Niantic has been rolling out useless after useless updates for Pokemon GO - from push notifications that essentially begs players to keep playing the game to Niantic's crackdown of third party application scanners when their confirmed plans for their highly requested tracking system are zilch. Now, Niantic has rolled out a new depressing update, one that might affect the majority of avid players in Pokemon GO.
Niantic Puts Speedlock On All Devices
This weekend, Niantic imposed upon Pokemon GO players a 30-mph speedlock, which deliberately erases all Pokemon spawns and completely shuts off the sightings list when players are travelling above 30 mph. This means that when the game detect that the players are going above what Niantic considers as "driving speed", they won't be able to play as they normally do. This new bug or feature came after the patch that added the push notifications, which players called both 'useless' and 'annoying'.
Although this update's main purpose is for safety and security reasons, and it may seem like Niantic only has the players' best interests in mind, Pokemon GO players are outraged after perpetually getting these useless updates for the past consecutive weeks. The developer's questionable decisions have been affecting the players' ability to explore and enjoy the game. Fans have poured their anger and dismay across various social media platforms.
According to Forbes, while this logic may seem sound, i.e. playing while driving is undoubtedly unsafe, playing while going driving speed however may cover perfectly safe situations; which includes riding as a passenger in a car, bus, train, taxi, and having a GPS spoofer. This update is not listed on the patch notes however, so this might be an unintentional bug.
If this new feature is an intended update, then players will have issues coming winter time. When everyone can neither catch Pokemon while inside the warm safety of their vehicles nor simply walk around outside in freezing weather, player usage will surely decrease; if not, drop completely. Especially when some of them have admitted that they still hate having the application installed.
Fans have claimed that we may be watching one of the most disastrous tech failures of all time, second to No Man's Sky; that is. The only difference is, No Man's Sky has long since put the final nail on their own coffin whereas Pokemon Go is an ongoing trainwreck that could either get better or worse. It all depends on Niantic whether they wish to continue these series of unfortunate and unwanted events. The only thing they need to do is listen to the community after all, but all these complaints have been falling on deaf ears so far.
