"Niantic are absentee landlords"

#PokemonGO: Pokemon Go has netted over a billion dollars to Niantic over the last year. The game is stagnant and is dying a slow painful death. There are numerous groups of players all complaining about the same things, and those complaints fall on deaf ears. Wait, no, that is far too generous. These complaints fall on absentee landlords.Pokemon Go Fest was a total disaster. I did not take part in the class action lawsuit, but I wish someone would hold them accountable.EX Raids are a total disaster. Players are going to EX raids where only 3-4 people show up, total. Too many people who got an EX raid pass have multiples (a guy in my office has 4 Mewtwo, and got two passes back to back, Niantic literally can't do any worse with their beta design at this point).EX Raid pass distribution is far too punishing. You either feel guilty that you got a raid pass (and your friends didn't), or frustrated that you didn't get one, and have no idea what you should do next.EX Raid pass execution is awful. People have to work, people getting raid passes for raids they did while on a trip is rough. EX-Raids during the middle of the day on a weekday are impossible for people in school or have a job. (to be clear, I have done 150+ legendary raids and 100+ regular raids and I have not received an EX raid invite to date).Raid timers shifting with DST, with shortened raid times is ridiculous. The lack of communication was on full display.I just went from "nothing" to "gold" in a gym this past week, nobody is playing (17+ days in the gym). Gym turnover slows to the point that holding 8-9 gyms may mean nobody takes you out, so you don't earn coins for the day, nobody cares?It seems like every other release is rolled back due to total lack of software engineering rigor. The client application has no QA done on it whatsoever.There is far too much focus on sponsored gyms.The game is no longer about walking around and discovering, but driving in your car and raiding.The amount of time/money/effort to create 100+ models with animation/effects simply cannot take as long as it is taking. Delaying Gen3 until December just shows how totally incapable the management of Niantic is.According to [http://ift.tt/29CDB8U] they are making $100,000 a day. Other than keeping the servers up, what are they really providing for that money?Every "major" release has a large enough "crash" that I question the usefulness of the entire google cloud platform. If Niantic claims they've spent most of their time addressing scalability challenges, why does every major/minor release result in huge outages?Niantic's announcement of the upcoming Harry Potter Go shows their true colors. They aren't interested in supporting this game they engineered to be as addictive as possible, leaving all their "users" in their wake. They just want to go to the next fad and make another billion dollars, but this time with their platform, so they can repeat the process at an even faster rate.Niantic's AR is a joke. All their blog posts try to imply they are the kings of AR, while their actual implementations aren't even as advanced as Eye of Judgment for the Playstation 3. They aren't a leader in AR in any way shape or form. Their videos make Pokemon Go out to be this wondrous adventure, but the reality is their AR implementation sucks, people turn it off because it wipes out their batteries and makes the game even harder with no benefit.The battery utilization of Pokemon Go is a total disaster. Brand new iPhone 8's shouldn't be drained by a game in an hour. If Niantic can't implement anti-cheating technology that doesn't punish the active player base, maybe Niantic should consider a different line of work.Bots/Spoofing: Niantic claims to have hired someone with machine learning experience. It doesn't appear they made it past chapter 2 of "learning tensorflow" because scanners, bots and spoofing still runs incredibly rampant. John Hanke has spoken numerous times how this is a top priority for him. If his leadership is incapable of getting a result on something that he considers a "top priority", I'd hate to see the track record of anything else within the company. Worse, the recent attempt to ban a player based on other applications being installed relied on a "soon to be patched" weakness of iOS. Why they thought it was a good idea to use an API that wouldn't be around makes no sense. Worse, on Android it takes little to no effort to sidestep this "restriction".People who run multiple accounts: I don't know how hard it could be to record the incoming IP address for a given player. Take down a gym, dump your entire "family" into a gym, one account at a time. That's fair. Nothing Niantic can do about that, right?Providing clear communication. I think one guy spent all of 5 minutes on reddit once, the rest are "text fixes". I'm sure TPCi has some restrictions over their actions, but being obtuse doesn't help. Would it kill someone from Niantic to sit down with a youtuber and do a quick Q&A so people at least feel like somebody is making an effort?The client application itself is a buggy disaster. Crashes, broken textures, and intern level bugs plague the game a year+ after release. Again, nothing changes, nobody cares, because they are not professionals, they have no pride of ownership, and no sense of producing a commensurate product for the riches the reap.Delivering. Niantic should be ashamed for their progress, regardless of the server issues. John Hanke is quoted in various trade journals from time to time talking about PVP, trading and all sorts of other things. None of this stuff actually ever happens, but he talks about it a whole lot. Meanwhile a random Ukrainian company builds a complete clone, with more features and less bugs, and I assume for a lot less money than I'm sure they spent building Pokemon Go. Instead of just BUYING the company and getting some talented developers to help fix their own problems, they start talking about suing them.I hit level 40 recently. I don't play nearly as much, and the only reason I do play is for some half-brained hope that I may eventually get an EX raid pass, and for the great group of people I play with, though our ranks are starting to thin, both in numbers and intensity. Lastly, to bring up their "doubling down" post, I should bring up the fact that doubling zero still yields zero. via /r/pokemongo http://ift.tt/2huNLuv