Pokémon Go! - Page 133

On December 16 2016 07:32 dAPhREAk wrote:
i highly doubt niantic offered him a job. he has been spitting in their face from the very beginning.

On December 16 2016 07:09 Gahlo wrote:

Because they want the game to be easy mode. It started because people wanted decent tracking, but trackers put people into false complacency. There's a tracker for my city that, I shit you not, will display EVERY non-common spawn in the city and let you filter stuff. People were filtering to Snorlax and driving around at night catching dozens of them.

That guy doesn't care at all about the quality of the game. He's only in it to make money for himself now. According to him, Niantic offered him a job and he turned it down. Dude gets 0 benefit of the doubt from me.

On December 20 2016 15:31 Gahlo wrote:
Too bad they've already fixed the tracker update vibrations.

I agree, having nearby crowd out/overwrite sightings entirely isn't an ideal situation. I'm not happy with the in game tracking it its current situation either.

Third party apps make anything Niantic does "regressive" because they give a player access to information they were never intended to have in the first place.

On December 20 2016 15:57 Oktyabr wrote:


Mind you, information which actually makes the game fun by getting people to run from place to place within a timer. No other mobile game can claim to achieve that. It seems as if you prefer to walk 1-2 blocks max and give up on anything else outside that radius.

But of course its too late to even bring the crowd back. You can already sense their desperation. Double candy, items, then xp all within a span of a few weeks lol.

On December 20 2016 16:06 dAPhREAk wrote:

considering they did these events with their previous game, i am going to assume that it was a planned event rather than say something stupid like they are desperate. and it wasnt within a few weeks, they coincided with holidays.

On December 20 2016 16:20 Oktyabr wrote:


Oh really? With the exception of Halloween, double items and double xp were handed out to "celebrate" the game's new features and progress. These goodies are just going to come more frequently once the game is left with near 5% of its original playerbase.

On December 20 2016 16:32 dAPhREAk wrote:

double xp/dust coincided with thanksgiving in the U.S. the double items was related to the release of daily bonuses, which is pretty much a norm for most f2p games.

its pretty amazing that for a dying game, sprint/starbucks just gave them sponsorship money. but hey, you obviously know more than sprint/starbucks as to whether the game is succeeding, right?

edit: spoiler, there will be another event for christmas. because they are desperate, you know? not because its another big holiday.

On December 20 2016 17:02 Oktyabr wrote:


I'm pretty sure I know what the sentiment is like on the ground, at least in my own country. We'll see. Meanwhile I'll hold on to my lucky eggs because I'm sure that they'll release double xp for another week soon.

On December 20 2016 15:00 Oktyabr wrote:


FPM's tweets are actually spot on lol. I have a ton of grouses with the tracker.

Tracker is now being swarmed with a ton of commons nobody needs a tracker for, even worse, vibrations are added once sightings are updated which are downright annoying because usually it forces people to check their phone to see if there are legitimate spawns. This is the most retarded feature ever. I could usually play with power saver mode and leave the phone by my side as I walk along the park and enjoy the scenery, now I have to check my phone every 10s in the event that I do miss an actual spawning.

A swarmed tracker defeats the purposes of providing sightings to begin with - there's virtually no possibility of spotting a Snorlax or something rare now when in the past it used to condense similar pokemon to one single sighting. Now it's straight up filled with 3x ratata, 2x pidgey, 2x zubats and a whole ton of shit. Third party apps used to be awesome precisely because they could filter. You'd spend at most 2-3 minutes looking through your vicinity for anything interesting to hunt instead of hoping to clear out the trash in your neighborhood in the hopes of seeing something new.

Let's face it - this game doesn't require skill or anything. There is no easy mode or hard mode for this game. You simply need to be at the right place at the right time. I used to be that guy that ran nearly 2km past an expressway just to get to a Snorlax, and I ran for 10 minutes straight for a ton of meaningless but somewhat rare stuff like hitmonchan, weezing, omastar, electrode. I used to leave my home in the middle of the night to get to charmander spawns across the road and end up going home over an hour later while being distracted by other tempting pokemon - all of these are made possible with the third party trackers. I have never driven a car for this game, and I have never spoofed at all, but such trackers made the game legitimately fun because you are now aware of what possibilities are out there and you have to decide if you could get there in time. Pokemon hunting was an actual thing with those trackers. It was pretty exhilarating. Back then I could see a bunch of strangers grouping together to run for starter spawns - again all thanks to these apps.

Now I just head to the park for maybe 30 minutes and back and can't be bothered to check the sightings because its hands down worthless. The only conceivable advantage an in-game tracker could bring was instantaneous updates on spawns. Every other aspect of Niantic's tracker is straight up regressive compared to third party apps - retarded vibrating false alarms, no filter for things you don't care about, sighting radius obviously not further too, no timer on despawn. And my community is totally dead with nobody gathering for lures or hunting trips together anymore. Niantic made a lot of stupid decisions that pretty much decimated the playerbase - don't even get me started on pokemon catching probabilities past level 30.

On December 20 2016 17:21 dAPhREAk wrote:

i apologize. i didnt realize you were the spokesperson for singapore.

On December 20 2016 17:42 Laurens wrote:


I actually prefer the new tracker. Simply because the range is now much bigger. This will be useful especially when Gen 2 comes out and I actually still need pokemon for Dex. Dunsparce at a stop 1 km away from here? Let's go! Impossible to know he's there with the previous tracker.

Your argument that sightings only shows worthless pokemon is weak at best. They've reduced the amount of pidgeys/rattatas. On top of that, if you don't want to see a certain pokemon in your Nearby, you can just go to the stop and catch it, it will be gone from the tracker. If they ever introduce filters it'd be a top tier tracker. (Though also broken/OP, so it'll never happen)

Let's compare what I see from my location now to what I saw from my location before the tracker update:
- Before tracker: Usually empty sightings list, occasionally a rattata/pidgey/spearow from the hourly spawn point right outside our office
- New tracker: 4 rats, 1 pidgey, 1 magikarp, 1 abra, 2 goldeen imgur.com

That's a Magikarp and an Abra I would've otherwise not caught.

Yeah you could walk in range of a Snorlax and not know, but with the previous tracker there could be 3 Snorlaxes within 1 km range and you wouldn't know either.

On December 20 2016 18:08 Oktyabr wrote:


I almost mistook you for a spokesperson for niantic based on how you thought that sponsorship spoke volumes about the health of the game, but I guess they'll have to settle for you being their mouthpiece given the state of the game. I stand by my opinion that they've squandered a lot of potential of this game and turned off a huge segment of the playerbase based on many stupid decisions they've made thus far.



You being able to see a Magikarp and an Abra has nothing to do with the tracker. There was an update which nearly doubled the number of pokemon that spawns at any given location, and also increases the variety of spawning based on biome. What you would have seen in the past would be 1 instance of ratata, 1 of pidgey/magikarp/abra/goldeen each, effectively leaving space for an actual Snorlax sighting. Your example is pretty ridiculous because you'd never see 3 Snorlaxes spawn near each other, but let's entertain that notion. With the old tracker I'll be able to see the Snorlax sighting, and what I'll do next is switch to the third party app to figure out where the Snorlax actually is. It's like I'm beating a dead horse but I can't stress simply enough the importance of a filter.

I'll give you an actual example of how bad the tracker is. My usual routine is near a waterfront area that leads to park. By experience I know that the park has a ton of pretty interesting spawns upon arrival - geodude, ponyta, sandshrew, kabuto, vulpix. I wouldn't have known this if I wasn't going there everyday for the past 2 months. Now the route starts off at the waterfront area and all I see is a ton of ratatas, magikarps, psyducks, ekans, poliwags. I could be as close as 200m and I'll see at best the geodude, and that's assuming I actually succeed in catching every single psyduck in the area. The tracker simply doesn't represent what is truly available in the area. If I didn't frequent the park, I would have headed home and called it a day. Third party apps were the key to alerting me to the unusual spawns in the park right ahead to begin with and got me started on a routine for so long.

On December 20 2016 18:18 Laurens wrote:


What? Of course it has to do with the tracker. They are more than 200m away.

I'll put this very simple:
Old tracker: 200m range
New tracker: 1km+ range
magikarp and abra: ~500-600m away

What I would've seen in the past is exactly as I described: 1 pokemon in sightings from the only spawn point that is within 200m of the office.

Implying that the old tracker only works well when combined with a 3rd party tracker doesn't help your case.

On December 20 2016 18:48 Laurens wrote:
Okay so we're arguing different things, my bad.

What I'm saying is: New tracker > Old tracker, ignoring 3rd party trackers altogether.
Not sure why you compare "old tracker + 3rd party" with "new tracker" rather than "new tracker + 3rd party" but ok.

I filled my pokedex without 3rd party trackers, perfectly possible.

As for why Niantic doesn't want to bring these 3rd party tracker features into their game / actively fights 3rd party trackers with encryption, this is pretty obvious: People would complete their dex too quick and quit.