One Day Of An ‘Unintentional Bug’

On June 28th, a change was made in Pokemon GO. Rather than the 40m area to catch Pokemon, the range was increased to about 70m, allowing people to see Pokemon from further away. This immediately meant that you could see way more Pokemon at any one time. And, frankly, it was great.

Normally, I can see one, maybe two spawns at home. My position is awkwardly stuck between two gyms, and GPS drift means I can only access one of them at a time. The same goes for Pokemon spawns, there’s one I can always see, and maybe a couple more if I drift one way or another. However, with the extended radius, I was AMAZED at how many Pokemon I could see. On top of those three potential spawns, I could see an additional 2-3 spawns to my left and a massive 6 spawns to my right, all normally just out of reach. After work, I went for a walk and could see spawns that I’d never seen before, because they were always a little bit too far away, generally blocked by buildings. I also managed to finish my Cosmog research, thanks to this extra range. It turns out, there are a LOT of spawns behind one particular gym that you can’t reach at all, because there are buildings in the way.

Okay, it wasn’t all good. The increased radius came with a few bugs, mostly related to the spawning and despawning of Pokemon. Pokemon didn’t want to despawn properly, so you’d end up with Pokemon spawning on top of one another. If you’d left your phone on for a while, these Pokemon could end up stacking up on top of each other. These ghosty Pokemon could be despawned by tapping on them, but it was a pain getting rid of Pokemon which no longer existed.

The majority of the time though, the increased radius was great.

Unfortunately, the fun had to be ruined. Niantic fixed the range ‘bug’ insanely quickly, calling it an unintended side-effect from them trying to fix a bug related to GPS drift. Despite someone in Niantic’s company saying that the radius change was actually intended, Niantic immediately stepped in and said that the new, increased range was not in any way intended, then reverted the change back to the old 40m radius. A forced update got rid of the buff completely, and everything went back to normal.

When asked more about it, one of the guys at Niantic explained that they were trying to fix other bugs, and went into complete bullshit mode in an interview. The players had something nice, something that made playing more fun, but nooooooo, Niantic had to go and fix it because it benefited players. Maybe it is a big too large a radius, but that radius made Pokemon GO more fun, and definitely made Pokemon GO seem like a richer landscape, rather than a barren, green void.

The most ironic thing about all of this though? The “Pokemon stacking on top of each other instead of despawning” bug is still around. Typical.