A GOOD REASON WHY POKEMON GO TRACKERS DONT WORK ANYMORE

Over the last week, Niantic has been chewed out by the public for not being open enough about what was going on with Pokémon Go. But now, it seems like they’re finally turning all of that around.

Not only have they been posting more on social media, today Niantic also blogged about one of the more controversial topics surrounding Pokémon Go: tracking websites.

The rumor for a long while had been that tracking websites such as Pokevision put too much of a strain on Niantic’s servers, and today, Niantic confirmed that in straightforward terms:

As some of you may have noticed we recently rolled out Pokémon GO to Latin America including Brazil. We were very excited to finally be able to take this step. We were delayed in doing that due to aggressive efforts by third parties to access our servers outside of the Pokémon GO game client and our terms of service. 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. The chart below shows the drop in server resources consumed when we blocked scrapers. Freeing those resources allowed us to proceed with the Latin America launch.

Niantic continued:

In addition to hampering our ability to bring Pokémon GO to new markets, dealing with this issue also has opportunity cost. Developers have to spend time controlling this problem vs. building new features. It’s worth noting that some of the tools used to access servers to scrape data have also served as platforms for bots and cheating which negatively impact all Trainers. There is a range of motives here from blatant commercial ventures to enthusiastic fans but the negative impact on game resources is the same.

Of course, there are also outright hackers out there attempting to break into systems, hijack social media accounts, and even bring down the service. Some of them have posted publicly about their attempts.

We don’t expect these attempts to stop. 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.