Update on Maintaining and Running the Pokémon GO Service(pokemongo.nianticlabs.com) |
Update on Maintaining and Running the Pokémon GO Service(pokemongo.nianticlabs.com) |
Do they suffer the rage of entire countries, and potentially their backers by delaying launching in territories to fix bugs?
OR do they suffer the rage of existing users by delaying bug fixes to keep to their original schedule by launching new territories?
All the while, they are crippled by scaling issues they never dreamt of having and managing cheating/additional traffic from the meta-ecosystem of trackers.
Have no doubt the team are working doubletime and overtime as it is, a shame that redditers are unable to see this. So keep it up Niantic - thanks for bringing us the AR killer app and for showing that there are still opportunities for huge apps to launch![0]
[0] https://www.appannie.com/insights/mobile-strategy/pokemon-go...
PS if you guys need more devs, do let me know :P
EDIT: downvotes - really? The post scriptum was obviously a cute joke. Or are the downvotes towards the Niantic support?
That said, however, the devs would still be affected by the feedback, they are almost certainly are working crazy stressful hours and the general backlash towards them is directed towards engineering.
My point being that we have no idea what it's like whatsoever inside Niantic, but you can be pretty sure their employees are working frantically right now, and the flak directed in their general direction is pretty unwarranted considering they've brought out a free video game that loads of people are enjoying.
The product might well have been released 6 months early, but isn't a more positive viewpoint that we should be grateful for having a version of Pokemon Go available early? 1 month ago, we didn't have pokemon go and our lives were essentially the same. Nothing is forcing us to play this game, it's bad, don't play it. If you have a problem with the management of the product then explicitly call out the management team but let's not forget that humans built and are building this product and are mostly following the instructions of their corporate overlords and take a moment to thank them for their hard work.
The only edge Niantic have over their fanbase is their gis database. Lack of communication was appalling, execution and reactivity too. I'm surprised nobody started a "private server" implementation of the game, yet.
From the chart it looks like third party API clients were generating two thirds of total traffic. That is a lot.
On the other hand, this has sparkled a huge community effort to reverse, understand and bypass the implemented protection/fingerprinting. https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongodev/comments/4w1cvr/pokemo...
Everyone I talk to who's also played Ingress sees history repeating itself. They've experienced the same bugs, lack of communication, shutting down services making the game better instead of improving said game and whatnot.
I really, really wish Niantic fixes its technical, management and communication problems. The game has so much potential but at this point I lost almost all hope they'll be able fully exploit it.
The graph they showed was of spatial queries. That's not going to be affected by lookups of images for pokestops.
A lot of bot writers are trying to break that authentication. Given that people are paying others to 'walk' their pokemon there is real money in faking GPS movement in the API.
Nobody including Niantic would ever have dreamed that Pokemon Go would be as huge a sensation as it has been. Nobody. And they have smartly realised that this opportunity is potentially fleeting and so they need to capitalise as quick as possible i.e. grow into other regions.
To expect them to do accurate capacity planning is ridiculous. Likewise it is ridiculous to assume that they can react any quicker than they can. It's very hard to scale quickly whilst still maintaining a high level of uptime.
However, they behaved in a way that really makes it difficult for us, players, to support them. They weren't ready for their success, sure, but they could at least bring some explanations on why would they ship without a trade system, why are they struggling with traffic and downtime, why would they delay bug fixes for more than 3 weeks, why they decided to remove one of the key feature of the game, and why they decided to ban third party apps made by people trying to fix their mistakes (and not with a broken graph!). I remember terrific launches from Blizzard, but even with all issues combined from Wow, Diablo and Hearthstone, this is nothing compared to Pogo's. I care about this game, because it's different from the long trail of duplicates we've seen for a long time; but, I really wish, Niantic, as a company, was more mature.
Like all good companies do in the tech/gaming space?
I definitely feel that a significant amount of the drive to use the 3rd party services was due to the fact that you couldn't realistically hunt down any of the pokemon that show up on your radar.
I was out walking today and saw an unknown Pokemon silhouette in my Nearby list. All I could do was shrug and hope I'd run into it (I didn't). Previously I would have gone significantly out of my way to find it, adding mileage to my walk - which I understood to be one of the design objectives of the game.
True, but I don't know if that's a fair metric. The Third Party API clients were the only effective way to play the game (because unlike real Pokemon games, "Go" focuses almost exclusively on the act of finding and catching, instead of training. And finding and catching doesn't actually work in their own client)
Effectively, Ninantic has "gotten traffic under control" by banning all non-beginner-level players and play strategies. It's like if YouTube decided to "manage traffic" by removing every video from PewDiePie.
Which we know, hasn't happened yet, but it's an important part of the direction they are going.
Around the time they banned API access they removed distance evaluation from the software (after having had it broken for a few weeks), initially the game included three distance ranges shown as steps in the UI, there's no distance information left whatsoever now.
Of course this could be an innocent mistake made by Niantic. Could be. But given that PR statements in general tend to be manipulative, I'm not willing to trust that. If they didn't want to reveal their resource capacity, they could have labeled the Y-axis with percentages.
Why did a product ship without features? Not enough time to make them.
Why are their servers struggling? The game is significantly more popular than they expected.
Then you can do a for loop and catch all the pokemon in 30 seconds.
Actually catching the pokemon is a 0 skill item. Its literally dragging your finger across the screen.
The entire game is the exploring the real world part.
A winning strategy must accommodate both.
