Pokémon Go creator Niantic has released a statement on its Facebook page explaining some of the recent changes. You may have noticed on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit that some of these changes have been quite controversial. Hence today’s statement.
First, the ‘3-step’ indicator in the nearby Pokémon screen is gone for good. Yes, it was broken. But Niantic doesn’t have any good alternative for now. The company promises that it’s going find a way to improve this feature and bring it back in some other form.
And it brings us to the second point. Third-party tracking services, such as Pokévision, PokéHound and PokéNotify received cease-and-desist letters. While I haven’t been using these services, my friend Arthur thinks they are pure evil and should die in a fire. But they existed for a reason — if the ‘3-step’ indicator was broken, players needed some kind of hints about where to find Pokémon. Otherwise it’s just pure luck.
Sure, Pokévision and others probably went too far. But as a colleague who shall remain nameless wrote, “it was the only thing keeping their game playable while tracking is broken. It’s like suing the locksmith for helping you get into your house when you’ve got a pot on the stove about to burn your house down.”
Anyway, Niantic has the final say regarding this issue. The company says these services were making the servers unreliable. Pokémon Go doesn’t have an API, so it seems like Pokévision and others created countless of accounts on many servers around the world using Android emulators. With these emulators, they could fake movements around cities and reverse-engineer the game to create a sort of lightweight API and gather Pokémon data.
Quite a cool trick. But it’s clear that these services were using a ton of server resources. Pokémon Go doesn’t need additional server load as Niantic is still trying hard to make the game scale. And it could also be a nice excuse to kill them anyway.
Here’s the full statement:
