"An Open Letter to Yang Liu (Creator of PokeVision)"

#PokemonGO: Dear Yang Liu,First to preface this, I do not work for Niantic, I am a Software Engineer that works in a very different space then video games, however I feel as though the insight I have obtained over my years developing various different types of applications/programs gives me a bit of insight into how development goes in general. I also have to preface this with, I have a love and passion for video games that I have had almost my entire life, including Pokemon.As much as you, Yang, wants to disassociate yourself with Pokevision, you cannot as you are one of the creators of the site. Trying to act as though the creation of a site that clearly broke the Terms of Service of which you agreed upon, does not change the tempo and angst that is more and more apparent in our culture and in your letter that seems to be there due to the circumstances at which you, Yang, have wrote this letter. Notably getting served with Cease and Desist orders and being asked to shut down Pokevision.With all of that out of the way, yes you had a very similar history with Pokemon as a ton of other Pokemon Go players. Playing hours upon hours of the franchise, some of us have played well beyond and been attached to the franchise far longer than others. To be clear, I followed the Pokemon Go development as closely as I could, with all the silence that Niantic continues to have through out the history of the company. I was mired with all the ups and downs of trying to get any information out of the Field tests that I could as I was never involved in them. But even before that, we all should have been aware of how much information we were really going to get out of this, especially given Nintendo's history with releasing information as well.This new set of circumstances comes as nothing but normal business as far as Pokemon and Pokemon Go are concerned. Now to the meat of your letter, the first thing out of all of this comes a shot that seems out of place:But then, you broke it all too quicklyTo be clear, this game came out and blew up faster than any other mobile game in history. It has more unique users than the top games in the field combined. This outdoes all the Clash of Clans, Angry Birds, and even Flappy Bird. And to be fair, this game even in it's basic state has complexities that only one generally successful video game has in it, Ingress which hadn't really been tested at the scale we are talking that Pokemon Go attained in a matter of a week.There is so much evidence to show that Pokemon Go was pushed to market way before it was indeed ready, this can be seen by a single missing feature that was planned for release: Trading. In my mind, Pokemon Go is not feature complete until this has been implemented. Another anecdotal piece of evidence is the release versions, 0.29. Most companies do not do a full release with a version under 1.0. Even Ingress in its most basic form was release as version 1.0.0, source. The point being that under the circumstances and stress the game itself was put under in the matter of days after release, not helped by the community which illegally hosted the APK before the launch into many of the companies, the systems Niantic had in place simply failed. It wasn't because of gross negligence or direct misconduct in my opinion but simply the shear viral nature of the beast.Niantic as a small company (11-50 employees) has had a fairly successful run with Ingress, including building the community that has lasted years. This maybe indeed in spite of their communication but the design goals and application has allowed them to foster that community without that direct need. I believe that Niantic is doing the best that they can in the situation, let's not forget that massive companies like Blizzard haven't even had this type of viral activity on launch. To put this into perspective, WoW at its peak well after it's release in October of 2010 had 12 million subscribers while over the last month Pokemon Go has exceeded 100 million downloads worldwide. This game is unprecedented in the history of gaming.As far as I am concerned, I am amazed that I can even login and play in some fashion at this moment, be it a very basic version of the game I was promised.Now there are some very interesting things you point out and I have issue with your timeline here. You state that you waited 2.5 weeks of having the bugs before "the only way I could convince them to play was show the Pokevision". I have to start to doubt your intentions here, I can look past some of the other statements but this gives a false narrative to the timeline. As far as I can find, the 3 step bug first came about on July 15-16, 2016 source, source. Pokevision as far as I can tell released on July 20-21st, about one week after the bug showed itself source. Which is only 3-4 days before John Hanke at SDCC states that Niantic is aware of the 3 step bug on July 24th, 2016 source. This merely 1.5 weeks from when the Bug initially appeared. To this I would mention that Hanke, points out that server stability is the most important thing they are working on at the moment.At what point do you actually think you became part of the problem? Let us put this into perspective, you state that your site had 50M unique users and 11 million daily. At what point do you think what you created added significant stress to the already over stressed servers? Do you think that the accessing of the API by those 11 million users on top of all the players affected the Pokemon Go servers? Did you ever think that maybe your actions actually impeded the fixes for the 3 step bug rather than helped? Do you ever think that maybe your actions are the reason your fellow players haven't had the game released to them yet?Let that sink in for a second.If Pokemon was as everlasting as you say it was then maybe you should have been more patient. Let's put a 2 week sprint to the test, source on Hanke saying 2 week updates. To help frame this, July 6th, was the release date with Android version 0.29, on July 13th 0.29.2 went live, 0.29.3 came out on July 20th, and 0.31 came out on July 30th. All of this information is relevant to the situation we as a community face currently. First off, the updates are actually faster than 2 week a piece currently which leads me to believe there are at least 2 different teams working behind the scenes in a staggered fashion. I am speculating that one team is putting out fires while another is trying to develop features on a more regular pace. One can argue that the past 3 releases were all about stabilizing the platform so they can move forward implementing other community desired features.This all plays into an interesting narrative, so we have a release that was most likely in QA when the 3 step bug came about, on July 15-16th and the development team had most likely moved onto a group of other features (most likely a good portion of the 0.31 release). That means that they probably only had about a week to attempt to find the issue with the 3 step bug before 0.31 was release and fix it in a fashion that would not destabilize their platform. From what they did in 0.31, I can only assume that any measure to temporarily fix the issue would have destabilized the platform worse than just removing the feature temporarily. With all that said, notice that the version jumped from 0.29 to 0.31. This probably is a great indication that they had initially started implementing other features but were retasked to attempt to solve the 3 step bug in my opinion. What does this all mean? That we should be patient, bug fixes can be extremely unforgiving. I think it goes to say that I don't think they would remove a feature willy nilly without good reason. Hanke has time and time again talked about the tracking feature being integral to the game, to think that Niantic and John Hanke don't think so is simply ignoring the history of the game.What I think this all means is that we need to calm down a moment and understand that things like this happen in development. And I agree, Niantic's lack of transparency is an issue, however as you have stated, "Pokemon is everlasting. The same 151 Pokemon have been around for 20 years." So don't be disheartened, Pokemon Go is not going anywhere, I can only see a positive future from here on out given Niantic's track record. They are slow and quiet, but very well meaning and goal oriented.As Professor Oak says, "This is a great undertaking in Pokémon history!" Let us be patient as we are all on this long journey together now.Sincerely,TerinHDObligatory Gold Edit: Thanks for the gold! via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2b1yRrI