Niantic Labs just can't help itself.
Apart from being incapable of communicating with its community, which is just one of five reasons why Pokémon GO sucks right now, Niantic—or perhaps just Niantic's corporate overlords—has released a pitiful, feature-removing update for the game that is making no one happy.
The game's Nearby feature, which is meant to give players a radar of what Pokémon are in the area and approximately how far away they are, has become a shell of its former self. What worked properly during the first week of the game's release has since then been plagued by a bug that marks every Pokémon near the player as being three steps away. This piece of intentionally broken code was meant to reduce server load, but it still hasn't been fixed.
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And now, Niantic has removed the three-step bug altogether and replaced it with, well, nothing. Instead, all you see is the Pokémon who are nearby. You have no clue where they are, how far away they are, and what the point of it all is unless you want to play Pokémon Go Wander Aimlessly or Pokémon Go Sit Near a Pokéstop. The Nearby feature has now regrettably become a tracker of all the Pokémon that you'll probably never find.
To play devil's advocate, are they doing this so that new players aren't confused about the three-step bug? Or is the tracker never returning? No one knows the answer, because Niantic isn't communicating anything about it.
To make matters worse, Niantic has changed its code so that third-party apps like Pokévision and Poké Live, which show the location of Pokémon in your area and how much time you have to catch it, no longer function. Sure, these apps are sort of cheating, but they actually make players walk somewhere instead of sitting at at Pokéstop and that's been one of the only things keeping players going while the Nearby tracker is useless.
Instead of fixing the game's own tracker, or aggressively shutting down GPS spoofers who trick the servers into where their location actually is and have taken over gyms as a result, they decide to break user-made trackers made by other devs and fans. Is Niantic dismantling a popular mod because it's cheating or because it's embarrassing?
As Yang C Liu, one of the creators of Pokévision, stated in a Tweet:
You don't invent Marco Polo, get 80M players to join, then remove the Polo part and expect people to keep playing.
Even worse than all this is that Niantic has reduced the player's scanning radius from 100 meters to 70 meters. This effectively means that, using elementary math, the scanning area has been reduced by half. If Niantic wanted to penalize players for going places, they've done a fine job.
Oh, and let's not forget to mention that the experience you would have earned for Great (+50XP) and Excellent (+100XP) throws no longer exist. If anyone deserves experience points, it's someone who gets an Excellent throw which I've only gotten twice out of what must be at least 2,500 throws. Now, all those expertly thrown Poké Balls don't mean crap anymore. Yes, because what Pokémon Go needs is less gameplay.
It's downright heartbreaking to see Pokémon Go slowly die by a thousand cuts… from its own creator. Niantic is losing its community fast, to the point that by the time they fix the game, it may already be dead. Niantic, stop leaving your Charmander in the rain. No one wants to go to a Charmander funeral.
