Thread: Pokémon GO
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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2016-08-01, 23:05

Quote:
Originally Posted by Luca View Post
I think they're gone permanently.
That's my feeling too.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Luca View Post
My brother speculated it was to reduce load on their servers.
Maybe. I'm still convinced it's to improve load on their bank accounts. Their API calls still return distance information (although often broken and wrong; that's something to your argument, I guess) for all of the nearby pokémon. Here's an example I just *now* fetched from an API call to their servers (IDs rounded/anonymized):

Code:
{ 'nearby_pokemons': [ { 'distance_in_meters': 200.0, 'encounter_id': 1146767300000000000L, 'pokemon_id': 16 }, { 'distance_in_meters': 200.0, 'encounter_id': 4769005900000000000L, 'pokemon_id': 46 } ] }
Their API responses also return a complete list of incredibly precise GPS coordinates of nearby spawn points (again, numbers rounded but still very precise):

Code:
'spawn_points': [ {'latitude': 35.77720000000000, 'longitude': -78.64320000000000}, {'latitude': 35.777210000000000, 'longitude': -78.64330000000000}, {'latitude': 35.77724000000000, 'longitude': -78.64270000000000} {'latitude': 35.777250000000000, 'longitude': -78.6429000000000}, {'latitude': 35.777350000000000, 'longitude': -78.64310000000000}, {'latitude': 35.777430000000000, 'longitude': -78.64300000000000}, {'latitude': 35.77794000000000, 'longitude': -78.64310000000000}, {'latitude': 35.777940000000000, 'longitude': -78.64300000000000}, {'latitude': 35.77795000000000, 'longitude': -78.64310000000000}, {'latitude': 35.77813000000000, 'longitude': -78.64320000000000}, {'latitude': 35.77821000000000, 'longitude': -78.64320000000000}, ],
It doesn't take much geometry, arithmetic, and logic to plot very good guesses as to a pokémon's location and distance. Heck, there are a dozen amateur open source projects doing this now from the data currently returned by the API.

Unless Niantic is just truly incompetent in the software development department, which I actually am thinking may be a good possibility, there's too much evidence pointing towards this being a deliberate choice.

edit: and I just realized that the API even given high-precision GPS coordinates when it finds "catchable pokemons"...

Code:
'catchable_pokemons': [ { 'pokemon_id': 19, 'longitude': -78.77880000000000, 'expiration_timestamp_ms': 1470112000000L, 'latitude': 35.78910000000000, 'spawn_point_id': u'49d3adb3ef0', 'encounter_id': 6342863650000000000L, } ]
so... like... no excuses.

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