Pokémon Go developer Niantic has said it will act to improve the game’s quality levels, after a recent snafu left players spending time and money hunting rare Shiny Pokémon with far lower-than-expected odds.
The bug, which Niantic previously told Eurogamer was an “unfortunate technical error”, was eventually fixed by the developer only after fans worked to crowdsource data and diagnose the problem for themselves.
It was the latest in a string of issues which seem to regularly affect the hugely-successful mobile app, with the release of Pokémon and the launch of in-game events frequently marred by some problem or other – particularly in early timezones such as New Zealand and Australia, where it is now a running joke in the game’s community that players act as unofficial beta testers.
Today, at a Pokémon Go hands-on event held in Los Angeles designed to showcase several major upcoming features, Eurogamer’s Chris Tapsell asked for more detail on what went wrong in this latest instance – and what Niantic will do to ensure it does not happen again.
Niantic’s response was light on detail on the nature of the problem – something the Niantic spokesperson here apologised for, as they were not on the game’s engineering side. Still, there was an acceptance that the game needed to improve – and that Niantic needed to do better, as quality had been an issue “maybe throughout much of our history”.
“It was a technical bug in nature, but I do know with 100 percent confidence, our engineering team [are] super aware of the root cause,” Pokémon Go’s director of product management Alex Moffit told Eurogamer. “The issue is resolved as we communicated, which is good.
“But the broader point that I would touch on there: quality. Clearly it’s an important thing and maybe not something that we’ve been the best at as of late – maybe throughout much of our history. And I can very confidently say that is something that we as a leadership team are echoing consistently from the tip top.
“There’s been meaningful change throughout this entire year. A lot of times that tooling, that quality work that goes on behind the scenes can be even more ambitious as, let’s say, a new [feature] in and of itself. There are some really, really smart people hard at work on like making things better, because we know we want to do better, we can do better, but it doesn’t happen overnight.
“The good thing is like train set in motion. I think there’s better stuff on the horizon.”
Earlier this year, Pokémon Go veteran developer Ed Wu promised a “blockbuster slate” of features headed to the game this summer, with the recent launch of Shadow Raids being the start.
Next up, Eurogamer was shown today, will be contest-like Showcases and the long-awaited launch of Routes – user-generated walking trails for players to follow. We’ll have more details on both to share very soon.
