Over the past week, Niantic has come under fire for shutting off third party trackers for Pokemon GO. Yesterday, an update on Niantic’s website explained exactly why it did so.
According to the developer, those unofficial mapping tools were a major strain on their servers. This prevented them from expanding the game to other countries worldwide.
“We were delayed in [bringing Pokemon Go to Latin America including Brazil] due to aggressive efforts by third parties to access our servers outside of the Pokemon Go game client and our terms of service,” CEO John Hanke wrote in the post. “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.”
Hanke mentioned that since sites like Pokevision were shut down, the Pokemon GO servers have experienced far less strain. This allowed them to expand the game to Brazil and other countries.
Niantic has had less success blocking bots and other cheating programs from using its data. They use the same API calls that the tracking sites did. Niantic has tried to cut them off, but the bot-developing community has stayed ahead of them.
Trickier still are hackers who have gone after Pokemon GO’s systems and the staff’s social media accounts. Hanke’s own Twitter was taken over by Poodle Corp over the weekend. Hanke made mention of the hackers in the post.
“We don’t expect these attempts to stop,” Hanke wrote. “But we do want you to understand why we have taken the steps we have and why we will continue to take steps to maintain the stability and integrity of the game.”
Niantic is communicating more since players lambasted the developer for remaining silent during the whole tracker debacle. The game’s built-in Pokemon tracking, which was glitched since just after launch, was removed in a patch last weekend and has not returned. Many players had turned to third-party trackers like Pokevision to make up for the missing feature. Their shut down led to public outcry, claiming the game was now “broken.”
