata. It's so hard.

 

[CoalCraft]

As another person who plays by having the app open when I would be walking somewhere anyway, the loss of the tracker means absolutely nothing to me.

Safety is a moot point; people should not be walking around paying no attention to their surroundings whatever they're doing; that is the onus of the user, not Niantic.

Like some others, I find the argument that using a tracker enables a better community spirit rather puzzling. What's so social about checking a tracker, hopping in a car and driving to a spawn? Sure, you can do it in a group, sprinting haphazardly to try and catch something rare, but the enjoyment there comes from sharing an experience with other people, not specifically from the tracker. Yesterday a housemate and I went on a long walk, taking detours here and there from our normal route into town, just following the paths and waiting for vibrates, and we had a blast. We would exclaim to each other about the pokemon we just found, calling each other over, and when a pikachu appeared out of nowhere, well, we were both over the moon.

The existence of the trackers never bothered me, but there's a degree of entitlement in people getting so upset at the loss of something that was, when all was said and done, cheating. I expect that a tracking feature will soon be reintroduced into the game, which should alleviate some of the stress, although I personally won't get much use out of it.

Actually, this is not technically true. My American friends reported their footprints being fixed (displaying one, two, and three) while up here in the North mine was still threes-only. We are not playing QUITE the same game. Honestly I had never heard of nests before today, they simply aren't a thing I've been exposed to yet.

The three-step bug isn't fixed for anyone, unless it happened in the last few hours; although it was recently removed altogether in the form of the steps being taken away completely. I strongly suspect that nests are indeed found everywhere. Certainly they're here in the UK, and I couldn't find any sources suggesting they're exclusive to certain countries. They're rare; you not having seen them is not proof that they don't exist in Canada.

If you truly believe that you're not on the same version of the game as some other folks, you can always check for updates for the app? Updates get pushed everywhere simultaneously, so if you're behind, you may just need to install the latest patch.

 

[Sirindu]

Like some others, I find the argument that using a tracker enables a better community spirit rather puzzling. What's so social about checking a tracker, hopping in a car and driving to a spawn? Sure, you can do it in a group, sprinting haphazardly to try and catch something rare, but the enjoyment there comes from sharing an experience with other people, not specifically from the tracker. Yesterday a housemate and I went on a long walk, taking detours here and there from our normal route into town, just following the paths and waiting for vibrates, and we had a blast. We would exclaim to each other about the pokemon we just found, calling each other over, and when a pikachu appeared out of nowhere, well, we were both over the moon.

The existence of the trackers never bothered me, but there's a degree of entitlement in people getting so upset at the loss of something that was, when all was said and done, cheating. I expect that a tracking feature will soon be reintroduced into the game, which should alleviate some of the stress, although I personally won't get much use out of it.

Exactly. Thank you.

 

[Afterglow Ampharos]

Well... you do realize that you posted an article with that exact information in it in your very first post for this thread. I mean it's right there near the bottom of the article and you can even read about the Ingress lag and how they dealt with it by searching for more related info.

Spoiler:

https://kotaku.com/pokevision-and-other-pokemon-go-trackers-seem-to-have-b-1784602025

"[...]While it would be easy to paint Niantic as the villain here, it's possible that the situation with Pokémon Go tracking websites may be more complicated than it appears. Looking back at Ingress, Niantic's previous game, we can see that Niantic has actually experienced this exact problem before. Like Pokémon Go, Ingress also had fan-developed mapping services, and these reportedly taxed servers so much, they ended up making the experience worse for everyone. Ingress was also a significantly smaller game than Pokémon Go.[...]"

"it's possible"
"Looking back at Ingress"

This is speculation on Kotaku's part. It is not the reason Niantic gave for shutting down Pokevision.

I'm not saying it's not true, of course. I'm just saying that Hanke ONLY said that he didn't like Pokevision for very different reasons. Server load was never mentioned.

If they had, this would have been a lot more clear. I guarantee that more fans of Pokevision would be understanding about the shutdown if they'd made this clear.


This is off-topic but:

The three-step bug isn't fixed for anyone, unless it happened in the last few hours; although it was recently removed altogether in the form of the steps being taken away completely.

I don't know what to tell you, but I know for a fact that at the very least, my friend in Maryland reported having one- and two-footprint icons showing in his game. Prior to the update that removed them altogether, of course. Anyway, as far as he was concerned, the footprint bug was fixed, and he thought it was fixed for everyone but that simply wasn't the case. Most of us were still plagued with it. So I can only conclude that the bug that you have isn't necessarily a bug everyone has.


As for the community arguments everyone has, all I can say is: You guys have your points, and they're good and I acknowledge them, but my opinion is different. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's perfectly understandable that you don't approve of Pokévision, but at least get your own solution working before you shut them down. We don't even have any sort of time frame as to when the tracking system will be fixed. The latest update actually removed the footprints altogether, presumably to reduce frustration from confused players, a move which suggests that the fix isn't coming any time soon. Without any reliable way to find the Pokémon they're looking for, the majority of high-level players now have very little reason to play.

 

[CoalCraft]

I don't know what to tell you, but I know for a fact that at the very least, my friend in Maryland reported having one- and two-footprint icons showing in his game. Prior to the update that removed them altogether, of course. Anyway, as far as he was concerned, the footprint bug was fixed, and he thought it was fixed for everyone but that simply wasn't the case. Most of us were still plagued with it. So I can only conclude that the bug that you have isn't necessarily a bug everyone has.

Just to confirm, you are running the most up-to-date version of the app, and you still see footprints? Most people are seeing no footprints at all.

 

[Afterglow Ampharos]

I'm speaking about events prior to the update, CoalCraft. All that was past tense, to clarify.

 

[smocks]

As a person who plays GO time to time, I personally think that they had a right to shut down Pokévision.
I'm well aware how Pokévision is useful to players who are looking for specific Pokémon or just to see if there's any Pokémon nearby, but that defeats the purpose of the app.
The app was created for players to EXPLORE and find Pokémon just for fun, + surprises are always better :) Sites like Pokévision defeated the purpose of exploring outside to find the Pokémon, but found the Pokémon already for you, decreasing the value of the "adventure".
I have had used Pokévision before, it was pretty useful & I'm not against Pokévision, use it if you want to idc, but remember it wasn't approved by the creators of Pokémon GO (in my knowledge).

+ Pokévision helping out to decrease accidents is great and all, but remember, the people driving and who are playing GO should know very well not to be doing that.

 

[Squirrel]

+ Pokévision helping out to decrease accidents is great and all, but remember, the people driving and who are playing GO should know very well not to be doing that.

Also worth noting that PokéVision was used by a lot of people who sat at home refreshing until a cool Pokémon appeared at which point they'd drive out at full speed to pick it up in time before returning home to their tracking hub. I feel like almost every argument surrounding PokéVision seems to go in both directions haha.

 

[Afterglow Ampharos]

The app was created for players to EXPLORE and find Pokémon just for fun, + surprises are always better :) Sites like Pokévision defeated the purpose of exploring outside to find the Pokémon, but found the Pokémon already for you, decreasing the value of the "adventure".

I've heard this "exploration" argument before and it falls flat, sorry to say

Exploring does not equal destination-less wandering. It need only be unfamiliar. If you're out Pokemon Going and your map shows something new and interesting for you to take a detour to find, that's still exploration.

Pokévision helping out to decrease accidents is great and all, but remember, the people driving and who are playing GO should know very well not to be doing that.

No no no, I meant for pedestrians. Pedestrians looking down at their phone to track a Nearby Pokemon. When something comes motoring toward them, like a bike.

 

[Jrmiah]

They basically stripped us of all methods of tracking down Pokemon without them actually having a functional tracker.

 

[Grokus]

Pokevision was using their APIs and connecting the the servers to find where the Pokemon were spawning. Niantic was careless in allowing that interface to be visible, but it was never intended to be used the way Pokevision was using it. They are entirely within their rights to control who has access and how to their own servers.

Wait and see what Niantic comes up with, but don't expect Pokevision in it's current form to come back anytime soon.

 

[Afterglow Ampharos]

Shamelessly linking to a recent thread I made sharing a wonderful Open Letter to Niantic and John Hanke, because it communicates these tracker-related events in a positive light I only WISH I could convey.

Please give it a read! But keep comments about the letter's subjects over there so the threads don't mix up.