Originally published on Trevor Trove on August 13, 2016
Well it’s been a few days since Pokemon GO rolled out their latest update with revised tracking. “Nearby” has been replaced with “Sightings” (unless you’re in the test-market of San Francisco where the two run in tandem with “Nearby” now featuring Pokestop images). By most accounts, it actually sort of works again. But all week I’ve gotten consistently debilitating GPS errors. Prior to the update, I had no problem pulling into the underground garage at work, getting out of my car, loading up the app, and catching a Pokemon or two on my way to the office. But since the latest update, I’m left fighting off a “GPS signal not found anywhere inside my six-story office building. It’s not until I’m back outside again do I connect to the still shoddy and occasionally glitchy Pokemon GO servers.
As a result, I’ve basically stopped playing. I’ll still occasionally load it up and put it in my pocket on my walks to and from lunch. Of, course this also ends up a frustrating pain because the distance tracker Niantic uses is screwy so I can walk the roughly 1km to and from lunch and only a fraction of the distance gets counted. The combination of these frustrating experiences alongside the slog it has been trying to go from Level 21 to Level 22 have left me ready to walk away from the game entirely. I’ve caught or hatched maybe five new Pokemon in the last two weeks. The drive to continue catching them all isn’t there anymore and there’s just nothing else in the app to support my time so I’ll spend my time elsewhere.
This of course comes at a time where it’s been announced that the game has made over $250 million dollars since it launched just over a month ago. Niantic and the Pokemon Company clearly didn’t have a damn clue what they were working with here. If they did, they would have invested in twice the staff and servers and probably still have a couple hundred million left over.
I’m sure people are still out there having a great time with it, but I’m tired of trying to support this clearly unfinished product so it’s only a matter of time before I end up uninstalling the game altogether.
But at least Niantic has been responding to requests to alter Pokestops in inappropriate places like cemeteries. So that’s nice, I guess.
