Since its launch at the beginning of July, one of the biggest problems that a lot of people have had with Pokemon GO is the lack of communication on the part of the game’s creator, Niantic Labs. Problems cropped up with the game’s servers, updates practically crippled the game, and the fan community was left scratching their heads and looking for answers. People called for Niantic to clear the air, but a few hazy Tweets were about all they got from the enigmatic dev house, saying that their communication efforts have been hampered by the constant work required just to keep the game afloat. On Thursday, however, John Hanke broke the silence with a short, but clear letter to the community.
In the letter, Hanke addressed the recent issues with the game, as well as the slow rollout to other countries. In short, he said that third party apps making an insane number of queries to the server put such a strain on Niantic’s resources that they were not able to release in South and Central America until the issues were resolved. Fans who may have seen the cease and desist letters sent to the likes of Pokevision as cruel, especially as the game lost any way of tracking Pokemon, were subsequently assured that it was a necessary step. Hanke also touched on the fact that not all of the third party services making tons of calls to the servers were tracking or mapping utilities used by legitimate players; some of these were used for cheating and bot usage, a practice that Hanke claims has a “negative impact” on everybody who plays the game.
As for when these issues may get fixed, Pokefans are sadly left out in the cold. Hanke does acknowledge that the game is currently plagued with a number of issues. He goes on to say that the dev team is actively working on the issues, but that keeping the game going at all is a full-time affair and makes dealing with any kind of issue that much harder. What he does not do is provide any sort of rough timeline or roadmap for fixing the issues. For now, trainers will simply have to deal with the game as it is, complete with Pokemon that are as difficult to catch as they are to track down, and hope that Niantic puts out a fix soon.