PokéVision and other helper apps taken offline
Helper apps such as PokéVision were taken offline at the end of July, and combined with the new updates (see above) a huge number of players are not happy. This is what the developer had to say via its official Facebook page:
"Trainers,
As many of you know, we recently made some changes to Pokémon GO.
- We have removed the ‘3-step’ display in order to improve upon the underlying design. The original feature, although enjoyed by many, was also confusing and did not meet our underlying product goals. We will keep you posted as we strive to improve this feature.
- We have limited access by third-party services which were interfering with our ability to maintain quality of service for our users and to bring Pokémon GO to users around the world. The large number of users has made the roll-out of Pokémon GO around the world an... interesting… challenge. And we aren’t done yet! Yes, Brazil, we want to bring the game to you (and many other countries where it is not yet available).
We have read your posts and emails and we hear the frustration from folks in places where we haven’t launched yet, and from those of you who miss these features. We want you to know that we have been working crazy hours to keep the game running as we continue to launch globally. If you haven’t heard us Tweeting much it’s because we’ve been heads down working on the game. But we’ll do our best going forward to keep you posted on what’s going on.
Be safe, be nice to your fellow trainers, and keep on exploring.
The Pokémon GO team"
Yang Liu, creator of PokéVision, responded with an open letter. We've outlined some of the highlights below:
"I write this not as one of the creators of Pokevision nor as player who has gone through the past few turbulent days in Pokemon Go; instead, I write this as a fan of Pokemon ever since I was 8 years old."
"The world became captivated by Pokemon Go. People absolutely fell in love. We saw stories of elderly learning about Pikachu for the first time. My parents that could care less beyond who the yellow mouse looking thing was 20 years ago, started asking what the other Pokemon were. It was phenomenal."
"You’ve simply captured all of our hearts with Pokemon Go, Niantic. But then, you broke it all too quickly."
"When the game broke every few hours or so and wasted our lucky eggs, we stood patiently, excusing the huge growth and thus, strain on servers, as the cause. We were happy to wait it out with our fellow trainers knowing that it’s worth waiting for. No one got mad.
"When the in-game tracking “broke,” we all stood idly by, patiently, waiting for the game to update and fix.
"Along came Pokevision. We made Pokevision not to “cheat.” We made it so that we can have a temporary relief to the in-game tracker that we were told was broken. John, at SDCC, you said that you guys were working on “fixing the in-game tracker.” This made everyone believe that this was coming sometime soon. We saw Pokevision as a stop gap to this? - ?and we had every intention in closing it down the minute that Pokemon Go’s own tracker restored functionality."
"After 3 weeks though, we started seeing that you guys seemed to not want to talk to us (the players). Pokevision, at this time has grown to almost 50M unique users, and 11 million daily."
That's a pretty strong argument as to why people want PokéVision and why it should be available, but the developer has once again defended its decision in an official update on its website:
"Running a product like Pokémon GO at scale is challenging. Those challenges have been amplified by third parties attempting to access our servers in various ways outside of the game itself... We blocked some more of those attempts yesterday. Since there has been some public discussion about this, we wanted to shed some more light on why we did this and why these seemingly innocuous sites and apps actually hurt our ability to deliver the game to new and existing players. The chart below shows the drop in server resources consumed when we blocked scrapers. Freeing those resources allowed us to proceed with the Latin America launch... In addition to hampering our ability to bring Pokémon GO to new markets, dealing with this issue also has opportunity cost. Developers have to spend time controlling this problem vs. building new features."
While the map apps are no longer available, many Pokémon GO players are still taking advantage of third-party utilities to enhance their gameplay. For example, Poke Assistant offers an IV Calculator and Evolve Calculator.
VIA - pcadvisor.co.uk
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