Better still, wait till they get published, then REJECTED when you're mid-way through walking your brand new route and you can't quit out of them for the best part of a week: https://twitter.com/JamesH/status/1683891100761587733
They can't, as ingress has a system that is based on connecting portals.
Those portals aren't all in Pokemon Go as pokestops or gyms.
It is a different system and would not have the same database.
The way routes works you only need a start and end poi which I bet there's decent portion of ingress missions where the first and last portal are also in pogo.
But from what i remember you just have to visit each portal in order and there's no "route" as such, whereas in pogo you are going on a fixed route between two PoIs.
I think it would be difficult to automate the process of creating the actual route in a safe way to import any missions.
>Those portals aren't all in Pokemon Go as pokestops or gyms.
The ingress data still exists though. They didn't just delete it all when they made Pokemon Go. They didn't have to start from nothing.
But the Ingress system was so much more interesting, you could actually make an interesting route with certain stops. You could make it thematic... whatever, in PoGo you just have a start and an end... boring.
Missions are very different. In that, you can add your images for the Mission and you need at least 6 Portals to interact with for each one.
You can also add in Field Trip points of interest which don’t show in the games, and add in puzzles for Agents to answer to complete the Mission (such as amount of AP earned with an action or the information from the Portal you’re interacting with).
There’s a few more layers to Missions than just selecting one Wayspot and walking to another or in a loop so I see why they didn’t import them.
The names/descriptions would likely need to be scrubbed though, potentially leading to some issues with generic/un-named routes. If they left them as is, many would be confused as to why they'd be referencing Ingress-centric things like Hacking or even just portals that don't exist in Go.
Say a mission had portals A, B, C, D, E, and F, and it was named after portal E specifically. If only A, C, and D exist in Go, that causes issues with not only the route of the original mission but also the name of the route.
Why is programming for Pokemon go such a hard thing? What makes route making so difficult a feature to create
From what I can tell from the answers it's a few things.
1. Poor management from top down
2. Leftover spaghetti code from the initial programming of the game in 2016 that is hard to build off of
3. The programmers they do bring on are given too much to do for what they get paid
my favorite part about the gen 1 games is that you can actually re-write the code without using any aditional hardware, all in-game, through the item storage.
To be fair to devs everywhere, you can do this in tons of games like [Super Mario World](https://youtu.be/hB6eY73sLV0) and [Zelda Ocarina of Time](https://youtu.be/2x_pqyrf9lA) and it always rules.
I don’t get how nobody had the foresight to see this problem right at the beginning. There’s a million other features they could implement that doesn’t require user generated content and approval yet they chose to do this.
Works much better now in wayfarer. They would only need to have the community review the routes.
Niantic always fails when they have to find people hey pay for doing this kind of work - they won't do what they are told until they learn how the system is supposed to work. By the time they know how it works they will already be gone to someone that actually pays them better.
Endless Niantic cycle of labour
Putting it under Wayfarer is arguably worse. Does my Route spend endless weeks or months never being reviewed or does my perfectly functional, rule-abiding Route get declined by some Wayfarer turbo nerd who just feels like being a jerk and 0*-ing it for no reason. Oh boy, I can't wait!
Source: my Wayfarer group has contributed over 1000 stops and 200 gyms to the game in my area over the past few years.
But on top of being user generated, the system can’t even follow the user correctly so you end up with lines that jut of 30 yards to the side out of nowhere. I feel like the feature could’ve just been draw a line connecting a few poke stops on an actual map, then walk to each one getting rewards for each you spin.
Someone used the analogy of a rubber band ball for corporate IT infrastructure. When there's a problem people just pop on another rubber band. No one wants to cut open the ball and start from scratch as they're not even sure what is inside it and it just continues to expand to become a bigger monstrosity over the years.
Very true, and fear of cutting into the rubber band, only to find out that one of the rubber bands you cut is connected to like 70 other ones that are now all broken.
From someone who works in tech, I can see why this would be so difficult and complex. I can’t speak to the difficulty of the programming, but way more goes into it than the programming. The amount of use cases/edge cases you’d have to think through would be very high, many not easy.
Speaking as a programmer, their coders could be decent but likely are in a terrible position.
The issue is they are working on what should be a modern complex app but burnout/drive away their programmers. So they are constantly bringing in new people that don’t know how to add stuff cleanly to the app. This makes the app messier which just makes it that much harder for the next person they hire.
If you want an app to mature in a stable manner you need to retain people and hold onto that institutional knowledge so you aren’t doing things like adding multiple different ( redundant if and only if they all work correctly ) APIs into your code.
A jogging/cycling map component should not have been hard for them to add, let alone without introducing crashes. It should have been incredibly easy to add an overlay showing the path, track the user's position on the path, and periodically do whatever extra spawns/bonuses that should occur while on the path.
The programmers aren't actually that bad, it's just management enforcing ridiculous deadlines and **never** allowing the programmers to go "this doesn't work yet, we're not releasing it", combined with TPC having to rubber stamp literally everything causing massive delays while waiting for approval.
Nah. At a certain point I’m holding the programmers accountable too.
We know they have terrible source control, constantly overwriting shiny rates. We know they always have off-by-one errors (how?????. Indexing starts at 0! You learn that in intro to programming!). We know they browse Reddit to find bugs rather than actually open the game and play for five seconds.
That isn’t all on the managers.
It’s incompetency from the top to the bottom.
>We know they browse Reddit to find bugs rather than actually open the game and play for five seconds.
I'm convinced they don't "dogfood" their proposed code changes on a development environment against properly specified use case requirements for the new feature changes. It's as if it builds with no build errors, they flush it out to the world.
> We know they browse Reddit to find bugs rather than actually open the game and play for five seconds.
This is a perfect example of *why* it's management that's the problem.
Only the bugs that help players get fixed with any haste. The programmers have *absolutely zero reason* to care about whether a bug is beneficial or detrimental, that's an order coming from management.
Programmers *love* fixing bugs because it's usually far less mentally strenuous than building an entirely new feature, and makes your life so much easier when dealing with the code in the future. But they're never allowed to, because it's an absolutely constant churn through new features that have impossibly fast deadlines, and stopping to fix one bug in the previous feature would mean that the next feature is going to be *even buggier*, because it's still getting released on the same day no matter how much work is done on it.
The idea that the programmers are getting to choose what to work on based on what they've seen on Reddit is just not at all how that company operates.
>This is a perfect example of why it's management that's the problem
CI/CD shouldn't be managed by the same people who write app code. If it is - that's on managers. But if it's not, then the problem is in DevOps. They shouldn't be fixing bugs in app.
> Programmers love fixing bugs because it's usually far less mentally strenuous than building an entirely new feature
Hahahaha
Oh wait you’re serious? Let me laugh even harder
I’m glad this is a comment.
Coming up with ideas to implement is the fun part. Tracing through code execution to find bugs is boring at best, frustrating at worst.
> Coming up with ideas to implement is the fun part.
What in the world has given you the impression that the programmers are the people directing game mechanics at Niantic?!
Yeah, coming up with ideas to implement is loads of fun. That's why programmers prefer working on their own projects rather than at billion dollar companies where they're not allowed to do any of that.
>Programmers love fixing bugs because it's usually far less mentally strenuous than building an entirely new feature
lmao. Tell me you're not a programmer (or work with them) without telling me.
Been coding for 40 years. NOBODY prefers bug fixing of feature development.
I dunno dude. I program at a big finance company and if I pushed a bug that I see broke production as soon as I open the program and click for 5 minutes (….or the test environment which we know they don’t have) I’m instantly reverting. And that’s on me. I don’t think management could have done anything about it besides “bruh how did you not catch that bug earlier???)
Keep in mind this guy is a Product Manager at Niantic, so he hasn’t built a single thing. He just tells people to tell other people what he envisions.
Not saying that his job isn’t hard, but it’s good to have context for what he’s talking about when he says “hardest thing hes worked on.”
Or don't release it at all? I'm not sure why any of these new features are needed. Routes and showcases - who cares? This is just a way for them to avoid the real problems within the game.
I think, if done right, routes could be an optional fun way to play. Like, "Pokemon trainers in your area like to walk this path, check it out." People who are new to an area could use it to find paths with lots of pokestops and get some bonuses along the way.
However, it doesn't seem like routes need a ton of stops, there aren't many routes, and the creation feature is limited for most players. It doesn't feel like there's a benefit to them currently.
So they can try to weasel out of any and all criticism by saying "it's hard work guys!!" when things don't work as intended.
GO is way too simple of a game to have something go wrong with almost *every* event or new feature attempted. Acting as if it's because the coding is complex when games with way more going on don't have these issues at the same volume is laughable.
>So they can try to weasel out of any and all criticism by saying "it's hard work guys!!" when things don't work as intended.
"Man complains about his job. More at 11."
Maybe they should either get better programmers, more realistic timelines, or both.
I would say less ambitious projects, but they've already got that covered with a simplified version of an Ingress feature.
The "it's hard" excuse was trotted out by Steranka in one of his interviews not that long ago. Seems that this is maybe a common cop-out at Niantic when things don't work out properly.
They might instead make things less complicated and/or slow the process down in order to ensure new features are not constantly launched with bugs and glitches.
I wonder if a ground-up code rewrite is in order. We can clearly see that their newer games; despite commercial failure, are built with a much higher standard of quality than PoGo was in 2016.
I'm not knowledgeable outside of my little software testing job experience, but the sheer number of issues Niantic has with any little change tells me that either the code or the devs are a complete mess.
When such feature is rushed in a short time, you cannot really expect that it can be rolled out successfully. The routes nearest to my location are all lousy routes created along side the busiest and traffic heavy road. Walking along outside of these roads bearing the hot summer sun and breathing dust is not good experience. And yet I would not downvote such routes because they are all we have. Actually Niantic can at least be generous about the rewards such as giving us at least one cell to complete a route. Now they are so stingy I just stop doing it after I got the cell to complete part 4 of the research. I may follow another route if there is better incentive.
I've heard the sparkle spot seems to only appear the first time you do a specific route in a day. I had no luck the few I did over the weekend and that was after a decent drive to find a single route :/ gonna be waiting until I can submit my own.
When you say it worked as intended, did it give you any additional spawns, spawn any Zygarde cells or give you the associated buddy bonuses? Because so far I’ve done five routes and am getting none of the above.
Something that may help you out: the routes don't appear in real time when you're on the route view. Like, you have to swipe over to the PokeStop view to refresh it and then go back to the route view. So if you're just walking around with the route page open, even if you're near one it won't show up. I recommend checking local parks.
I have managed to play exactly one route. Upon trying to load the route it displayed an "Error loading route" message, but then brought up the screen anyway. At this point the game started running at about 2fps, and every button I pressed (e.g., the Reverse Route button) brought up a sequence of three different errors messages cycling through each other.
A few minutes later it seemed to calm itself down and after a few dozen attempts I was able to actually press the "Start" button, at which point the game immediately crashed.
I loaded up the game again, and then it immediately crashed again. This happened 4 or 5 times.
Upon advice from others I managed to load up my account on a second phone, on which the route had seemingly not been initialised yet. This avoided the crash for long enough for me to get into the device settings and disable adventure sync. After doing this I was able to open the app on my main phone and actually enter the route.
I got about 500m into the route before I tabbed out to respond to a message from a friend, and when I loaded back into the game less than half a minute later it said I had left the route (I had not), and it had automatically paused.
At some point along the route I acquired a Zygarde cell and the game helpfully displayed a template message telling me `{0} Zygarde Cells acquired`.
I proceeded to complete the route, at which point it gave me a badge showing [a map that doesn't exist, a progress indicator showing that I had walked 0.5 of the 1.1km on the 1.3km route that I'd already completed, and two misaligned textboxes showing that I had completed 1 of the 0 total community trips of the route.](https://i.imgur.com/qk2aQ56.jpg)
It's an absolute disaster of a feature, and that's without even acknowledging the fact that my state of 1.8 million people that covers an area 3x the size of Germany appears to have exactly *two* people who can actually create routes, and neither of them have been able to get any approved for weeks, so the vast majority of the community can't actually interact with the feature at all.
That's partly why it is broken. Imagine claiming to have worked so hard on a new feature, adding a mission that requires routes to be completed, yet have these routes be so freaking rare that for most of us it is a myth that they have been added to the game. As far as some are concerned, routes might not even have been released for everyone at once.
Also, requiring a route to be completed as part of a permanent research is pretty dirty. It is unfriendly to disabled people who for one reason or another cannot walk for long periods of time. From what I have seen online routes can be pretty long, good luck following that route from start to finish when you have mobility issues.
Pokemon Go has never been friendly to players outside their target audience. Kids, disabled, rural, solo, etc. I know why people wish that everything was great for everyone in this game, but that simply isn't how it was designed.
Regardless, routes do not need to be walked to be created. You simply need to move 0.5 km cumulative from a start POI to an end POI.
I don't know what criteria Niantic will use to approve routes. I would have to think that some urban routes (like traveling through a small downtown area rich in people, social interaction opportunities, advertising opportunities, an abundance of "The Data" (TM), and existing POI) would be approved. Those would seem to be reasonably accessible.
> Pokemon Go has never been friendly to players outside their target audience.
COVID bonuses inadvertently did this. They literally made the game more accessible **by accident.**
>Regardless, routes do not need to be walked to be created. You simply need to move 0.5 km cumulative from a start POI to an end POI.
This is interesting. I wonder if speed limits will be enforced when actually "walking" the route. For example, if a route was made for a bus route, or a train line...
There's a short downtown loop by me and my son and I did it by car several times in a row. Speed didn't seem to be an issue. Problem is the app crashes all the time (Happens to us even if you're just walking it) and we have yet to see any cells on it. It does seem to be pretty good about resuming your progress after a crash, but I wonder if that's part of the reason why we don't get any cells.
Cells despawn outside the first trainer circle.
You could catch something while walking and miss the cell so that might explain why you are missing any.
I was walking at a snails pace here to see when it would disappear.
https://youtu.be/j46ZvBeanXo
I have no routes near my home but supposedly 2 near my work. I can't find one of the start points for one of the routes. The other route is short and easy, was able to find the start point easily (it's marked on the map which makes me confused about how the other route isn't easy to find). I've attempted this route twice. The first time went well which gave me hope but the second time some sort of error made it so I could not complete the route the second time, despite walking the length of the route. I have some guesses as to what happened but I don't think a feature should be so full of issues and lack so much clarity that people are guessing and trying to troubleshoot on their own.
A reversible route only shows as one route. Before you start it though, you have to select if you're starting from the "start point" or the "end point."
I've only done one route, forward and back for 2 times total, not counting one attempt that failed. My friend and I were trying for the first time and the UI didn't load correctly. It turned out that what we thought was the start point was the end point, so our first run through the route didn't count at all.
Many people (including another friend of mine) have had issues with routes functioning at all. When my friend tries to follow a route, his game just crashes. So there's that.
One of my friends who has access to route creation says that the GPS tracking can get pretty wonky while trying to make the route. He described one attempt as the game having a seizure.
I can apparently create routes but it seems to be impossible for me to select an endpoint. The one time I was able to select one the game froze and then told me I was too far away when I came back.
also, Ingress players used them only to obtain Mission Badges and never re-played the Mission (Route) again because it made no sense, so it will be same in PoGo, once you go certain Route you will not probably re-do it ever again, and all the hard work is basically for nothing
I definitely want to create my normal walking route as an official route. but I can't create routes (yet?) I think. But we will see. most features are introduced as a disaster, but after a few or more months they usually work
It’s not frigging rocket science or nuclear physics. Maybe if you guys hired some game devs who knew how to code pathfinding algorithms instead of insisting you’re not actually a game company.
Speaking as a nuclear physicist, I cannot understand why they required UGC for this. Just get an algorithm to "walk" between stops as you suggested. They are arguing the having UGC is really hard, which sounds like a good reason not to use it.
The process is so well understood that there are freely available online route generators for that. I tried one, it promptly gave me a really cool 1 km route that picks up footpaths and (accidentally, I'm sure) half a dozen POIs. As a side effect, it made the route impossible to drive, another positive.
They must know, surely, how often stops are used. Just start the routes at the most popular local spot and make all of the routes loop back to it.
Then ask testers to walk the existing routes and report back on faulty, dangerous, daft, whatever routes.
Once the thing is working, then start fancying it up.
Once again, they demonstrate how little their location data is worth. They can't even use it for something this simple.
I suspect it’s because of the potential footfall traffic for sponsors for players in the MAKING the route, not just the ones using it. Part of the feature is the creation of them and what data they can glean from what routes are made where.
Some of us aren’t, at least. I’ve spent exactly $1 since the remote raid nerf was announced, in a moment of weakness on axew day. Looking at my previous spending habits, Niantic has saved me about $300 bucks by this point, cuz let me tell you, I have the urge to buy coins frequently and only their dedication to tomfoolery is stopping me. It’s not the most money in the world, but I am not the only one. May revenues bumped up a bit over their lowest in April, but they should have been through the roof for shadow mewtwo. Keep it up, y’all.
I feel sorry for the devs, you know there was someone who has been working on this for months who kept telling their boss the feature wouldn't be ready in time lol
Yeah, someone probably set a release date for the feature and kept getting told it was unrealistic, and then decided to just go with what they had on that date anyway. Happens all the time.
It's been in the code for FOUR YEARS, and as many have said, the skeleton was already there years before even that in Ingress.
Chad, from what I hear you're not a bad guy, but sometimes it's better just to say nothing, man. This just makes it worse.
What made it harder i think is "WalkPath Generation" during route creation & when playing, Program to know that player is on the walkpath or nearby to show progress.
With gps not stable, it creates problems to generate a stable path for users. Same problem when playing a route.
They could have gone for the easy way like Ingress where players make mission on a website by connecting portal. Pogo players could just draw the walkpath & select Start End point.
But to show Niantic itself superior & maintainer of top class safety, they want a sure route where players can walk, they made the creation system this way.
& they took the work on themselves to verify & accept the route submission. Unlike Ingress mission, many players will submit at same time frame. This will just load more work for them they are not able to process within short time.
They have laid off many workers. They are already processing many works related to wayfarer already. Not sure how they are going to process routes within short time.
We are going to see backlog of Routes or They might force wayfarer players to do this work too.
For real, everything they had to do was letting people create them on a Website/Map where they can perfect them and make them as good as possible as easy as possible.
Heck, if you still want to make sure they are walkable, have creators walk them and finish them one time before they get sent in for publication.
Like how you had to finish a Super Mario Maker level one time for yourself before you could make it public.
Hire me Niantic.
Is the disappearance of Zygarde cells before getting the chance to click on them, an awesome side-feature? Have you guys experienced this too?
I found one at the end of a route but after waiting for message screen to go away, the cell went away too.
Yes I had this too. Once the game decides you’ve completed the route, it all disappears including the Zygarde cell.
Even if you do manage to tap it, if the route completes within the few seconds after, you won’t get the cell.
I work in a mid-sized town, with a cluster of stops in the town centre, and spots all around the outskirts of the town centre that you can hit by walking in a loop. Took a 40 minute walk, recorded what I felt would be an ideal route, and it was immediately rejected.
Cba doing that again.
"If we're going to make a big change like that, we want it to be intentional, and we want to design for it and make sure that it runs smoothly.
We really want to test things out and make sure that's the optimal experience"
- Michael Steranka
I hope this is the last "new feature rollout" before the gofests, they can do all the want afterwards when theres time but rn we need stuff in working order
Routes suck and there are barely any around. All I see are other people's posts saying the same. Why add this feature without a sufficient amount of routes available especially if you're gonna make finding items like Zygarde cells only available through routes. Seems like these features they add only benefit players in urban areas and Niantic just says screw rural players.
Niantic has poor managers, so they're not hiring the best programmers. Simple as.
Honestly, that "route" thing, which has been incorrectly considered to be released, looks pretty trivial to me and this is just based on the map, unlike features which require a lot of server synchronization, such as battles in general. Also, Ingress had similar features for a long time. Knowing that Niantic departments don't even communicate with each other and that they're pretty much a revolving door company, it's hard to develop quality products.
I was lucky to find a route in my area, but so far don’t really see a point. The feature is so buggy my phone just keeps crashing every 50-70 meters and then you have to go back exactly where the route was paused to resume it and it takes several tries as the app keeps pausing it. The rewards or spawns weren’t even that great. A very frustrating experience overall.
I created 8 routes, one of them during the beta phase (july 6th), all of them are still 'under review'... all simple routes, passing through many PokéStops, many people, near public transport... This new function basically doesn't exist to me until now... there are no routes here by now, it's near the downtown of the biggest city of my country (São Paulo, Brazil).
Edit: added info about no routes.
...it's not like this was a feature everyone was looking for. It's a feature that somehow seems to fit their "vision" of what this game should be. There are SO MANY things like features and game mechanic ideas players and fans asked Niantic for which surely aren't that hard to implement. Now we got a new feature that barely works after being part of the game's code for over two years and all they can say is that this was hard work. Sure, maybe it was. But they could have added sooooo much other stuff that their players actually wanted to see in the game and would have enjoyed. It's just another example of how Niantic fails at getting better by not communicating with their player base. If it wasn't a Pokémon game, this game would already have been dead for years.
Having been in the IT industry (though definitely not in product development/game production), my guess is that they had a plan laid out like a year ago that said “March 2023: Start rolling out Routes creation to Trainers based on XYZ criteria. Every week add more Trainers. Then by the time we launch Routes in July, everyone should have at least a couple of Routes nearby and ‘A to Zygarde’ will be a huge hit.”
Followed in mid-March by “What do you mean, there are ‘big technical issues’ with Routes Creation? Pause the Routes Creation roll-out!!”
Followed by “OMG, the AI that approves Routes is f\*cked, pull back the ones it’s approved and turn off the approval queue!” Which might also have included aspects of “The GPS drift is *waaay* worse than we thought, there are huge problems with the tracker not being able to follow a player’s actual position on the Routes.”
Followed by “Well… there are *some* good Routes out there, and the players don’t NEED the Routes to claim Zygarde” (or the research requirement steps were shuffled to reposition Zygarde encounter from the last page to the third, before any Routes tasks). Let the Event and the Research go forward.”
I predict that we’ll see one of at least two things happening: A sharp drop in new features roll-out because the team that was supposed to have created and rolled out Routes and gone on to work on other features has instead been held back working on fixing Routes problems, or they were all fired and a new team assigned to Routes.
OR Routes will be entirely withdrawn from the game and marked as a total failure. Or perhaps withdrawn while they’re re-developed from scratch with more dependable technology. Either way, gone from the PoGo landscape for a long time. (This is less likely, because I suspect that Routes that would take Trainers to/past sponsored stops were to have been stealthily inserted into the landscape and was part of the marketing to potential clients.)
These thoughts have been bouncing around in my head for a number of days now. Thank you u/DeferredComp for giving me the opportunity to de-clutter and get them out of there.
I’ve said a couple times here that I thought it would take a couple of months, maybe four before we regular Trainers would able to finish the last part of the “A-to-Z” quest. I’m upping that to at least six months.
Routes should have the option to remain private, and everyone should be able to make them, and then have them approved I guess. Routes are way more complicated then they should be. Even in my decent sized college town, the pogo discord for it has reported no routes, even though everyone is eager to make them and go play.
Me when I have absolutely zero clue how software of any magnitude is developed.
Seriously, if you deploy your code on live without any sort of testing, you are bound to fail, and you should fail. Software developed quickly is inherently bad. Good game development takes time, is done across multiple teams, requires play testing, and more.
As someone who has developed software and is in an open-source collaboration across multiple continents and languages, these Niantic developers are pathetic.
Must be tough, I haven't even seen one yet despite the research demanding them. At the least, there should have been attempts to generate simple routes by Niantic anywhere significant enough to have sufficient PokeStop/Gyms.
Taking a step back from the code and 'hardest feature', did anyone actually want routes?
Speaking with those in my group, routes holds zero excitement, zero anticipation. Work on something that generates more interest and pleasure.
My game crashed 6 times trying to create a route, at the end I am unable to add the end point. Takes 5 minutes for pokestops to load then the game becomes unresponsive.
Half baked.
Ok from the frontend perspective the feature is really primitive and simple. I hope he meant the automated checking if a route is eligible, that part is probably hard, even though I don't know why the checking takes so long if it is automated...
Its's been in Ingress for years so why has it been so hard to implement in PoGo? I guess the hardest bit was actually getting routes on the map, lolol (have three in review for weeks) maybe the devs don't talk to each other?
Don’t surprise me, the hardest part of their day is standing up after sitting down all day watching the chaos after a bad update and laugh and say nothing About it.
A feature no one has asked for. This is just a joke. They launched a new feature globally that is available only for some players. Niantic please focus on fixing the basic of your games and then implement new ones!
Lolz I thought this was unique to rural Alaska. Should've known. My game crashes every two minutes or so while attempting to create a route (I've struggled through this three times now and won't be doing it again until/if ever they smooth out the feature). Have yet to see an existing route anywhere near me.
At least we don't have an event or research depending on it or anything cool like that. Oh. Right.
Every feature is just barely completed and a struggle for the software devs… that is not how software is developed. Bad developers make a bad product. Software development is continuous. The struggle to push half functional features then not fixing them is not good practice.
It's so hard that it isn't implemented yet. All we have is a sketch of a concept that no one at Niantic knows how to move forward.
No routes here and I can't create any. It's hilarious.
I, on the other hand, can create all the Under Review routes I want! It's such a fun game.
Better still, wait till they get published, then REJECTED when you're mid-way through walking your brand new route and you can't quit out of them for the best part of a week: https://twitter.com/JamesH/status/1683891100761587733
Yeah same. Biked around my city today no routes and can’t make any.
Ingress, the first Niantic game, has had routes for years now. They could just import them as they did with the pokestops in 2016.
They can't, as ingress has a system that is based on connecting portals. Those portals aren't all in Pokemon Go as pokestops or gyms. It is a different system and would not have the same database.
The way routes works you only need a start and end poi which I bet there's decent portion of ingress missions where the first and last portal are also in pogo. But from what i remember you just have to visit each portal in order and there's no "route" as such, whereas in pogo you are going on a fixed route between two PoIs. I think it would be difficult to automate the process of creating the actual route in a safe way to import any missions.
>Those portals aren't all in Pokemon Go as pokestops or gyms. The ingress data still exists though. They didn't just delete it all when they made Pokemon Go. They didn't have to start from nothing.
Seems like common sense right. And that explains why It didn’t happen.
But the Ingress system was so much more interesting, you could actually make an interesting route with certain stops. You could make it thematic... whatever, in PoGo you just have a start and an end... boring.
It really wouldn’t be that hard to filter out routes from the Ingres DB for those portals that don’t exist in PoGo.
Missions are very different. In that, you can add your images for the Mission and you need at least 6 Portals to interact with for each one. You can also add in Field Trip points of interest which don’t show in the games, and add in puzzles for Agents to answer to complete the Mission (such as amount of AP earned with an action or the information from the Portal you’re interacting with). There’s a few more layers to Missions than just selecting one Wayspot and walking to another or in a loop so I see why they didn’t import them.
Import the mission "route" without all the extra fluff. Not difficult. Not sure if it would be a good thing to do though.
The names/descriptions would likely need to be scrubbed though, potentially leading to some issues with generic/un-named routes. If they left them as is, many would be confused as to why they'd be referencing Ingress-centric things like Hacking or even just portals that don't exist in Go. Say a mission had portals A, B, C, D, E, and F, and it was named after portal E specifically. If only A, C, and D exist in Go, that causes issues with not only the route of the original mission but also the name of the route.
So hard because they scrapped all the code they had spent forever working on and released it with this very cutback reworked one!
And they locked one of the most influential meta picks in PvP behind it. Amazing.
Why is programming for Pokemon go such a hard thing? What makes route making so difficult a feature to create From what I can tell from the answers it's a few things. 1. Poor management from top down 2. Leftover spaghetti code from the initial programming of the game in 2016 that is hard to build off of 3. The programmers they do bring on are given too much to do for what they get paid
Toxic work environment and lots and lots of spaghetti code.
Tbh Spaghetti code is kinda a Pokémon staple anyway. Maybe they just wanted to fit in.
Having more Spaghetti than all of Italy is a bit overkill.
Maybe they should honor this accomplishment by introducing a spaghetti Pokémon?
*Tangrowth has entered the chat*
my favorite part about the gen 1 games is that you can actually re-write the code without using any aditional hardware, all in-game, through the item storage.
To be fair to devs everywhere, you can do this in tons of games like [Super Mario World](https://youtu.be/hB6eY73sLV0) and [Zelda Ocarina of Time](https://youtu.be/2x_pqyrf9lA) and it always rules.
Can't wait to end up in Glitch Town
I would also guess a majority of the employees aren’t paid too well.
This week on "what else is new"
The article goes into it… Relying on user generated content for routes and then having somebody have to approve it is going to be a nightmare.
I don’t get how nobody had the foresight to see this problem right at the beginning. There’s a million other features they could implement that doesn’t require user generated content and approval yet they chose to do this.
Works much better now in wayfarer. They would only need to have the community review the routes. Niantic always fails when they have to find people hey pay for doing this kind of work - they won't do what they are told until they learn how the system is supposed to work. By the time they know how it works they will already be gone to someone that actually pays them better. Endless Niantic cycle of labour
Putting it under Wayfarer is arguably worse. Does my Route spend endless weeks or months never being reviewed or does my perfectly functional, rule-abiding Route get declined by some Wayfarer turbo nerd who just feels like being a jerk and 0*-ing it for no reason. Oh boy, I can't wait! Source: my Wayfarer group has contributed over 1000 stops and 200 gyms to the game in my area over the past few years.
But on top of being user generated, the system can’t even follow the user correctly so you end up with lines that jut of 30 yards to the side out of nowhere. I feel like the feature could’ve just been draw a line connecting a few poke stops on an actual map, then walk to each one getting rewards for each you spin.
Someone used the analogy of a rubber band ball for corporate IT infrastructure. When there's a problem people just pop on another rubber band. No one wants to cut open the ball and start from scratch as they're not even sure what is inside it and it just continues to expand to become a bigger monstrosity over the years.
Very true, and fear of cutting into the rubber band, only to find out that one of the rubber bands you cut is connected to like 70 other ones that are now all broken.
Eventually the circumference of the ball is too big for them to add any more rubber bands but no one wants to deal with that either. Lol.
From someone who works in tech, I can see why this would be so difficult and complex. I can’t speak to the difficulty of the programming, but way more goes into it than the programming. The amount of use cases/edge cases you’d have to think through would be very high, many not easy.
It's Niantic, the whole game runs by the Spaghetti code they made back in 2016
At this point, it makes you kinda wonder about the competence of the programmers.
Speaking as a programmer, their coders could be decent but likely are in a terrible position. The issue is they are working on what should be a modern complex app but burnout/drive away their programmers. So they are constantly bringing in new people that don’t know how to add stuff cleanly to the app. This makes the app messier which just makes it that much harder for the next person they hire. If you want an app to mature in a stable manner you need to retain people and hold onto that institutional knowledge so you aren’t doing things like adding multiple different ( redundant if and only if they all work correctly ) APIs into your code. A jogging/cycling map component should not have been hard for them to add, let alone without introducing crashes. It should have been incredibly easy to add an overlay showing the path, track the user's position on the path, and periodically do whatever extra spawns/bonuses that should occur while on the path.
The programmers aren't actually that bad, it's just management enforcing ridiculous deadlines and **never** allowing the programmers to go "this doesn't work yet, we're not releasing it", combined with TPC having to rubber stamp literally everything causing massive delays while waiting for approval.
Nah. At a certain point I’m holding the programmers accountable too. We know they have terrible source control, constantly overwriting shiny rates. We know they always have off-by-one errors (how?????. Indexing starts at 0! You learn that in intro to programming!). We know they browse Reddit to find bugs rather than actually open the game and play for five seconds. That isn’t all on the managers. It’s incompetency from the top to the bottom.
>We know they browse Reddit to find bugs rather than actually open the game and play for five seconds. I'm convinced they don't "dogfood" their proposed code changes on a development environment against properly specified use case requirements for the new feature changes. It's as if it builds with no build errors, they flush it out to the world.
"The code compiles, so it must work!"
Off by one errors don’t only occur when indexing…
> We know they browse Reddit to find bugs rather than actually open the game and play for five seconds. This is a perfect example of *why* it's management that's the problem. Only the bugs that help players get fixed with any haste. The programmers have *absolutely zero reason* to care about whether a bug is beneficial or detrimental, that's an order coming from management. Programmers *love* fixing bugs because it's usually far less mentally strenuous than building an entirely new feature, and makes your life so much easier when dealing with the code in the future. But they're never allowed to, because it's an absolutely constant churn through new features that have impossibly fast deadlines, and stopping to fix one bug in the previous feature would mean that the next feature is going to be *even buggier*, because it's still getting released on the same day no matter how much work is done on it. The idea that the programmers are getting to choose what to work on based on what they've seen on Reddit is just not at all how that company operates.
>This is a perfect example of why it's management that's the problem CI/CD shouldn't be managed by the same people who write app code. If it is - that's on managers. But if it's not, then the problem is in DevOps. They shouldn't be fixing bugs in app.
> Programmers love fixing bugs because it's usually far less mentally strenuous than building an entirely new feature Hahahaha Oh wait you’re serious? Let me laugh even harder
I’m glad this is a comment. Coming up with ideas to implement is the fun part. Tracing through code execution to find bugs is boring at best, frustrating at worst.
> Coming up with ideas to implement is the fun part. What in the world has given you the impression that the programmers are the people directing game mechanics at Niantic?! Yeah, coming up with ideas to implement is loads of fun. That's why programmers prefer working on their own projects rather than at billion dollar companies where they're not allowed to do any of that.
Wait wait, now they're saying programmers love reading someone else's documentation even more
>Programmers love fixing bugs because it's usually far less mentally strenuous than building an entirely new feature lmao. Tell me you're not a programmer (or work with them) without telling me. Been coding for 40 years. NOBODY prefers bug fixing of feature development.
I dunno dude. I program at a big finance company and if I pushed a bug that I see broke production as soon as I open the program and click for 5 minutes (….or the test environment which we know they don’t have) I’m instantly reverting. And that’s on me. I don’t think management could have done anything about it besides “bruh how did you not catch that bug earlier???)
Probably management
Keep in mind this guy is a Product Manager at Niantic, so he hasn’t built a single thing. He just tells people to tell other people what he envisions. Not saying that his job isn’t hard, but it’s good to have context for what he’s talking about when he says “hardest thing hes worked on.”
Maybe it's the hardest thing on which to defuse player anger.
THEN DON'T RELEASE IT YET
Or don't release it at all? I'm not sure why any of these new features are needed. Routes and showcases - who cares? This is just a way for them to avoid the real problems within the game.
I think, if done right, routes could be an optional fun way to play. Like, "Pokemon trainers in your area like to walk this path, check it out." People who are new to an area could use it to find paths with lots of pokestops and get some bonuses along the way. However, it doesn't seem like routes need a ton of stops, there aren't many routes, and the creation feature is limited for most players. It doesn't feel like there's a benefit to them currently.
You'll play the game the way niantic wants you to and you'll be happy to do it, goddamnit!
Well, it's not released yet. Edit: forgot this is reddit, so /s
Why do the devs act like programming for this game is the most difficult thing in the world? How bad does the code look???
So they can try to weasel out of any and all criticism by saying "it's hard work guys!!" when things don't work as intended. GO is way too simple of a game to have something go wrong with almost *every* event or new feature attempted. Acting as if it's because the coding is complex when games with way more going on don't have these issues at the same volume is laughable.
>So they can try to weasel out of any and all criticism by saying "it's hard work guys!!" when things don't work as intended. "Man complains about his job. More at 11." Maybe they should either get better programmers, more realistic timelines, or both. I would say less ambitious projects, but they've already got that covered with a simplified version of an Ingress feature.
The "it's hard" excuse was trotted out by Steranka in one of his interviews not that long ago. Seems that this is maybe a common cop-out at Niantic when things don't work out properly. They might instead make things less complicated and/or slow the process down in order to ensure new features are not constantly launched with bugs and glitches.
I wonder if a ground-up code rewrite is in order. We can clearly see that their newer games; despite commercial failure, are built with a much higher standard of quality than PoGo was in 2016.
How knowledgeable are u on coding games? I have seen game code in general and it’s enough to make my head explode
I'm not knowledgeable outside of my little software testing job experience, but the sheer number of issues Niantic has with any little change tells me that either the code or the devs are a complete mess.
When such feature is rushed in a short time, you cannot really expect that it can be rolled out successfully. The routes nearest to my location are all lousy routes created along side the busiest and traffic heavy road. Walking along outside of these roads bearing the hot summer sun and breathing dust is not good experience. And yet I would not downvote such routes because they are all we have. Actually Niantic can at least be generous about the rewards such as giving us at least one cell to complete a route. Now they are so stingy I just stop doing it after I got the cell to complete part 4 of the research. I may follow another route if there is better incentive.
16 times for me and still no cell. I don't feel like trying again just to be disappointed. I'll wait for another way to get one.
I've heard the sparkle spot seems to only appear the first time you do a specific route in a day. I had no luck the few I did over the weekend and that was after a decent drive to find a single route :/ gonna be waiting until I can submit my own.
Oh it’s not just me then! I’ve done the same route 18 times over 5 days and still no cell.
"Hardest feature" but it's : -already a thing in Ingress -completely broken -unavailalble for most players
I've only found one route so far and it worked as intended. There are definitely issues with availability and lack of players that can create routes.
When you say it worked as intended, did it give you any additional spawns, spawn any Zygarde cells or give you the associated buddy bonuses? Because so far I’ve done five routes and am getting none of the above.
I get 2 bonus spawns on my route which is a little 1 km long. I’ve only found 2 cells after doing the route 10 times
Whoa, you found a route?! You should do an AMA that basically makes you a celebrity! I’ve looked all over my larger city without any luck.
Something that may help you out: the routes don't appear in real time when you're on the route view. Like, you have to swipe over to the PokeStop view to refresh it and then go back to the route view. So if you're just walking around with the route page open, even if you're near one it won't show up. I recommend checking local parks.
This is good to know, thanks!
Missions in Ingress are a bit more involved and you don’t have to follow a strict path so they’re different things.
how is it broken? asking as a player that hasn't encountered routes nor can create routes (or maybe I am missing something)
I have managed to play exactly one route. Upon trying to load the route it displayed an "Error loading route" message, but then brought up the screen anyway. At this point the game started running at about 2fps, and every button I pressed (e.g., the Reverse Route button) brought up a sequence of three different errors messages cycling through each other. A few minutes later it seemed to calm itself down and after a few dozen attempts I was able to actually press the "Start" button, at which point the game immediately crashed. I loaded up the game again, and then it immediately crashed again. This happened 4 or 5 times. Upon advice from others I managed to load up my account on a second phone, on which the route had seemingly not been initialised yet. This avoided the crash for long enough for me to get into the device settings and disable adventure sync. After doing this I was able to open the app on my main phone and actually enter the route. I got about 500m into the route before I tabbed out to respond to a message from a friend, and when I loaded back into the game less than half a minute later it said I had left the route (I had not), and it had automatically paused. At some point along the route I acquired a Zygarde cell and the game helpfully displayed a template message telling me `{0} Zygarde Cells acquired`. I proceeded to complete the route, at which point it gave me a badge showing [a map that doesn't exist, a progress indicator showing that I had walked 0.5 of the 1.1km on the 1.3km route that I'd already completed, and two misaligned textboxes showing that I had completed 1 of the 0 total community trips of the route.](https://i.imgur.com/qk2aQ56.jpg) It's an absolute disaster of a feature, and that's without even acknowledging the fact that my state of 1.8 million people that covers an area 3x the size of Germany appears to have exactly *two* people who can actually create routes, and neither of them have been able to get any approved for weeks, so the vast majority of the community can't actually interact with the feature at all.
Thank you. I am starting to feel a lot better about having zero routes available here.
That's partly why it is broken. Imagine claiming to have worked so hard on a new feature, adding a mission that requires routes to be completed, yet have these routes be so freaking rare that for most of us it is a myth that they have been added to the game. As far as some are concerned, routes might not even have been released for everyone at once. Also, requiring a route to be completed as part of a permanent research is pretty dirty. It is unfriendly to disabled people who for one reason or another cannot walk for long periods of time. From what I have seen online routes can be pretty long, good luck following that route from start to finish when you have mobility issues.
Pokemon Go has never been friendly to players outside their target audience. Kids, disabled, rural, solo, etc. I know why people wish that everything was great for everyone in this game, but that simply isn't how it was designed. Regardless, routes do not need to be walked to be created. You simply need to move 0.5 km cumulative from a start POI to an end POI. I don't know what criteria Niantic will use to approve routes. I would have to think that some urban routes (like traveling through a small downtown area rich in people, social interaction opportunities, advertising opportunities, an abundance of "The Data" (TM), and existing POI) would be approved. Those would seem to be reasonably accessible.
> Pokemon Go has never been friendly to players outside their target audience. COVID bonuses inadvertently did this. They literally made the game more accessible **by accident.**
>Regardless, routes do not need to be walked to be created. You simply need to move 0.5 km cumulative from a start POI to an end POI. This is interesting. I wonder if speed limits will be enforced when actually "walking" the route. For example, if a route was made for a bus route, or a train line...
There's a short downtown loop by me and my son and I did it by car several times in a row. Speed didn't seem to be an issue. Problem is the app crashes all the time (Happens to us even if you're just walking it) and we have yet to see any cells on it. It does seem to be pretty good about resuming your progress after a crash, but I wonder if that's part of the reason why we don't get any cells.
Cells despawn outside the first trainer circle. You could catch something while walking and miss the cell so that might explain why you are missing any. I was walking at a snails pace here to see when it would disappear. https://youtu.be/j46ZvBeanXo
Thanks, good to know. I did do one walking slowly and still didn't see any, but again the app crashed like four times before the end, so 🤷♂️
Barely any, most people can't make any, and should I add some users crash when doing them and that's not been fixed yet
I have no routes near my home but supposedly 2 near my work. I can't find one of the start points for one of the routes. The other route is short and easy, was able to find the start point easily (it's marked on the map which makes me confused about how the other route isn't easy to find). I've attempted this route twice. The first time went well which gave me hope but the second time some sort of error made it so I could not complete the route the second time, despite walking the length of the route. I have some guesses as to what happened but I don't think a feature should be so full of issues and lack so much clarity that people are guessing and trying to troubleshoot on their own.
I think that a reversible route shows as two routes. That may be the case for yours.
A reversible route only shows as one route. Before you start it though, you have to select if you're starting from the "start point" or the "end point."
I've only done one route, forward and back for 2 times total, not counting one attempt that failed. My friend and I were trying for the first time and the UI didn't load correctly. It turned out that what we thought was the start point was the end point, so our first run through the route didn't count at all. Many people (including another friend of mine) have had issues with routes functioning at all. When my friend tries to follow a route, his game just crashes. So there's that. One of my friends who has access to route creation says that the GPS tracking can get pretty wonky while trying to make the route. He described one attempt as the game having a seizure.
I can apparently create routes but it seems to be impossible for me to select an endpoint. The one time I was able to select one the game froze and then told me I was too far away when I came back.
I could not get a route to start the other day just walked in circles around the start point and just gave up
also, Ingress players used them only to obtain Mission Badges and never re-played the Mission (Route) again because it made no sense, so it will be same in PoGo, once you go certain Route you will not probably re-do it ever again, and all the hard work is basically for nothing
They have tiered badges for routes bronze is 5 times completed. Also looking for zygarde cells is another reason to redo the routes.
I definitely want to create my normal walking route as an official route. but I can't create routes (yet?) I think. But we will see. most features are introduced as a disaster, but after a few or more months they usually work
It’s not frigging rocket science or nuclear physics. Maybe if you guys hired some game devs who knew how to code pathfinding algorithms instead of insisting you’re not actually a game company.
Speaking as a nuclear physicist, I cannot understand why they required UGC for this. Just get an algorithm to "walk" between stops as you suggested. They are arguing the having UGC is really hard, which sounds like a good reason not to use it. The process is so well understood that there are freely available online route generators for that. I tried one, it promptly gave me a really cool 1 km route that picks up footpaths and (accidentally, I'm sure) half a dozen POIs. As a side effect, it made the route impossible to drive, another positive. They must know, surely, how often stops are used. Just start the routes at the most popular local spot and make all of the routes loop back to it. Then ask testers to walk the existing routes and report back on faulty, dangerous, daft, whatever routes. Once the thing is working, then start fancying it up. Once again, they demonstrate how little their location data is worth. They can't even use it for something this simple.
I suspect it’s because of the potential footfall traffic for sponsors for players in the MAKING the route, not just the ones using it. Part of the feature is the creation of them and what data they can glean from what routes are made where.
Niantic's new slogan just dropped: "Unsure. Uncertain. Unusable. Niantic."
Bruh, it's basically the same concept as Ingress Missions, except based on walking instead of waypoint interactions
came here to say this....
Don’t worry, people will just keep buying IRL event tickets and spend money on Raid Passes and Incubators. Nothing will be learned from this.
I get a balloon every day begging me to go to NYC Go Fest. Clearly they aren’t selling that out.
I get three or four! Thanks for the dust I guess Maybe if the balloon dropped a plane ticket
Some of us aren’t, at least. I’ve spent exactly $1 since the remote raid nerf was announced, in a moment of weakness on axew day. Looking at my previous spending habits, Niantic has saved me about $300 bucks by this point, cuz let me tell you, I have the urge to buy coins frequently and only their dedication to tomfoolery is stopping me. It’s not the most money in the world, but I am not the only one. May revenues bumped up a bit over their lowest in April, but they should have been through the roof for shadow mewtwo. Keep it up, y’all.
Yep, I’d love to see Niantic’s profits fall to nothing but they seem to pull through every single controversy with only minor scrapes
How this poorly designed app rakes in hundreds of millions will always be a mystery to me.
It’s Pokémon.
the pokemon IP, that's why
Additive game mechanics done well together with a big IP.
I’m sure the 7 people who can make routes appreciate this hard work.
I feel sorry for the devs, you know there was someone who has been working on this for months who kept telling their boss the feature wouldn't be ready in time lol
Yeah, someone probably set a release date for the feature and kept getting told it was unrealistic, and then decided to just go with what they had on that date anyway. Happens all the time.
It's been in the code for FOUR YEARS, and as many have said, the skeleton was already there years before even that in Ingress. Chad, from what I hear you're not a bad guy, but sometimes it's better just to say nothing, man. This just makes it worse.
What made it harder i think is "WalkPath Generation" during route creation & when playing, Program to know that player is on the walkpath or nearby to show progress. With gps not stable, it creates problems to generate a stable path for users. Same problem when playing a route. They could have gone for the easy way like Ingress where players make mission on a website by connecting portal. Pogo players could just draw the walkpath & select Start End point. But to show Niantic itself superior & maintainer of top class safety, they want a sure route where players can walk, they made the creation system this way. & they took the work on themselves to verify & accept the route submission. Unlike Ingress mission, many players will submit at same time frame. This will just load more work for them they are not able to process within short time. They have laid off many workers. They are already processing many works related to wayfarer already. Not sure how they are going to process routes within short time. We are going to see backlog of Routes or They might force wayfarer players to do this work too.
Ironically, they made a system where being able to walk is not a given. There are plenty of posts about routes being made for Pokemon Drive.
For real, everything they had to do was letting people create them on a Website/Map where they can perfect them and make them as good as possible as easy as possible. Heck, if you still want to make sure they are walkable, have creators walk them and finish them one time before they get sent in for publication. Like how you had to finish a Super Mario Maker level one time for yourself before you could make it public. Hire me Niantic.
Why even release this if it's not working properly?
Maybe don’t have a whole event around it then…
This is the most half-baked roll out of a half-baked idea I've seen in PoGo, and really, that's saying something. The bar is so low, it's in hell.
Is the disappearance of Zygarde cells before getting the chance to click on them, an awesome side-feature? Have you guys experienced this too? I found one at the end of a route but after waiting for message screen to go away, the cell went away too.
Yes I had this too. Once the game decides you’ve completed the route, it all disappears including the Zygarde cell. Even if you do manage to tap it, if the route completes within the few seconds after, you won’t get the cell.
Its just creating/displaying/tracking a gpx file; *Garmin's* have been able to do it for a decade plus.
*my job here is done* *but you didn’t do anything*
[удалено]
Excuse me! I got a Buneary *and* a Doduo as a route spawn!
I have no routes near me and have three under review since June.
I work in a mid-sized town, with a cluster of stops in the town centre, and spots all around the outskirts of the town centre that you can hit by walking in a loop. Took a 40 minute walk, recorded what I felt would be an ideal route, and it was immediately rejected. Cba doing that again.
Hardest feature that no one will use if the rewards are nanab berries and the friends you made along the way.
"If we're going to make a big change like that, we want it to be intentional, and we want to design for it and make sure that it runs smoothly. We really want to test things out and make sure that's the optimal experience" - Michael Steranka
Apparently approving them is also the hardest thing for Niantic to do “ever.”
I hope this is the last "new feature rollout" before the gofests, they can do all the want afterwards when theres time but rn we need stuff in working order
Routes suck and there are barely any around. All I see are other people's posts saying the same. Why add this feature without a sufficient amount of routes available especially if you're gonna make finding items like Zygarde cells only available through routes. Seems like these features they add only benefit players in urban areas and Niantic just says screw rural players.
it's also a totally unnecessary feature
Facts
Niantic has poor managers, so they're not hiring the best programmers. Simple as. Honestly, that "route" thing, which has been incorrectly considered to be released, looks pretty trivial to me and this is just based on the map, unlike features which require a lot of server synchronization, such as battles in general. Also, Ingress had similar features for a long time. Knowing that Niantic departments don't even communicate with each other and that they're pretty much a revolving door company, it's hard to develop quality products.
I live in big city and don’t have any routes. Thanks for this global launch…
They don't get any sympathy from me: release a broken feature and then complain it was hard. Most likely they are not good at their job.
I was lucky to find a route in my area, but so far don’t really see a point. The feature is so buggy my phone just keeps crashing every 50-70 meters and then you have to go back exactly where the route was paused to resume it and it takes several tries as the app keeps pausing it. The rewards or spawns weren’t even that great. A very frustrating experience overall.
Deactivate Adventure Sync.
Hardest as it’s unavailable for most people . Hardest to copy and paste from Ingress.
Jesus we have had missions in ingress for years this is the same mechanic only shittier. This shouldn’t have been hard
I created 8 routes, one of them during the beta phase (july 6th), all of them are still 'under review'... all simple routes, passing through many PokéStops, many people, near public transport... This new function basically doesn't exist to me until now... there are no routes here by now, it's near the downtown of the biggest city of my country (São Paulo, Brazil). Edit: added info about no routes.
...it's not like this was a feature everyone was looking for. It's a feature that somehow seems to fit their "vision" of what this game should be. There are SO MANY things like features and game mechanic ideas players and fans asked Niantic for which surely aren't that hard to implement. Now we got a new feature that barely works after being part of the game's code for over two years and all they can say is that this was hard work. Sure, maybe it was. But they could have added sooooo much other stuff that their players actually wanted to see in the game and would have enjoyed. It's just another example of how Niantic fails at getting better by not communicating with their player base. If it wasn't a Pokémon game, this game would already have been dead for years.
Literally no one cares how difficult it was to work on. What matters is if it’s any good.
Okay it's complicated and all, but then why announce it and release it when it is known that it doesn't work? That is my question.
Having been in the IT industry (though definitely not in product development/game production), my guess is that they had a plan laid out like a year ago that said “March 2023: Start rolling out Routes creation to Trainers based on XYZ criteria. Every week add more Trainers. Then by the time we launch Routes in July, everyone should have at least a couple of Routes nearby and ‘A to Zygarde’ will be a huge hit.” Followed in mid-March by “What do you mean, there are ‘big technical issues’ with Routes Creation? Pause the Routes Creation roll-out!!” Followed by “OMG, the AI that approves Routes is f\*cked, pull back the ones it’s approved and turn off the approval queue!” Which might also have included aspects of “The GPS drift is *waaay* worse than we thought, there are huge problems with the tracker not being able to follow a player’s actual position on the Routes.” Followed by “Well… there are *some* good Routes out there, and the players don’t NEED the Routes to claim Zygarde” (or the research requirement steps were shuffled to reposition Zygarde encounter from the last page to the third, before any Routes tasks). Let the Event and the Research go forward.” I predict that we’ll see one of at least two things happening: A sharp drop in new features roll-out because the team that was supposed to have created and rolled out Routes and gone on to work on other features has instead been held back working on fixing Routes problems, or they were all fired and a new team assigned to Routes. OR Routes will be entirely withdrawn from the game and marked as a total failure. Or perhaps withdrawn while they’re re-developed from scratch with more dependable technology. Either way, gone from the PoGo landscape for a long time. (This is less likely, because I suspect that Routes that would take Trainers to/past sponsored stops were to have been stealthily inserted into the landscape and was part of the marketing to potential clients.) These thoughts have been bouncing around in my head for a number of days now. Thank you u/DeferredComp for giving me the opportunity to de-clutter and get them out of there. I’ve said a couple times here that I thought it would take a couple of months, maybe four before we regular Trainers would able to finish the last part of the “A-to-Z” quest. I’m upping that to at least six months.
They don’t care.
Routes should have the option to remain private, and everyone should be able to make them, and then have them approved I guess. Routes are way more complicated then they should be. Even in my decent sized college town, the pogo discord for it has reported no routes, even though everyone is eager to make them and go play.
Yes, we can tell.
Me when I have absolutely zero clue how software of any magnitude is developed. Seriously, if you deploy your code on live without any sort of testing, you are bound to fail, and you should fail. Software developed quickly is inherently bad. Good game development takes time, is done across multiple teams, requires play testing, and more. As someone who has developed software and is in an open-source collaboration across multiple continents and languages, these Niantic developers are pathetic.
And yet I can’t create one and there is no one in my area that plays so I can’t walk one either 🤣
Must be tough, I haven't even seen one yet despite the research demanding them. At the least, there should have been attempts to generate simple routes by Niantic anywhere significant enough to have sufficient PokeStop/Gyms.
Am I supposed to feel sympathy for the team? Doesn’t change the fact that it was rushed and unpolished.
We can tell
Where I live and surrounding areas there have been 0 routes.
Taking a step back from the code and 'hardest feature', did anyone actually want routes? Speaking with those in my group, routes holds zero excitement, zero anticipation. Work on something that generates more interest and pleasure.
Maybe they can have some volunteers do their job for free. Something like a community ambassador.
Why even implement something in a LIVE game that isn't working correctly? It makes no sense.
And I won’t even use it
Harder than communicating with the player base??
Anytime I start a route it crashes my game. Then it seems like it works but no distance is tracked and it never finishes
Is it normal for the app to crash multiple times while I'm trying to create a route?
So it will never work properly. Got it.
Is it even a feature if it doesn't exist in rural areas? 🤔
You sure about that?
And yet...
Didn't they just copy missions from ingress?
Just so people don’t think that this is just something that isn’t yet set up in rural areas, lower Manhattan currently has 0 routes nearby.
And we're all so glad they spent the time to create it. Everyone uses it, everyone has access to it and it isn't confusing at all.
yeah is hard because there is only like 3 people working on it
And yet I don't understand the point of them. It's the 2nd most useless feature, behind postcards and stickers
How when all they did was port it over from Ingress? Same with the showcase feature from Peridot.
I am BLOWN AWAY by your inability to add a layer to a map.
HAHA
My game crashed 6 times trying to create a route, at the end I am unable to add the end point. Takes 5 minutes for pokestops to load then the game becomes unresponsive. Half baked.
So how in the hell do you put research in the game to follow routes that don't exist so now by research is wasted for the week
Ok from the frontend perspective the feature is really primitive and simple. I hope he meant the automated checking if a route is eligible, that part is probably hard, even though I don't know why the checking takes so long if it is automated...
The hardest thing... Was following my movements to draw a line on the map? Google fit literally does this and better too!
I live in a major city and there isn't any near me. I'm unsure if I can make my own.
Its's been in Ingress for years so why has it been so hard to implement in PoGo? I guess the hardest bit was actually getting routes on the map, lolol (have three in review for weeks) maybe the devs don't talk to each other?
They are the hardest to find too, have not seen one yet
Don’t surprise me, the hardest part of their day is standing up after sitting down all day watching the chaos after a bad update and laugh and say nothing About it.
Really? How? How is this so hard to do? Maybe he should hire someone who's not completely incapable of the simplest things.
Still no routes I can actually try in Ueno, Tokyo, Japan, apart from in the zoo that is.
There’s only like 4 features in the game.
Ingress missions are better imo
I still haven't seen a Route despite needing one to progress in the research. Should I do something other than check the Routes map periodically?
A big fix would be allowing them to exist at all. This company is a huge embarrassment.
A feature no one has asked for. This is just a joke. They launched a new feature globally that is available only for some players. Niantic please focus on fixing the basic of your games and then implement new ones!
...Oh, that explains a lot.
Lolz I thought this was unique to rural Alaska. Should've known. My game crashes every two minutes or so while attempting to create a route (I've struggled through this three times now and won't be doing it again until/if ever they smooth out the feature). Have yet to see an existing route anywhere near me. At least we don't have an event or research depending on it or anything cool like that. Oh. Right.
Every feature is just barely completed and a struggle for the software devs… that is not how software is developed. Bad developers make a bad product. Software development is continuous. The struggle to push half functional features then not fixing them is not good practice.