Pokemon Go Receives Biggest Update Yet, And One Change Has Angered Fans

Good effort Niantic, good try. That's the appropriate response to Niantic's newest and biggest update yet for Pokemon Go, the crazy popular mobile game that has hordes of smartphone owners on scavenger hunts for cartoon characters appearing in real life locations. As part of the update, Niantic addressed the broken tracking system by removing the footprints that appeared underneath characters that let players know which ones were close by.

When Pokemon Go was in beta, the tracking system would tell players how many meters away nearby Pokemon were. This was later changed to footprints—one to three would appear underneath a Pokemon character based on their proximity to the player, with one footprint indicating it's very close. But shortly after the game's release, the tracking system stopped working correctly, displaying three footprints underneath all nearby Pokemon characters.


In version 1.1.0, the footprints are gone altogether. Furthermore, Paul Tassi at Forbes claims that the order of Pokemon in the Nearby menu is no longer arranged in such a fashion that the top row are closest, followed by the second and third rows. He says that he's seen Pokemon in the last slot spawn right next to him, when previously the last spot would indicate the furthest away of all nearby Pokemon characters.

The way Niantic chose to address the game's tracking bug stinks, as it now means wandering aimlessly in hopes of finding that rare character that appears on your radar. And as the game warned me when first firing it up after the update, players should be careful not to trespass. Thanks for the advice, Niantic.

While the tracking system 'fix' is bananas (and is hopefully just a temporary thing), there are other parts of the update that presumably make the game better, such as better use of memory, various bug fixes during wild Pokemon encounters, updated medals art and Pokemon details UI, fixed issues with displaying certain map features, more minor text fixes (whatever that means), and a few other changes.

You can grab Pokemon Go for iOS devices in iTunes/App Store and for Android devices on Google Play.