Tracking sites were hurting Pokemon Go service, Niantic explains

Developer Niantic has delved deeper into the reasons behind its decision to put a block on third party Pokemon tracking sites.

The shutdown came into effect earlier in the week, with Niantic previously claiming that such services were interfering with our ability to maintain quality of service for our users”. All of this was followed by a very emotional and public plea from the creator of one of the most popular such sites, Pokevision.

Running a product like Pokmon Go at scale is challenging. Those challenges have been amplified by third parties attempting to access our servers in various ways outside of the game itself,” it has now said.

As some of you may have noticed we recently rolled out Pokmon 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 Pokmon Go game client and our terms of service.

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 also points out that along with the server troubles that were being created, the issue was also a time sink, hampering efforts to improve the game.

Added the studio: 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.”