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Niantic has updated Pokemon Go again and made steps to restore the much needed tracker system that lets you actively hunt Pokemon.
There's a catch, though: not everyone has the new option. For most people there's just a 'sightings' option showing whatever's nearby. Here are the patch notes with the changes. The tracker stuff is at the bottom:
So, what is this variation of 'Nearby Pokemon' that a subset of users are lucky enough to test? Well, it replaces the 1, 2, 3 footprint thing that used to tell you how close Pokemon were, with an actual specific location.
This is what it looks like in action (via NeoGAF).
As you can see it shows a list of nearby Pokemon and then shows you an actual picture of where to go before pinning it to the map. My guess is this system is far less of a demand on the server as it only has to retrieve a photo and a location once. For the old footprint system to work it had to ping each time it wanted to check a distance for each of what could be potentially nine Pokemon. For over 80 millions player that's a lot of work and Niantic has clearly had server troubles since it's been very strictly stopping third party apps from accessing the same data.
No word yet on when this system will be rolled out for everyone, or even if it's the final one.
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