Plenty of players have been losing their shit lately at Pokemon GO, and for a very good reason: Pokemon are harder to catch. On top of that, they don’t spawn quite as often, and that’s just the tip of a very, very broken iceberg.
Fortunately, there’s some good news. If Pokemon are fleeing from you more often, it’s because of a bug.
Niantic tweeted out earlier this morning that a new bug has been making it more likely that Pokemon will bugger off into the wild grass instead of, y’know, getting into the damn Pokeball where they belong. The bug has also been impacting the accuracy of Pokeball throws, but fortunately a fix is on the way.
Trainers, a new bug affecting throw accuracy increases the odds of escape and omits the XP bonus. We are working on a fix, stay tuned…
— Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp) August 4, 2016
It’s one of the game’s many bugs, though, but it’s at least nice to know that someone is working on a fix. As to when that’ll finally be rolled out, that’s another matter entirely.
Comments
21 responses to “Pokemon GO Is A Lot Harder Because Of A Bug”
I’m sure there are many whom don’t believe it was a bug at all and that this is just arse covering because it was the straw that saw player numbers fall.
They’re a victim of their own success. They have a very small window of opportunity to get things back on the right track, but a large list of pretty serious issues that need fixing. I wouldn’t want to be working there right now.
All the people I know are in to it even more than when it launched, myself included. It will draw so many back in when gen2 pokemon are released too. It’ll be much mature then as well so will probably retain any who left because of bugs.
pok’e coin sale would help, especially if they cheapened the pokeball prices as well
The info in the tweet seems to match up with what I’ve observed recently. I don’t remember getting more than 100 experience from a catch for a few days, even when the game says it is a nice throw or great throw. I could easily believe that they aren’t using those bonuses to calculate the catch probability either.
What’s with all the Pokemon bashing lately? I know the game’s had some issues (like every single popular game from 2015/2016 with a major online component oh shiiiit), but everyone I know is still playing and enjoying the game, despite the 3-step bug or anything else.
because patches should fix things, not break them, because the code itself seems super simple, because reports say the games made $210 million in a month, and because any amount of testing would of discovered these issues before they were pushed to end users
I think the excuse that “testing would have discovered issues” is weak. We’ve seen massive AAA online games like Destiny, Diablo, GTAV all crumble under the initial strain of their server load, and these are seasoned developers with loads of experience making online games work, so the reasonable assumption is that it’s actually really difficult – if not nearly impossible – to accurately test for that kind of load.
In other news, nearly everything they’ve taken out of the game (including the 3-step feature) is to make the game more stable. Since the updates I haven’t had my game crash once, so while Niantic is working to fix it, right now their priority is obviously to get the core of the game stable, meanwhile they continue to fix the issue so they can bring back the feature without causing problems.
Considering that the pokemon fleeing seems to be an intermittent issue and affects some users more than others it would be very hard to test for.
Even if testing showed a couple more pokemon fled than normal it’s hard to see a trend without a month or so of data from a small test group. Niantic don’t have a month to test…they’re pushing updates out twice a week.
Don’t mistake simplistic graphics or gameplay for simple code. It’s far more complex internally than you would believe.
From experience, anything involving networks complicates things exponentially – everything can fail, at any time, and your code has to cope gracefully. Packets get corrupted, go missing, arrive out of order, take too long, turn up way too late, and you have to be ready for all of it.
Large-scale multi-user code complicates stuff far more – any changes to the shared world have to be immediately and efficiently pushed (only) to nearby players, but those players are probably all talking to different cloud servers, so that section of the world state has to be replicated ASAP to any servers that might be involved, but not to others.
Then there’s the sheer scale of the user base. Niantic have been managing the above for years with millions of Ingress players, but dealing with tens of mllions of players has made the first challenge (network issues) far more likely, and the second challenge (efficient shared-state management) far harder – everything the servers send, to players and to each other, has to be stripped back and made super-efficient, and it all has to be done without increasing the complexity of the server code too.
Pokemon being harder to catch was probably by design because they said the initial game-play didn’t align with their product aim (to get you to buy stuff). The combination of taking any and all trackers away and not counter-balancing the rate of which pokemon run away just makes the whole experience not worth my time :\
They said the tracker didn’t align with their underlying product goals, not the game play as a whole.
Basically it means they didn’t like how the 1, 2 and 3 steps worked in practice because it was different to their idea of how they want the tracker to be. In the beta test it showed a distance in metres to the pokemon which made it pretty easy to figure out where they were. They changed it prior to release for reasons unknown.
So it could be they want the tracker to be more precise and less confusing to people or something else…point is that they were only referring to the tracker.
It’s not exactly bashing to report on the game’s recognised issues, but on the other hand not every update on the game’s current state needs as much editorialising as we see on site with a a more personable-writing style.
Similarly, I’d put a person who prefers fantasy over sci-fi on all the No Man’s Sky articles and watch the salt pour out, but that’s why I’m not running a gaming website 🙂
I went to take a piss at the gym last night and decided to check my phone. Phone in one hand, dick in the other and a Scyther spawned. Damn near pissed all over my shoe but shaked and washed then caught the bastard. Good times were had. This is about how serious a free app centered around a 2 decade old franchise should be.
People need to get a grip and chill the fuck out is what I wanted to say but damned if Im still not chuffed about that Scyther!
I wish this was a Diglet and not a Scyther. Would have been even more amusing.
I could understand say CP500 Pokémon running off quick but when CP50/CP100 do a dash after one ball seems a bit stupid.
This ‘Bug’ was the code written deliberately to make it hopelessly difficult to catch anything, to change the business model and force you to buy PokeBalls, make it significantly more difficult to level up and ‘catch em all’ (to drag out the game longer). Too many high level players with almost full PokeDexs already apparently.
The escape/capture figures entered in were entered in very deliberately, tested and accepted ‘OK’, then published to the game live servers, don’t believe for a second that go live for productions development happens off the cuff.
The real ‘Bug’ was that the reputation was seriously affected sand now they realise that people may let this game die as fast as it grew.
The real ‘Bug’ was that Nintendo’s brand was affected, with Nintendo’s PokeMon brand was being dragged through the mud, Nintendo most likely clamped down on Niantic via the licensing agreement (companies normally have a clause for protecting the image of their company and product brand by not bringing the company and brand into disrepute and not causing harm). A lot of peoples first exposure to the PokeMon franchise is PokeMonGO and this will destroy any chance of them picking up a real Nintendo device and game.
You clearly know little about development, or Niantic either for that matter, so please leave the unsubstantiated conspiracy claims out of the discussion.
Hey, you seem pretty sure of this. It would be great to be linked to some sort of article or internal release that expands on these deliberate changes. I wouldn’t want to accuse you of baseless, overly cynical conjecture.
Do people really have a good reason to lose their shit at a free mobile game? I think people need to re-evaluate their priorities in life if they think there is.
I stopped playing The Division only a few weeks before picking up Pokemon Go. How good it is to not be playing a bug filled mess of a game…………….
From bullet sponges to ball sponges.