Another community-made Pokemon Go service bites the dust. The creator of PokeAdvisor, a tracking tool which let users see stat-tracking leaderboards and even the Individual Values of each of their Pokemon, posted the following Tweet late last night.
It appears @NianticLabs has blocked our servers from fetching your Trainer and Pokemon data. RIP @PokeAdvisor ? Will keep u updated :(August 8, 2016
As you might expect, the official PokeAdvisor Reddit forum is still a sea of dismay. Former users are shocked that one of their favorite Pokemon Go tools has gone offline with no warning.
While it was cool to check PokeAdvisor and see things like how many gym battles you'd won, many players are most upset that they now have no easy way to track the aforementioned Individual Values: stats that give certain Pokemon of the same species more powerful potential than others. Since IVs aren't displayed in-game, it was helpful to check your account on PokeAdvisor and see how your latest catches measured up.
The site's creator, who posts as lax20attack on Reddit, said Pokemon Go developer Niantic didn't ban PokeAdvisor specifically. Instead it blocked multiple major cloud hosting providers from accessing the servers, which would sweep up the majority of unofficial tools all at once. Niantic previously said a big part of the reason it shut down PokeVision (an in-game mapping tool that was much more powerful than the broken in-game tracker) was the heavy strain it put on the game's servers.
The company shared the below graph illustrating the difference in server load from before and after blocking PokeVision. Though we can't be sure of the overall significance of the traffic change since the graph doesn't necessarily begin at 0.
Lax20attack said PokeAdvisor "peaked at 108 instances processing 1,200 requests/second" to Pokemon Go - and who knows how much strain other sites put on the game - so this wave is likely the other shoe dropping. Niantic has every right to insist its servers are used solely for actually playing the game, but with player-made solutions to in-game problems dropping like Zubat guano, I hope the studio plans to roll out fixes of its own soon.
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