What went wrong?

I dunno, something with the servers, it sounds like.

Couldn't keep up with the demand.
And the tracker is horrorable.

>>27456025
Released a buggy mess of a freemium game that is getting retards to walk into traffic.

>>27456154
I heard the update got rid of the pawprints and 3rd party tracking completely. I saw my game updating earlier but haven't opened it yet. Came here hoping to see some info about the update.

>>27456025
They were never good at managing ingress in the first place and they never learned from any of their mistakes. Their PR Manager was 8 and 3/4 months pregnant when they decided to launch version 0.29 of their game on the google play store for some reason. They proceeded to launch in 35 other countries while the game was not working to begin with. They straight up removed a bunch of features from the game as time went on, and updated with things like literally "Minor Text Fixes" and cosmetic changes of slightly nicer looking medal images. They decided not to accept any help from Amazon or Google's cloud servers and instead ran the game on the same servers as their previous game, Ingress.

And now we realize that their support email leading to an unattended inbox with an auto-replier is against Google's terms of service.

Somehow, despite 14 million dollars during launch and 3 million dollars every single day since then, they have not addressed any of it.

>>27456025
Laziness, greed, the usual things uou encounter with shitty companies.

Shitty entitled manchildren are the majority audience.

>>27456025

Niantic are some literal NOBODY fucking developer and complete fucking noobs who were entrusted with a major property like Pokemon

If you're gonna do a project of this scale, you need someone better than fucking bargain bin indie devs on the project

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>>27457995

Wow man, they sound like a bunch of cock suckers

Jesus Christ, this could be bad.

>>27458415
Niantic is literally plugging their ears and going LALALA.

This isn't entitlement at all. People want refund for things like wasting money buying lures right before servers went down in the first few days of the game. And purchases longer than 48 hours need you to directly contact the developer for it. But their support email is an automated message telling you that "nobody reads this email, try the pokemon go support page". Which coincidentally does not have anything on its dropdown regarding refunds. Not that they've ever talked to players about anything in the first place, since the only things on their dropdown list are issues that can be solved in seconds, like removing pokestops.

It's straight up bullshit for how much time and resources they've had.

>>27458698
>It's straight up bullshit for how much time and resources they've had.

Yes

All they've managed to do is disable and remove the tracking feature, and to take down third party apps like Pokevision

They haven't fixed one single problem yet. And it has been like a month

>>27458788
Nah, they got minor text fixes and new images for medals in. And they added lines under the eggs.

3 weeks of work. I'm sure the poor hundred-millionaires at Niantic must be exhausted after all that work. They'll probably just fix the rest of the game when they wake up from their nap.

>>27456025
Let me tell you a fun little story about a company named Niantic from the perspective of an original beta Ingress player.

>November 2012
"The Niantic Project" opens detailing an ARG story that would eventually prep for the release of the game "Ingress" Said game being developed by a (at the time) in house Google company known as Niantic. The game is released shortly after in a closed "Invite only" beta which people interested would either have to apply for an invite directly or would have to create artwork to "please" the developers enough to provide an invite code into the game.

Several months pass in closed beta with little change in adding/improving the game. Once a year has passed the open the game to all and have it be an "Open Beta" and shortly after stable. As the game became open to everyone a massive flood of new users and spoofers gain access to the game causing massive server issues.

Niantic becomes aware of the Spoofers and tries to take them down a peg by adding a "Speed Limiter" which disables all app functionality and gameplay when you are moving beyond 20-30mph. This caused a rift in the players who could not recharge their portals while traveling because that too was disabled thanks to this anti-spoof counter measure. That said however this did not kill spoofing at all.

>>27456025
Literally whos thought they could handle a pokemon game

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>>27457995
>Somehow, despite 14 million dollars during launch and 3 million dollars every single day since then, they have not addressed any of it.

>nobody will stop giving them money
>they'll keep getting away with it
>they'll fix the game when they're good and ready but not after getting $3m/day

>>27460456

>2013-2014
Niantic still trying to keep up with it's users after a user stat system was released a particular badge known as "Seer" which counted how many successful portal submissions you had go through caused many players to overload Niantic's submission system. They would try to fix this by employing an algorithm to approve/deny portals on the fly. This would end up working well and submissions were as fast in a matter of a day or two. That is until it was realized that the algorithm was approving of fake/joke/shitty locations as portals and a few people figured out that keywords such as "monument", "Gazebo", "memorial" and so on were algorithm highlighted and would instantly approve the submission regardless of picture/location. A lot of people got away with this submitting a lot of bullshit before Niantic caught on and pulled the plug on the auto submission system. Vowing to go back to portal approval teams and so on.

Eventually they would retire the seer badge to discourage people in submitting so many locations. A year or so later they outright retired the submission system as the team could not process the daily number of submissions per day.

Niantic did eventually open the system back up, but only in Japan.

>>27460543

>Cross-promotion gone wrong
At some point Niantic partnered up with Motorola mobility (which at the time was also owned by Google) in a means to cross promote their game in an upcoming device by releasing a limited item for the game. This item would be called the "Ultra Strike" and it would only be accessible via the Motorola "Droid Ultra" through Verizon.

The outcry of this decision was heard on all fronts both within the US and internationally. Since the Droid Ultra was a Verizon exclusive device no one outside of Verizon or outside the country could get their hands on using Ultra Strikes. This was an unfair practice by Niantic and they ignored the majority of the complaints on the matter. A few weeks later however a couple of players were able to copy the build.prop information of the Droid Ultra and by modifying their devices own build.prop to make it identify as an Ultra to Niantic servers everyone was able to get their hands on Ultra Strikes ultimately undermining Niantic's exclusivity for a few years until they finally released the item to all devices past the point of relevance.

But would this be the end of Niantic and exclusivity? By no means. You would think they would learn their lesson from the fans the last time but things will only get more complicated.

>>27460618

>The Zipcar Fiasco

Niantic has worked with some companies for cross promotion/ad revenue for some time now. One of their more well known cross promoters being Zipcar would have specially dedicated portals set up for every known Zipcar location. There was also a Zipcar passcode list that would allow players to redeem passcodes for various items. However a few smart players found out that the passcodes were the license plates of all known zipcars and with a database available created the "Zipcar Fiasco" which thousands of players were redeeming hundreds of passcodes throughout the night. Niantic realized this and tried to disable the submitting of them through the website end but players were still able to input them in through the app's passcode system. This caused players to have an insane amount of items which Niantic responded by creating an item limit of 2000. Anyone at or over the limit would not be able to obtain more items from portals until their inventory was cleaned/used up.

Also Niantic never figured to add a number counter to inventory until 2 years after the fact. Before then people kept spreadsheets on tracking their inventory space.

>>27460707

>AXA and the problems that came from it.

Niantic would eventually partner up with AXA insurance international to not only release portals at every international AXA location but also a special item known as the "AXA Shield". Said shield being more powerful than the current portal shields in the game and at a period of time were only obtainable through AXA portals. Since these could only be done internationally players were once again pissed and started to spoof over to AXA portals to farm said shields. Eventually Niantic would release AXA shields to every portal but AXA portals would still remain at having a much higher chance of obtaining AXA shields than the rest. This would end up being the beginning of something common for a particular country.

>>27460752

>Japanland (Or how Niantic fell in love with a country)

Niantic's CEO John Hanke expressed his love for the players in Japan who have despite not being part of a larger country have had shown nothing but love and dedication for the game. At the time of an "Anomaly" (I.E. meetup) Niantic made a special redeemable badge for Japan alongside the normal anomaly badge because they wanted to. Anomaly badge collectors were pissed by this but one of the players got a hold of a stack of these limited badges and started to sell them internationally with a shirt.

Niantic's love for the country only grew over time as Hanke kept making special visits there time and again. Niantic would soon make it a priority to add a Japan location at every anomaly series to make sure they never get left out of an anomaly (while some countries are still ignored and the east coast gets one a year if they are lucky).

To add more to Niantic's ever growing love of the country several deals and cross promotions with Japanese companies were made which would include a special item duplication capsule, a special long range link amp mod, and a more powerful power cube among other tie ins. All done in the same way as the AXA deal.

Niantic also made Japan the first country to open portal submissions again, the first country to test Pokemon GO before anyone else, and also still give exclusive badges to among other things.

You would think that Niantic was based in Japan with all this favoritism.

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>>27460850

>Pokemon GO is technically "No.3"

In 2014 a book series writer came to Niantic in interest of using the core game engine/concept of Ingress and build a new game as a tie in for his book series. Niantic agreed to the deal and began to develop "Endgame: Proving Ground" as a tie in for the Endgame book series.

The game would work similar to Ingress but would feature 12 separate teams "Bloodlines" who would fight in in a slightly more 3D designed environment. There was to be plenty of things carried over from Ingress into this game plus a few new mechanics such as direct PvP battles but little to no information was fully detailed on the game's development.

As 2015 rolled around many people asked about the development of the game. Niantic only replying with either "its being worked on" or not replying at all. The tie in was official at this point with the book's release and was set to prep for the game's release. Nothing ever came from it though.

A little while later much of the information and knowledge of the game fall into obscurity. Once the announcement of Pokemon GO happened all focus on the other game was buried among the hype of GO.

This was one of the screenshots of the game Niantic abandoned. I wonder if the book series writer ever got his money back for the game commission?

>>27456025
The players.

>>27460941

>Pokemon GO, the hype, the uncertainty.

At some point Niantic wanted to split away from Google and become their own company. Once the Alphabet restructuring happened Hanke and the team who supported him took the chance to break free to be on their own. Many players were uneasy about this as Google supplied the means and income for their projects/servers and anomaly meets. Apparently however this was a plan to take up a potential money making endeavor and would risk it all doing so.

Niantic had been in contact with Nintendo since 2014 when Google in brief partnership of TPC made an April Fool's joke on Google Maps for hunting down all 151 Pokemon. Apparently some people over at Nintendo were curious/interested in what Niantic had on the table with Ingress and wanted to work together on something big. This would end up being the groundwork for Pokemon GO.

Pokemon GO was announced to the world with much hype and cheer in tow. So many people have been wanting something like this for ages now and on the surface it seemed like it was all perfect. However a lot of the more disgruntled playerbase of Ingress started to doubt on Niantic's delivery as did a few other groups.

In typical Niantic fashion questioning and discussion about the release went ignored/dodged or were made vague at best. Some would even doubt that the game would release given Niantic never releasing their planned second game. That would soon change however as beta tests start making their way...to Japan only.

>>27461061

>NDA NoGO

The closed beta release of Pokemon GO was met with plenty of mixed feelings. Most of which between hype that the game was actually in the process of being tested but also disgust over the lack of countries involved. It would have not been a problem for the countries that were involved if the testers would simply talk about the game but this is where things get ass backwards.

The beta test of the game was under extreme NDA by Niantic and Nintendo. You were not able to share pictures of anything in the game, you were not able to show others the game in person, you were not able to even discuss the game in the open under fear of having your accounts for both PGO and Ingress banned for violation of the NDA.

The Japanese test users greatly respected/feared this with a majority refusing to talk about/share anything about the game. Once the test made its way to AUS/NZ however leaks became more realistic as well as the US once it was released here.

The biggest complaint about the test was that they expected to choose a few people to test a game so greatly hyped to the general populace and they expected that it would stay secret because of an NDA? What was Niantic/Nintendo thinking here with this? If they wanted to keep testing of this game in secret it would be much easier to just hire testers to keep the NDA than trust open users to keep their mouths shut when it comes to the most hyped mobile game of the year. It made no goddamn sense.

>>27461134

>E3 and rushed releases.

In late May of this year Niantic took in US field test users of the game. While the game itself worked fine there were plenty of issues that needed to be ironed out, primarily the nearby system either being wholly inaccurate or just being random at times. Eggs would sometimes hatch to no pokemon, the leveling system was vastly different than it is today (A Lv8 user could have up to 2000+CP pokemon) Great Balls and Ultra Balls were unlocked very early in the game with Lv5 unlocking the ability to obtain Master Balls. Spawn points were easier to see and predict spawns of certain pokemon and so on.

During E3 some Rep jackass alluded that Pokemon GO would be out soon because of the GO+ supposedly releasing at the end of July. Every media outlet eats this shit up announcing that Pokemon GO would release in July and everyone over hyping the fuck out of it now. Nintendo pressuring Niantic to get the game out there to the public had no choice but to close the beta at the end of June and try to polish up the game as best as they could before releasing it a week or so later to the public.

July 5th, Pokemon GO sent out emails to testers that there is a new update of the game that would be the stable release of the game. Some people released the apk ahead of the play store release as a shitload of people flocked to download it. This caused nothing but server issues for days to weeks on end.

Also despite the beta profiles being reset before the original release, most of the test users could not choose their beta name for the final release, forcing them to make a new player name for the game.

>not enough features
>servers are dogshit
>no battle/trading/anything, not even chatting
>removed the "how close are pokemon" so you can't even actually go find them

>HIGHLY reward sitting at a lure with incense

>>27461250

>Pokemon GO: The rise and fall

Niantic rejoices in the release of the game. Hype has made the game extremely popular on an almost global level despite it not being released globally yet. People are so happy the game is out and that they could play it.. Except they could not play it at all due to server overload and outages.

Niantic underestimated the draw of this game despite knowing full well on what they were getting into with this game. This is no niche audience they are dealing with here and they are simply not able to handle all the issues in one go.

How do they resolve this? They really do not resolve it at all. Every time they are able to get the servers stable they release another country to the game which causes more server crashing. At the same time several of the nearby glitches find their way back to the stable release including a power save bug and stability issues. Despite all of this however, they focus more on releasing more countries to the game despite it being broken.

Eventually some smart people find the means to access Niantic's GO's API/server calls and makes a means to map out all live pokemon spawns in a location. Several sites and apps would be made from this as people want to actually find pokemon rather than walk around blind.

Meanwhile bots and spoofers make their way into the game and make it easy to boost far into levels and obtaining all the rarest and powerful pokemon without needing to leave the house.

What does Niantic do however? Rather than focus on the actual cheaters in the game they aim to shut down map users, all while a the same time releasing an update that trashes any hope of Niantic fixing the Nearby system at all.

People get enraged over it, demand for a response to this and as to why, and Niantic refuses to respond.

Gaijin literally ruin everything

Fucking white pigs

>>27461361
Christ, anon, did you write all of this, or is this copypasta? Either way, this is fantastic information, thanks a ton for posting it. Really gave me a lot more perspective on the issue.