While many fans have been disappointed with the removal of of the in-game tracker in Pokemon Go and the fact that third-party tracking sites have been shut down, it seems to have significantly improved the game’s servers. Niantic has explained in a blog post that those third-party sites were putting serious strain on their servers and were hindering their ability to release a stable game.
“As some of you may have noticed we recently rolled out Pokémon GO to Latin America including Brazil. We were very excited to finally be able to take this step,” the developer wrote. “We were delayed in doing that due to aggressive efforts by third parties to access our servers outside of the Pokémon GO game client and our terms of service. We blocked some more of those attempts yesterday. Since there has been some public discussion about this, we wanted to shed some more light on why we did this and why these seemingly innocuous sites and apps actually hurt our ability to deliver the game to new and existing players.”
“In addition to hampering our ability to bring Pokémon GO to new markets, dealing with this issue also has opportunity cost. Developers have to spend time controlling this problem vs. building new features,” the developer added. “It’s worth noting that some of the tools used to access servers to scrape data have also served as platforms for bots and cheating which negatively impact all Trainers. There is a range of motives here from blatant commercial ventures to enthusiastic fans but the negative impact on game resources is the same.”
While it is disappointing to see some of these third-party sites go down, Niantic has to make sure there game is as good, and safe, as possible. If this leads to a more stable server, then this was a good move by Niantic to further improve Pokemon GO. Pokemon GO is out now as a free download for iOS and Android.
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