[flocial]

The reverse engineering thread on Discord was one of the most exciting spontaneous collaborative coding sessions I've read. There were several talented coders using the IDA disassembler to reverse engineer the encryption scheme tacked on to Niantic's API and bypassing the new security scheme.

Niantic's (mis)handling of the PoGo launch might go down in history as a seminal case study in how to botch a black swan event: disabling the spontaneous tracking aka the 3-step bug, constant server issues, premature shutting down of pokemon map sites (that mainly arose from the aforementioned 3-step tracking being disabled), bugs in the game play, lack of perceived engagement with the community, the disparity in game experience between rural and urban players, unbalanced gym mechanics, divergence from the core Pokemon experience, etc.

The gyms of the countries that are now getting PoGo are already flooded by geo-spoofers/bots and most will never get to experience the scavenger hunt like excitement with neither the in app radar or third party maps. I truly hope that Niantic manages to recapture the initial excitement an deliver on the original promise and manage to engage third party developers and the player community.