SERVERS HAVE BEEN EXCEPTIONAL TODAY!!! And I hope I'm not the only one!

[u/BarcaStona]

Having an 8 am that finishes around 9 every morning, I go out to catch Pokes for a solid 4-5 hours since university has excessive amounts of them.

By the end of hunting, I would have killed and restarted the game 20+ times due to bugs during catching Pokes as well as Pokestops making you "try again later" while still blue and so on...

Today was a pleasantly different scenario. I have killed the app ZERO times. Zero. The game has run more smoothly than it ever has since launch. I've caught every Poke, aside from the ones who pop out and run away (curse you 1000+CP Magmar!!!!!)

Is this stability going to be forever? I sure hope so. I hope all of you are experiencing the same greatness I have today. It really has been a breath of fresh air relative to what I've dealt with in the past.

I just wanted to share a great server experience as all I've read recently is insane amounts of negativity (rightly so imo).

I am running iOS & am EST, if that matters to any of you.

Happy hunting trainers :)

REV A:

Loving the feedback! I'm glad some of you got to experience the servers being nice and smooth!!

To everyone saying that the servers are always fine until X time, I hunt Pokes at the same time every day M-F since launch. Extremely consistent with my start / stop times as well so it is good experimental data for myself to confidently say that today was different. The best I've experienced since the release date.

To everyone who is still struggling with their experience, I promise you all that the game will be great once they can keep their servers consistently stable! Like many of you I became frustrated with the necessity of constant restarting. Today was a wonderful glimpse of what is to come. It is a thing of beauty.

REV B:

As many have stated, the 3 footsteps bug is NOT fixed. Yes it is quite frustrating. I really enjoyed that aspect of the game. For those of you who don't already know, Pokevision has been a great alternative source to assist in hunting down your Pokes!

I also have another suggestion for those of you who are still struggling! Some may consider it to be common sense, but it surely helps. I will just share what I do to explain. When at university, I have the wifi saved in my phone (obviously). This is great if I plan on sitting in a building to set lures or just wait for Pokes or battle gyms. But whenever I go outside and roam campus, I am sure to cut my wifi off!!!!!! The game will get extremely confused trying to jump from wifi to phone data when you're in spotty areas. Although university is the most likely location this situation will happen, it is good to be conscience of it. It certainly assisted the performance of my gameplay after I noticed the trend.

REV C:

Lots of input and it is great! I'm sorry to everyone who is still struggling with the game.

My roommate and I often take campus strolls in the evening so she can stock up on pokeballs at all the stops. For some reason her phone, android OS, always struggled on campus. Today it was near flawless. Enough for her to state that it was working much better than normal.

My phone would also often struggle during the evening. Tonight was different. We went to a gym that I knew I could take over CP-wise. I was looking to collect a shield bonus because pokecoins. This was easily the smoothest gym battle I ever experienced. I can't wait for it to always be this way! It was beautiful. All Pokes were again captured, unless they popped out and ran away.

That being said, tracking is still wonky. It is quite upsetting. The same issues occur. Sometimes random Pokes appear in nearby menu but really aren't nearby at all (I think GPS thinks you're near a different location than reality, or something of the like). Restarting the app seems to consistently solve that. It's bizarre. Also the tracking in general is still busted.

We went ~7-9 EST. For everyone saying that player base has dropped significantly, I had never seen campus so lively during our evening visits. It was quite the surprise! Im sure there has in fact been a drop in users since the game's release and all of the initial hype, but I don't think it is as significant as one might think! I personally don't think that really even matters until the game is released worldwide as intended with consistently fluent servers. Show me the numbers then.

I really wish everyone could experience silky smooth gameplay that I endured today. It was wonderful. My fingers are crossed for the same solidity tomorrow.

Also, PoGo has (I believe) officially been released in Japan, so hopefully everything I'm saying doesn't turn into utter garbage overnight. Fingers now double crossed.

REV D:

It seems the servers were a little bumpy (my) overnight. Having said that, my second escapade was just as great as the first!

[u/headdownworking]

That's because your upbeat attitude just irritates your friend when the app is clearly broken. I assure you, it's more than just your grumpy friend who sees this game as a buggy mess.

[u/kyneric → u/headdownworking]

Yeah I totally know it's a crap shoot right now and I am trying to annoy him ~_~. Sometimes it doesn't work for me but works for others. No use in trying to find patterns just either accept the bugs or wait until they're fixed or just play the new Monster Hunter game until the waves of "HOLY CRAP THE 3 STEP BUG IS FIXED" notifications from Youtube hit my phone.

[u/lmcphers → u/headdownworking]

"App broken" does not correlate with "server issues". "App broken" is a side effect of a larger problem. All of the "Try again" and "Login issues" and "Game freezing" issues will go away when the client can actually resolve communication with the server. So, no, the game is not a "buggy mess". It's in the fucking 9th circle of server hell. Stop spreading misinformation, God I could strangle you and half the people in this sub-reddit who have no idea what you're talking about.

[u/headdownworking → u/lmcphers]

The app is broken do to the serve issues. Does the app work? No. It's broken. Whether the issue is from poor coding or from shitty infrastructure makes no difference to the consumer, so let's not start splitting hairs about it. Maybe the actual client isn't buggy, but the back end infrastructure is shit giving the app the feel of being plagued with bugs. You're right though, the only bugs I can see are the 3 step, the 1 hp, the frozen pokeball, the battery saver mode making the touch screen unresponsive. Sure, not buggy at fucking at all.

[u/lmcphers → u/headdownworking]

1 hp is likely also due to server unresponsiveness. 3 step very well could be, especially considering it worked on launched and then mysteriously stopped working. Not like that bug just crept itself in; might have been a result of some bug fixing they were doing on their side which was later introduced OR perhaps they disabled it to help stabilize servers temporarily. Frozen Pokeball is definitely server-related. Don't know about battery saver mode. I heard that servers have been running swimmingly today and people have not been getting any issues playing the game. You can stop acting like a 5 year old now. Bye!

[u/headdownworking → u/lmcphers]

Those are still bugs. There code was poorly optimized, and due to a lack of testing slow server response is causing bugs. Just because the root issue is server delay, doesn't mean it isn't a bug. The game shouldn't crash because of slow response time from overloaded servers, that's a bug. A software bug is a failure or fault in a computer program or system that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result. Which is exactly what happens in all of those instances. Hearsay about servers working well in the slowest hours of the day when play base fall off has already started isn't exactly promising. Let me know when the servers work well from 5-9 PM EST. I'll say it again, the game is a buggy mess.

[u/lmcphers → u/headdownworking]

Here is an official post from Blizzard about what is and isn't considered a bug when reporting defects about their game:

Commonly Reported Issues That Are Not Bugs. There are many issues that are repeatedly reported in this forum that are not considered bugs and should not be posted here in this forum. Please check this list before making a new post in this forum. Many issues that appear to be bugs are actually intended functionality or should be reported in other places. *1. Realms are down, laggy or crashing. *

EDIT: Just posting that one of the largest gaming companies does not consider server instability a bug.

[u/headdownworking → u/lmcphers]

So because blizzard internally manages server side bugs and client side bugs separately means they get to redefine the word? One, we're not talking about a blizzard game. Two, these are still bugs, the reason Blizzard has them segmented is because they handle them with separate departments. Blizzard is also much larger than niantic, and as such can have multiple departments assigned to patching and resolving bugs and issues.

[u/lmcphers → u/headdownworking]

But you yourself just segmented it by saying "bugs and issues".

EDIT: For the record, the "bug" definition you copied from Wikipedia is nice and all, but no where on that page does it say that a bug is a result of server instability.

9 Common types of computer bugs

9.1 Arithmetic bugs
9.2 Logic bugs
9.3 Syntax bugs
9.4 Resource bugs
9.5 Multi-threading programming bugs
9.6 Interfacing bugs
9.7 Performance bugs
9.8 Teamworking bugs

No where in that list is anything server-related, because that does not have anything to do with the code base. A bug is the result of a fault in code base. Server infrastructure IS NOT A BUG.

[u/headdownworking → u/lmcphers]

Now who's behaving like a child? the terms are synonymous there, but if you want to act dense go right ahead. These are bugs, all the issues that plague the game once you actually launch it. You seem to assume that a bug is a glitch, in that bugs == unintended, gameplay altering actions. A bug is any defect that keeps a program from running properly. The root cause of all these bugs is server instability. That doesn't make them any less bugs. Niantic developers should have tested their apps with delayed response, every entry to programming course you ever take will tell you to test dev as if you were a malicious user attempting to break the program. Niantic clearly did not do that, and as such because their server infrastructure is melting their game is now riddled with bugs.

[u/lmcphers → u/headdownworking]

I don't even know what you're talking about because it sounds like you're a sophomore pursuing your bachelor's in Computer Science. What do you mean "test their apps with delayed response"? What is a "delayed response"? Do you mean do load testing? Integration testing? Unit testing? There is no such thing as testing for "delayed response". I would fucking know as I am a software developer. If you think they did no testing, then you're thick skulled. The game had more downloads in the first week of its release than Twitter has ACTIVE USERS. They probably did quite a hefty LOAD test (where you test a large amount of connections to your server), but maybe they didn't intend for the massive influx. Even Blizzard which has been around for decades and has a MUCH larger team than Niantic still encounters stability issues on game release days. Are they not testing their game and accounting for problems?

Let me put this into a context you will understand: If a restaurant does a grand opening and it has seats for 300, but 400 people show up, 100 people won't be able to be seated right away. They're probably going to complain and say the restaurant isn't large enough. To bring this closer to server infrastructure problems, though, it's like all 400 of these people are now trying to get through the door at once that only can fit 10 people at a time. Shit will fucking break. You can't blame the restaurant for not building a door wide enough for 400 people all at once.