Well, this is it; the final nail in the coffin. Niantic Labs forced
Pokémon-tracking sites like Pokevision and Poké Hound to close. Pokevision had
become my sole reason to keep going in Pokémon Go, so now the app is dead to
me. I am not even remotely sorry for what I am going to say here; I am not
flying into a blind rage at the app, I have played with it enough to see all of
its defects. I know what I’m talking about here. I was willing to give the app
a chance as long as I had Pokévision, despite its MANY problems. It was the last thing that kept me going despite the many other defects that the app had...
I talked about
the stupidity of some players around the app, I discussed the points of view
around the app, today I am talking about the app itself and its defects. Its
qualities, I no longer care. It’s been fun while it lasted. Oh, what am I
saying, my frustration quickly overtook my enjoyment most times I played anyway. I am still
willing to defend the app and say that most people playing it are smart and
won’t do stupid shit, because I can defend the app’s players. I can’t defend
the app itself anymore. I accept that others still play it, but I refuse
to play it any more myself. Here’s a complete list of what bugs me.
12. The insane cost in real money (Canada-only)
Starting with a problem that concerns my part of the world, there is a serious
problem with the in-game purchases. See, this game is a partnership between
Niantic and Nintendo, but Niantic is the big name that is doing most of the
work, and they’re an American enterprise. Therefore, they want your money in
USD, according to the prices they fixed in USD. I am Canadian, and the
conversion rates between the two are somewhere around 1.40$ CAD for 1$ USD. In
other words, we in Canada pay 40% more on the game’s shop. The 100 Pokécoins
pack costs 1.40$, the 500 Pokécoins pack costs over 6$. The only Pokécoins pack
that gives more Pokécoins than the number of cents you pay… is the last one,
14500 Pokécoins for 140$. What a load of bullshit. I can understand that
Niantic wants the amount they’ve ordered in USD, but conversion rates really
ruin this. How bad is it in other countries? I wish to know.
11. Lures and Incenses… Nope.
As you level up in the game, you might gain some Lures and Incenses. The
concept for each is fairly simple: By activating an Incense, more Pokémon will
appear near you in the next 30 minutes. Lures are the same, except you attach
one to a Pokéstop and everyone around can reap the benefits. I live in a calm
suburban sector of my town, but I am lucky to live two minutes away from the
only Pokéstop at least one kilometer around. I’ve activated some Incenses, I’ve
also activated at least one Lure… and I can tell you, they’re not really worth
it. First off, chances are most of the spawns will be the same stupid common
Pokémon you’ve already seen hundreds of. Chances are that you won’t encounter
many rarer Pokémon; Hell, the first Jigglypuff I caught was thanks to a Lure,
and if I recall, it was the only “rare” Pokémon I got during that half-hour. Similarly,
Incenses are nearly useless if not used in a spot where more Pokémon have a
chance to spawn, and Lures are useless if you don’t have a Pokéstop nearby.
10. Revives are useless
While we’re on the topic of items… The last time I went downtown, I
tried beating a Gym. First, I was never told I had to fight multiple opponents.
Second, in-battle the app would keep slowing down; this, after I lost and my
unique Pokémon had its HP down to 0, I could
just bring its HP back to maximum with Potions. Revives are meant to be used
to, well, revive a fainted Pokémon. If a Pokémon’s HP hits 0, it’s supposed to
be fainted, and potions shouldn’t work on it as long as it’s fainted. Guess
what? I could just replenish my Vaporeon’s HP with potions even if it was
supposed to have fainted. Revives are completely pointless, and yet we receive
them numerous times by spinning Pokéstops. What the Hell? Can’t we at least
sell the items we don’t need? …No? Fuck!
9. Way too many candies for evolution
Many Pokémon are already plenty rare, which makes it a pain to try and
evolve them. For those who still haven’t played Pokémon Go but know the
original games, first off, don’t try the app, second, here the evolution system
is simplified. All Pokémon evolve when you give them a number of candies of
their base species, anywhere from 12 (for the common Weedle and Pidgey) to 25
(for the other common base Pokémon with two evolutions) to 50 (for the unique
evolution of some Pokémon, for the third-stage evolution of some other
Pokémon), to 100 (for the third-stage evolution of some rarer Pokémon) to 400
(for the motherfucking Magikarp, which I haven’t even caught one of). Thing is,
catching a Pokémon gives you only three candies of that Pokémon’s base species,
and sending one to Prof Willow only rewards you with one additional candy. That
means that, for the lowest required amount (12), you need to catch at least 4
Pokémon; one to evolve and three to send to Willow. For Magikarp, you need to
catch 101; one to evolve, the others you can guess. Needless to say,
most Trainers have a bunch of Raticate in their teams, many have lots of
Beedrill, and the most tenacious ones have four or five Pidgeot; but good luck
getting rarer Pokémon to ever evolve. Hatching a Pokémon from an egg gives you
many candies of that Pokémon’s species, but the downside is that you have to
walk for many kilometers each day to make it worth it. And stock up on
Incubators.
8. No Internet Connectivity/ No GPS Signal
The most common error messages I’ve seen popping up in the game. “No GPS
signal” means that the app couldn’t track your position for a reason or
another. I’ve seen that this message can go on and off at will depending on
where I am. It’s no secret that Pokémon Go needs to know your position, but
with such a fickle system that works for a bit and then stops working… it’s
annoying. “No Internet Connectivity” is a similar issue, though it’s apparently
got more to do with the phone the app is on than it’s a problem with the app
itself. And yet, even when I have the best settings for Internet connectivity,
I still wind up seeing this message pop up every once in a while.
7. The lack of Pokéstops in less populated places
One of the defects of Pokémon Go is that your best chances to “catch
them all” is to live in a major city. Or else, you’re screwed. The further into
suburbs you go, the less Pokéstops appear. Gyms almost entirely vanish from the
map. As I mentioned, I live on the border of my city, in a suburban area, and
the Pokéstop two minutes of walk away from me is the only one at least a kilometer around. Irony is, it’s a small park for kids, yet 30 minutes of walk from here
there’s a much bigger park with more people going there. Meanwhile, in the
downtown sector, if you threw a rock you’d hit a Pokéstop if they were real. In
general, the idea of Pokémon Go was that infrastructures of the game could be
found anywhere. Except clearly, Niantic is following an algorithm that puts way
more Pokéstops and Gyms where there’s a greater concentration of cell phones. I
see the point, but it really sucks for those who don’t live in the big city.
6. The lack of Pokémon in less populated places
Following the same algorithm, Pokémon get rarer and rarer as you go
further from the big city. There, you are certain to see more Pokémon show up
if you walk for a minute; here, you’d be lucky to see anything show up. I am
relatively lucky because I live close to a frequent spawning point, but that
still means waiting for that one rare Pokémon to appear. In a way, this
algorithm favors cities, which makes sense, but shouldn’t there be an opposite
algorithm that makes Pokémon spawn where there are LESS phones? So that people
are encouraged to visit other places, go into suburban areas, take walks in the
forest, go into the nature? The nature which, in normal Pokémon games, is where
Pokémon are normally found? I mean, yes, I can drive to the city, sure, I can
go catch Pokémon there. But I just feel there is a kind of irony to the way
Niantic programmed this at the moment.
5. The broken tracking system
One of the main selling points from Day 1 was the tracking system and
how it would show how close or how far Pokémon would be from you, with a
three-step indicator. One step, the Pokémon is very close; two, it’s a bit
further but not all that far; three steps, the Pokémon is pretty far, but if
you walk fast you may get to it. And one of the main complaints of Pokémon Go
after release, from Day 1, was that this thing was outright broken. For most –
if not ALL – users, every “nearby Pokémon” has the three steps, even the ones
that are right next to the player’s avatar. As far as we know, Niantic was
planning to correct this at some point in the future. For now, what we got with
the latest updates… is a complete elimination of the three-step system. So…
Niantic, is that your go-to solution? When something doesn’t work, you
silently dispose of it rather than try to make things better?
4. The app crashing when a Pokémon is caught in a ball
My first moments of anger directed at the game were when the server
wouldn’t respond after a Pokémon has been caught in a Pokéball. Thing is, this
happened as soon as contact between the Pokémon and the ball was made, so unless you restarted the app, you wouldn’t
know whether or not you caught the Pokémon. The only upside to this is that,
even if the app crashed, if it was guaranteed that the Pokémon was caught, it
would appear in your Pokémon collection. The downside is that it tended to happen
to me far more often when facing rare Pokémon – or at least, Pokémon I didn’t
yet own or was encountering for the first time. That’s already pretty bad. And
thus, for a long time, my question after a ball was thrown wasn’t “will this
Pokémon be caught?”, it was “will it crash or not?”. That’s pretty unreliable
for a game… but it gets worse.
3. The app crashing… every other time
Of course, if it crashed only when catching a Pokémon, it would be
annoying, but not impossible to manage. But Pokémon Go had a tendency to crash
for almost any reason.
-It couldn’t reach the server, and the spinning Pokéball on the top left
(indicating the game was saving and attempting to access the server) would stop
mid-spin;
-I was browsing the Shop;
-I was checking my collection of Pokémon, sending some to Prof Willow,
renaming others (mostly the Eevee);
-I was close to a Pokéstop;
-An egg in my collection was close to hatching (yes, it would crash
repeatedly for the last 200 meters I would still have to traverse to hatch an
egg);
-And sometimes at random.
Not to mention that, frequently, when I would leave the app to do
something else on my phone and then go back to the app, the game would start
over, showing me again the Niantic Labs logo for a good 30 seconds and then the
“Look where you’re going” image with the Gyarados. As if it crashed while I was away. Worse even, when the app
crashed, my attempts at closing it by returning to the phone’s main menu would
somehow leave the phone in a sort of limbo between the game and a completely
black screen, for numerous minutes, locking me out. I would play for 2 or 3
minutes, then this would happen and I would be stuck for 5-6 minutes. By the
end, this seemed to get a little better, it happened less frequently. Alas, it
was too little too late. Is my phone to blame? My HTC Desire 601 never behaved
that way before….
2. Always the same goddamn species
I get it, the app follows the rarity of Pokémon in the games of the
first Generation. That means there’s an overabundance of Pidgey, Rattata,
Weedle – the early common critters who, outside of Pidgeot, rarely make it to
the end. Why would they? Their evolved forms’ stats are average for some,
mediocre for others. However, walking around the neighborhood and seeing ONLY
these three can get REALLY grating at times. Sure, there’s also Eevee, the
fourth Com Mon, and this one can at least turn into pretty powerful creatures
if you catch enough, but that’s not sufficient. Where are the Electabuzz, the
Gastly, the Magikarp? In all my time playing, I saw exactly one Magikarp on the
Tracker, and never found it.
I can understand why there are so few common species around. This was
only Gen 1, there weren’t that many Pokémon yet (and 150 is tiny compared to
the 721 the Pokémon franchise now has, not counting the upcoming Gen 7!). If
more Gens get added to the game someday, we will get more diversity for common
Pokémon, it would be more interesting. A bunch of Hoothoot at night, Zigzagoon
and Poochyena galore, maybe plenty of Bidoof… Until we get there (and the app
gets bigger and slower), we’ll have to endure the thousands of Weedle and
Rattata. And we’ll keep on meeting more Pidgey, enough so that if they were
real, we could probably solve world hunger by sending all the Pidgey we caught
and a bunch of barbecues to malnourished countries. But none of these reasons compare to... well, you probably guessed it.
1. Pokévision shutting down (and Niantic Labs' other policies)
After seeing all of the problems, I was close to quitting the app
altogether. Too much trouble, too many bugs, and I was getting constantly angry
at it rather than feeling joy – like, you know, what’s supposed to happen when
playing. When a game becomes a chore, it’s no longer a game, and with the same
Pokémon always showing up, Pokémon Go was becoming a chore to me and many
others. Then, my interest sparked anew when I learned about Pokévision, a
little site that tracked the appearances and disappearances of creatures around a point you
choose on the map. I was fucking fed up of Pidgey, Rattata and Weedle, so I
decided to keep that site open and click again every few minutes, running out
only when something worthwhile showed up on the map. I can’t say it allowed me
to catch a lot of new Pokémon, but I did catch more uncommon Pokémon that I
already had, especially for the species I needed more candies from. I considered Pokévision a fair tool to use in my neighborhood where spawns were rare and I wasn't gonna go out all day to encounter the same three stupid species.
Here’s a little trick of the trade. You know, the Terms of Service you
agree to when you purchase an app? That very long wall of text filled with
complex terms and sentences about rights and stuff? Yeeeaaaaaaahhhhh… For
Pokémon Go, you shouldn’t just swiftly click I Agree to push this aside. This
app has some really worrisome rules. For starters, Niantic entirely forbids the
use of sites like Pokévision. The contract explicitly says that you cannot “attempt
to access or search the Services or Content, or download Content from the
Services through the use of any technology or means other than those provided
by Niantic or other generally available third-party web browsers (including,
without limitation, automation software, bots, spiders, crawlers, data-mining
tools, or hacks, tools, agents, engines, or devices of any kind)”. That means
that any site that grabs data from Niantic’s computers is not to be used; and
that includes all Pokémon-tracking websites, whether it’s Pokévision,
PokéWhere, PokéDetector, or Poké Hound. In even simpler terms: Fuck you,
player; search for those Pokémon by yourself.
Or, as John Hanke, CEO of Niantic Lab, says, “[…] People
are only hurting themselves because it takes some fun out of the game. People
are hacking around trying to take data out of our system and that's against our
terms of service.”
I’ll tell you what takes the fun out of a game: Searching for 15 minutes
for a Pokémon and never finding it, especially if it’s a fucking rare Pokémon.
What else takes the fun out of the game? Living in a suburb, where spawns are
rare. We’re not hurting ourselves. We’re trying to find some enjoyment in a
beta that is extremely broken and your development team isn’t working to
repair it. Worse even, you seem to sweep under the rug any issue the
game has. The first few days of launch, where the app had access to an insane
amount of data from one’s Google account; remember that? And now, instead of
repairing the three-step system, you get rid of it? That’s not how a company
gains the respect of its fans. That’s how it gets their ire.
Oh, but I had forgotten; we can’t sue, either. Because another clause in
the Terms of Service is this one: “Arbitration notice: Except if you opt out
and except for certain types of disputes described in the “Agreement to
Arbitrate” section below, you agree that disputes between you and Niantic will
be resolved by binding, individual arbitration, and you are waiving your right
to a trial by jury or to participate as a plaintiff or class member in any
purported class action or representative proceeding.” The arbitrator chosen for
this legal procedure? Hired by Niantic Labs. If you have a problem with them,
they have the big end of the stick by hiring the third-party person who'll settle the dispute. It’s normal that an enterprise adds points to their ToS regarding
legal action, but Niantic went with the shadier option, the binding
arbitration, where the public has little chance of overcoming them.
Mister John Hanke, you clearly have no clue why things like Pokévision
popped up. Perhaps it has to do with the outright broken system in the app and
the many issues it currently has. Perhaps it’s because a large number of gamers
actually see this as a viable tool to enjoy the game far more. Perhaps it's because many suburbia-bound folks are also tired of hunting the rare Pokémon and will give up if they don't get something to find quickly the diamonds among the worms, rats and pigeons. Sorry, sir, but you do not hold the final definition of the word “fun”, don’t pretend
that what you consider “fun” is what everyone else considers “fun”. The interest of a video game is that everyone can play it as they like, and this is especially true for Pokémon. Some Pokémon players only want to participate in battles and prepare their Pokémon for competitions. Others want to catch them all. And then, some do Nuzlocke challenges. You cannot force players to play Pokémon Go the way YOU want to, sir. That is not how video games work.
Perhaps getting down and talking to actual players, listening to what
advice the fanbase has to give, would help. Gamers have been using sites like
GameFAQs for as long as they’ve been around, because any gamer has the right to
go and seek some help when they’re stuck in a game. Pokévision is basically
that: We know we won’t grow super-speed to catch that Jynx that popped up ten
minutes of driving away from us, so we should be allowed to know where and when
rare Pokémon pop up near our homes, without having the battery-emptying app
always turned on. That goes for players living in cities, but it also goes for
those who live in suburban areas. Like me. We are trying to play this game to
the fullest, and if Pokévision is what we need to enjoy it, then why couldn’t
we use it? That site was the only reason I still bothered playing. Personally,
without Pokévision, the game is dead to me, and I expect hundreds of thousands
more to stop playing as well.
I was willing to defend your game. I recognized that it was a new
activity to do as a family, I defended it in the face of those who insulted the
game and called its players “zombies”. I walked more in the last two weeks than
I usually do. But I am sorry, I can’t defend it anymore, with all these bugs
and the worrisome Terms of Service...
Screw Pokémon Go. Screw it, I quit. Enjoy those 9 Canadian dollars I sent,
Niantic Labs. Until you fix this shit and allow sites like Pokévision to exist as
companions, as helpers for the players, you won’t be seeing my avatar – or my
money – again.
Good day to all the readers of this blog who went through the trouble of
reading this 3000+-word rant. Good day to you, mister John Hanke, and may you
seek to ameliorate both your app and the relationship you wish your enterprise
to have with your customers.
Everyone, have a nice week.
