
Update on Maintaining and Running the Pokémon GO Service - pratheekrebala
http://pokemongo.nianticlabs.com/en/post/update-080416/
======
dineshp2
Looking at the title, I was expecting them to share the juicy details of how
they handled the huge amount of traffic, the hacking attempts and the
engineering problems they are facing. Instead I was met with some sort of PR
attempt to explain the downtime.

~~~
oddevan
Not necessarily downtime, but why they "killed" a very popular third-party
tool to show real-time locations of Pokemon.

~~~
brianwawok
I mean the tool basically defeated the point of the game.

~~~
nix0n
Really? You think wandering around was the point of the game, as opposed to
actually catching the Pokémon?

~~~
brianwawok
I mean, if you reverse engineer an api for "where is pokemon X", you may as
well just reverse engineer your GPS device for "where am I standing" to move
your in game character to right where the pokemon is.

Then you can do a for loop and catch all the pokemon in 30 seconds.

Actually catching the pokemon is a 0 skill item. Its literally dragging your
finger across the screen.

The entire game is the exploring the real world part.

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yomly
Godspeed Niantic dev-team!!! Really despise the negative press you're getting.
Don't think anyone in their wildest dreams would have thought PoGo would have
taken off as well as it has and now they are stuck between a rock and a hard
place:

Do they suffer the rage of entire countries, and potentially their backers by
delaying launching in territories to fix bugs?

OR do they suffer the rage of existing users by delaying bug fixes to keep to
their original schedule by launching new territories?

All the while, they are crippled by scaling issues they never dreamt of having
and managing cheating/additional traffic from the meta-ecosystem of trackers.

Have no doubt the team are working doubletime and overtime as it is, a shame
that redditers are unable to see this. So keep it up Niantic - thanks for
bringing us the AR killer app and for showing that there are still
opportunities for huge apps to launch![0]

[0] [https://www.appannie.com/insights/mobile-strategy/pokemon-
go...](https://www.appannie.com/insights/mobile-strategy/pokemon-go-an-
opportunity-not-a-threat/)

PS if you guys need more devs, do let me know :P

EDIT: downvotes - really? The post scriptum was obviously a cute joke. Or are
the downvotes towards the Niantic support?

~~~
gambiting
Uhmmm I guess the downvotes are coming because no one believes that Niantic
couldn't predict that the first mobile game(if we forget Pokemon Shuffle for a
second) in one of the biggest franchises in the world would be this popular,
and I feel like it's quite a popular opinion that the app was released at
least 6 months too early, it's poorly optimized and full of bugs. Not to
mention that Niantic cannot handle PR, they don't even have a Pokemon GO-
dedicated rep yet, they are looking for one. Personally I know several people
who played this game every day after it came out, now this number fell down to
zero, after a while there isn't much to do and the recent updates made the
game worse. I have stopped playing after few days because every other catch
the app would freeze and I would have to restart the whole thing. Plus the
fact that it's obliterating the battery just by being open is unacceptable -
obviously it's just a personal opinion so take it as you will.

~~~
xorcist
It's also unfortunate that the game handles failures so badly. It hangs and
behaves strangely in a number of ways instead of showing an error message.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yup. For instance, the whole catching interaction part behaves as if the code
was full of shitty hacks that couple UI and local game state with successful
and _timely_ API responses. The kind of hangs you get with e.g. your Pokéball
stuck mid-air because of API response problem seems like a type of bug you'd
actually have to go out of your way to make in any kind of sane design.

------
Fiahil
How about putting some actual efforts into proper engineering before launch,
stop blaming third parties for your 6h+ downtime and proving ban effectiveness
with a graph missing its Y axis?

The only edge Niantic have over their fanbase is their gis database. Lack of
communication was appalling, execution and reactivity too. I'm surprised
nobody started a "private server" implementation of the game, yet.

~~~
threeseed
You seem borderline vitriolic about this.

Nobody including Niantic would ever have dreamed that Pokemon Go would be as
huge a sensation as it has been. Nobody. And they have smartly realised that
this opportunity is potentially fleeting and so they need to capitalise as
quick as possible i.e. grow into other regions.

To expect them to do accurate capacity planning is ridiculous. Likewise it is
ridiculous to assume that they can react any quicker than they can. It's very
hard to scale quickly whilst still maintaining a high level of uptime.

~~~
Fiahil
I am, indeed, quite angry towards Niantic. They made a very fun and addictive
game, I'm not denying that.

However, they behaved in a way that really makes it difficult for us, players,
to support them. They weren't ready for their success, sure, but they could at
least bring some explanations on why would they ship without a trade system,
why are they struggling with traffic and downtime, why would they delay bug
fixes for more than 3 weeks, why they decided to remove one of the key feature
of the game, and why they decided to ban third party apps made by people
trying to fix their mistakes (and not with a broken graph!). I remember
terrific launches from Blizzard, but even with all issues combined from Wow,
Diablo and Hearthstone, this is nothing compared to Pogo's. I care about this
game, because it's different from the long trail of duplicates we've seen for
a long time; but, I really wish, Niantic, as a company, was more mature.

~~~
spotman
How much did you pay for the game?

~~~
Mithaldu
Pokemon Go does have ingame micro-transactions.

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pingec
They banned third party clients from accessing their API.

From the chart it looks like third party API clients were generating two
thirds of total traffic. That is a lot.

On the other hand, this has sparkled a huge community effort to reverse,
understand and bypass the implemented protection/fingerprinting.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongodev/comments/4w1cvr/pokemo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongodev/comments/4w1cvr/pokemongo_current_api_status/)

~~~
elthran
I'd be really interesting the see that graph extended to to left - what was
the traffic like before the 3 paws "bug" was first introduced.

I definitely feel that a significant amount of the drive to use the 3rd party
services was due to the fact that you couldn't realistically hunt down any of
the pokemon that show up on your radar.

~~~
agar
Yes, the lack of a functional Nearby feature - either integrated or with a
third party app - really affects motivation while playing.

I was out walking today and saw an unknown Pokemon silhouette in my Nearby
list. All I could do was shrug and hope I'd run into it (I didn't). Previously
I would have gone significantly out of my way to find it, adding mileage to my
walk - which I understood to be one of the design objectives of the game.

~~~
xorcist
Not only must the three steps have been buggy, the whole "nearby" list is
useless and/or wrong. Two friends walking together, with the same exact GPS
position on the maps, can have vastly different nearby-lists, sometimes
without even one entry in common. How is that even possible?

~~~
aleksei
It could be that, since the nearby listing holds only 9 entries, that there
are more Pokemon nearby and the query to display them is unordered.

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discardorama
They don't cache images (of Pokestops) client-side. This has got to be one of
the bigger inefficiencies of this client. Aggressive client-side caching can
relieve a lot of load on the server.

~~~
jeremiep
That's only on the network side. Playing the game you get a feel that the
entire codebase is a cesspool.

Everyone I talk to who's also played Ingress sees history repeating itself.
They've experienced the same bugs, lack of communication, shutting down
services making the game better instead of improving said game and whatnot.

I really, really wish Niantic fixes its technical, management and
communication problems. The game has so much potential but at this point I
lost almost all hope they'll be able fully exploit it.

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codingmyway
Seems like they started authenticating a key (unknown6) that was previously
being sent but not getting authenticated against.

A lot of bot writers are trying to break that authentication. Given that
people are paying others to 'walk' their pokemon there is real money in faking
GPS movement in the API.

~~~
JorgeGT
Or go middle way and spoof the GPS radio signal near the device:
[http://www.rtl-sdr.com/cheating-at-pokemon-go-with-a-
hackrf-...](http://www.rtl-sdr.com/cheating-at-pokemon-go-with-a-hackrf-and-
gps-spoofing/)

~~~
curiousgal
That is extremely overpowered, all you need is a rooted device with Xposed
framework and a GPS spoofing app.

~~~
JorgeGT
I was (half-)joking :)

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cosarara97
I'd like to see some numbers in that graph.

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curiousgal
That graph is a joke.

[http://i.imgur.com/HC9PEx0.png](http://i.imgur.com/HC9PEx0.png)

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cloudjacker
Spatial graph, no scale

