Gone are the days when Pokemon GO players were greatly aided in their quest to hunt down Pokemon by the intervention ofsome sites which offered location status of any Pokemon lurking around.
Niantic CEO JohnHanke had previously made it abundantly clear that he was not happy about the popular practice. Hanke was of the opinion that players were inadvertently hampering their game-playing experiences by resorting to what was essentially a short cut to success in capturing Pokemon. He had even suggested that players might soon find such third party add-ons not working in the game anymore. “We have priorities right now but they might find in the future that those things may not work (…) People are hacking around trying to take data out of our system and that’s against our terms of service,” Hanke was reported as saying.
As per latest developments, Pokevision, a popular site that allowed players to track the whereabouts of Pokemon in any given location as well as how long they were likely to be there, has been shut down completely. A visit to the site will reveal that it is presently not functioning, while this is what its Twitter feed says: “Hey guys. We wish we had some news for you. At this moment, we are respecting Niantic and Nintendo’s wishes. Will keep you guys posted”.
According to some reports doing the rounds, Niantic has been sending out cease-and-desist letters to sites like Pokevision and Pokehound to put a stop to third-party intervention in the game. The creators say that such sites have a potentially damaging effect on a user’s experience while playing the game, especially because of their impact on the game’s servers. Earlier, Pokemon GO had been rendered unplayable for a lot of users due to a surge in sideloading.
However, fans of the game aren’t particularly happy about this. Considering the fact that it is incredibly difficult to hunt down Pokemon devoid of any help whatsoever, players have taken to Twitter to express their grief about the tracking function of the game being deactivated.
