>We have removed the ‘3-step’ display in order to improve

>>27501191
He means they fucked up and hey're going to keep fucking up.

>>27501191
What was the problem with the steps anyway? There was a glitch or something? Someone explain.

>>27501191
We can't fix it, because we are incompetent.So instead of trying lets just remove it.

Don't worry they will eventually bring it back and everyone will hail them as heroes

>>27501191
That they couldn't fix the glitch and that they had to come up with something to say about removing it.

"We're too lazy and incompetent to fix it, so we'll pretend we did this on purpose."

It's so weird how this is literally the exact opposite of what the problem was. When you could still track them by the number of steps, I was doing shit like running in the backyard at midnight for a Growlithe or running around the neighborhood for a Fearow. Now there's no point because everything is busted, but they're saying these features were "confusing"? The only confusing thing was the past month where the game didn't fucking work and Ni(gger)antic didn't say a fucking thing

>>27501221
The way it works is, no matter where you are or how much you walk, the “Nearby” tab will claim that each and every Pokémon is at a maximum distance away. Even if the critters on the Nearby tab change, they will still be displayed at three pawprints. You can still encounter Pokémon while experiencing this glitch, but there’s no actual way to hunt down a specific Pokémon.

>>27501410
and they're now claiming this feature that only served to make the game more fun and more playable actually caused confusion and something about underlying product goals (literally a meaningless term in this context)

>>27501221
On release your Nearby Pokemon display would show a number of footprints to show roughly how close you were to that particular pokemon. By walking around you could play hot & cold with a target pokemon to zero in on its location. About a week and a half after launch as Niantic released the game in more countries and the already stressed servers started seriously shitting the bed the footprints conveniently stopped working, always showing 3 steps regardless of your distance from the 'mon.

It's not much of a stretch to infer that given the size of Niantic and the resources it had on hand during this obviously rushed release that this wasn't a bug at all, and was in fact disabled to reduce server load. We may never know the truth, because Niantic has been practically silent apparently because they didn't bother to hire a community manager for the release.

The step feature was overloading their servers, but they don't want to admit that they're incompetent and couldn't fix it.