The sad and frustrating part of this all, at least for me, is seeing a company produce, a game that has the most potential in history, to become, hands down, the biggest and highest grossing game the world has ever seen. 45 Million active users is incredible, however, they have dropped more than 10 million already due to the boring nature of the game.
It's like seeing someone win the lotto and then have a stroke and go into a coma with death imminent.
Niantic is making tons of money, yet, rather than add features to the game, they are removing them for the sake of freeing up server resources. No Niantic, NO NO NO! When you have a groundbreaking and record breaking game, using an innovative system that captures 45 million active users, you don't take features out of the game that are good and useful features (they removed the footsteps location feature, which allowed people to locate Pokemon that showed up on the "Nearby" list. Without it, all you have is the nearby list and well, you're on your own trying to find it. The footsteps wasn't pin-point accurate or anything, it just made locating the Pokemon doable. You could find the general direction you should be going to eventually pick the Pokemon up on your radar. This feature is appreciate, needed, and now missed, a lot. Frankly, once they took this feature away, I stopped playing. Why? Because the feature actually made it worth-while to walk around outside for a bit and hunt down a Pokemon. Without it, I have to basically wander about a huge area with the hopes of going not only in the right direction, but going far enough in the right direction to find it on my radar. The only way do this as efficiently as possible, is to create a mental grid of the area around you and systematically scan the area, line by line, east to west, then west to east, moving southward, to cover all parts of the area and even then it may not work, because you have not have picked the right area, or the Pokemon might de-spawn by the time you get there. At least with the footsteps, you had a chance. It didn't work that well all of the time, but at least it worked enough to make wandering for a bit, something you'd debate with yourself as to whether or not to do, but if there was a rare enough Pokemon, you'd probably chose to do it. Now, even if I see a rare Pokemon on my nearby list, I couldn't care less. I turn the app off and put the phone back in my pocket and go back to RL.
On top of getting rid of the footsteps system, they reduced radius of the radar. It's like, are you kidding me? You first get rid of the one thing that really helped us locate Pokemon and now you are reducing the radius of our radar, making even harder to locate a Pokemon? Yes, they reduced it from 100ft to 70ft, which doesn't seem like much, but if you're actually calculating square area, that's basically a 50% reduction. 50 PERCENT! WTF!
So now, I really really don't want to look for Pokemon anymore. I really enjoyed doing up until they increased the chances of me completely wasting my time to about 9 out of 10 times. That return just isn't worth it for me. I walk around for 20 minutes, don't find the Pokemon, it disappears off my nearby list, and then I'm upset that I wasted 20 minutes of my life for nothing.
Lastly, the gym system just doesn't work. It's virtually impossible to hold a gym for 21-24 hours in a highly populated area. Not only is that a big letdown, as you can't seem to get gold any other way, side from spending real money, but even when you fight for a gym, you have to fight it over and over and over and over again, if there's a lot of Pokemon holding the gym, which I think it's a completely retarded requirement, and it's not even exciting in the least, as you aren't battling other people, you're simply battling a dumb AI that is in control of whatever leftover Pokemon that some random person decided to leave there.
When you have such an incredible opportunity in front of you, to make insane amounts of money, to break all kinds of records, to perhaps be the single largest, most popular software application on the planet, and you ruin it, because you're too damn lazy to add resources to the system, and instead, opt to remove features from the software, to accommodate the limited existing resources, it ends up being the most incredible waste of such an opportunity ever. Not only is it annoying as a player, but it is annoying as a human being, to see something so great be wasted by such *****ic management.
When you create something like this and the user base exceeds expectations and your servers are being slammed, you don't remove features from the app, to accommodate your existing servers, you add more resources for the app, you buy more servers, you buy more load balancers, you buy more RAM, more powerful CPU's, GPU's (for parallel computing needs), you buy enterprise SSD's to run in a RAID array, you increase the datacenter size to accommodate the needs of the user base. By taking features away from the software in order to accommodate the system, you end up reducing your user base and then you feel like a complete *****, for catering to inanimate objects instead of catering to the people who are making you successful, rich, and famous.
Not only should they have been adding more resources to accommodate the user base, but they should have been doing it LONG ago. It's been months since the game came out, and they still haven't returned these features, or provided any new ones. What they really need to do (and hopefully it's not too late, but I believe it is), is add a battle system. What is the point of spending so much time and energy hunting down Pokemon, if you cannot battle with them? People want their efforts to pay off in some way and the only satisfactory way, would be to be able to see other players on your map and initiate battle with them. When some douche-bag guy at the bar, is drunk, being a *******, and talking all kinds of **** about his Pokmeon, you should be able to challenge him and take advantage of his drunken state, to knock out some of his best Pokemon, and perhaps even be able to take them from him.
I mean, seriously, what Pokemon game exists that doesn't have a battle system? This is not Pokemon, this is Easter Egg Hunt, the game. Yay, I found an Easter Egg...now I can...add it to my collection...-.- w00t? nope.
If I was in control of Niantic, I would have sized up the development team enough to come out with the battle system months ago. I would have used the profits made so far to grow the datacenter enough to support the user base. I would have done every single thing possible to ensure that this, being one of the greatest single business opportunities the world has ever seen, remains successful. They are letting it slip through their fingers, which apparently are up their own arses, and it's a shame.