[pingec]

They banned third party clients from accessing their API.

From the chart it looks like third party API clients were generating two thirds of total traffic. That is a lot.

On the other hand, this has sparkled a huge community effort to reverse, understand and bypass the implemented protection/fingerprinting. https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongodev/comments/4w1cvr/pokemo...

[Nanite]

That's assuming the the y-axis starts at zero, it also lacks numbers for the "spatial queries". This graph doesn't actually tell us anything, besides that there was a drop in traffic after blocking third party access.

[elthran]

I'd be really interesting the see that graph extended to to left - what was the traffic like before the 3 paws "bug" was first introduced.

I definitely feel that a significant amount of the drive to use the 3rd party services was due to the fact that you couldn't realistically hunt down any of the pokemon that show up on your radar.

[agar]

Yes, the lack of a functional Nearby feature - either integrated or with a third party app - really affects motivation while playing.

I was out walking today and saw an unknown Pokemon silhouette in my Nearby list. All I could do was shrug and hope I'd run into it (I didn't). Previously I would have gone significantly out of my way to find it, adding mileage to my walk - which I understood to be one of the design objectives of the game.

[xorcist]

Not only must the three steps have been buggy, the whole "nearby" list is useless and/or wrong. Two friends walking together, with the same exact GPS position on the maps, can have vastly different nearby-lists, sometimes without even one entry in common. How is that even possible?

[aleksei]

It could be that, since the nearby listing holds only 9 entries, that there are more Pokemon nearby and the query to display them is unordered.

[curiousgal]

http://i.imgur.com/RLc4i9V.png

[maxsilver]

> From the chart it looks like third party API clients were generating two thirds of total traffic. That is a lot.

True, but I don't know if that's a fair metric. The Third Party API clients were the only effective way to play the game (because unlike real Pokemon games, "Go" focuses almost exclusively on the act of finding and catching, instead of training. And finding and catching doesn't actually work in their own client)

Effectively, Ninantic has "gotten traffic under control" by banning all non-beginner-level players and play strategies. It's like if YouTube decided to "manage traffic" by removing every video from PewDiePie.

[spotman]

Your analogy might be fair, but to continue it all the way, it would be like them turning off ability for others to upload pewdiepie videos so that they have the resources to give him his own you tube branded channel.

Which we know, hasn't happened yet, but it's an important part of the direction they are going.

[masklinn]

> From the chart it looks like third party API clients were generating two thirds of total traffic. That is a lot.

Around the time they banned API access they removed distance evaluation from the software (after having had it broken for a few weeks), initially the game included three distance ranges shown as steps in the UI, there's no distance information left whatsoever now.