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Comment by oddevan | Hacker News Reader

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

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

The point of any game is enjoyment. I found Pokemon Go much more enjoyable with the aid of Pokevision than I do without, since at least then I could find interesting pokemon. Since the last update, I chose to stop playing entirely. It's just not very fun.

The tools gained so much popularity because the in-game tracker stopped working. That was part of why players were upset with killing the third party tools too. There was then no way to track pokemon at all.

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

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.

Depends on how you look at the game. The point of the game for users is to catch pokemon. The point of the game for Niantic is to have users wander around, so they can make money via sponsored locations.

A winning strategy must accommodate both.

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