A recently released update for “Pokemon GO” has introduced a controversial change to the game, and it looks like the impact on the community will be felt for quite a while. The update removes the footprints of Pokemon in the area of the player, making it significantly more difficult to find the creatures, but also aiming to make the game more balanced for everyone.
With this change, players no longer know exactly where Pokemon are located, but can instead only know if there is a creature in their area. According to some players, the change isn’t actually that serious as the feature had been broken for quite some time before the update anyway. But on the other hand, plenty of players were displeased with the move, claiming that they relied heavily on footprints in their everyday play. This is a typical situation in the gaming world, where even minor changes to a formula can result in a lot of backlash from dedicated players.
The update also came with various goodies that should make the game a better experience for everyone, including fixes for some memory-related problems, better visuals, and some balance changes. In addition, players now have the ability to customize their avatar after its creation, no longer limiting them to the original character created upon sign-up.
Several new customization options have been added as well, so everyone has an incentive to go back to the character creation screen and see what changes they can make to their own appearance. We expect that Niantic will keep adding customization features as time goes by, as the initial set of options was a bit bare and didn’t give players that much variety in the first place.
But for now, discussions remain focused on the issue with footprints. It’s clear that Niantic want to prevent players from having a too easy time with the game, and the presence of footprints also possibly messed with some of their future plans for its gameplay. But according to most players, the main issue right now is communication – it’s fine if they wanted to remove footprints, but they should at least do a better job at explaining what drove them to this decision.
Meanwhile, a website dedicated to helping players find Pokemon more easily was recently shut down in response to a request from Nintendo/Niantic. Pokevision gave players detailed information about the location of various Pokemon around them, including times when they can be caught and precise locations on the map. The site claimed to get its data directly from Niantic, which obviously raised some eyebrows. As a result, it’s been shut down and is likely not coming back.
We don’t know what this means for other sites of a similar nature, but we suspect that the issue lies with the way they’re using the game’s API. There are certain things that would be an obvious violation of Niantic’s rules, and giving players easy access to their local Pokemon is clearly an example of that.
We would expect that Niantic are on top of this anyway, as the studio already has plenty of experience in dealing with cheaters from their days working on “Ingress”. Back then, they had various systems in place to prevent players from spoofing their location and using other methods to gain an unfair advantage. Given the popularity of “Pokemon GO”, we expect that the issue would be even more important for that game.