Pokémon Go developer Niantic has said it will act to improve the game's quality levels, after a recent snafu left players spending time and money hunting rare Shiny Pokémon with far lower-than-expected odds.
The bug, which Niantic previously told Eurogamer was an «unfortunate technical error», was eventually fixed by the developer only after fans worked to crowdsource data and diagnose the problem for themselves.
It was the latest in a string of issues which seem to regularly affect the hugely-successful mobile app, with the release of Pokémon and the launch of in-game events frequently marred by some problem or other — particularly in early timezones such as New Zealand and Australia, where it is now a running joke in the game's community that players act as unofficial beta testers.
Today, at a Pokémon Go hands-on event held in Los Angeles designed to showcase several major upcoming features, Eurogamer's Chris Tapsell asked for more detail on what went wrong in this latest instance — and what Niantic will do to ensure it does not happen again.
Niantic's response was light on detail on the nature of the problem — something the Niantic spokesperson here apologised for, as they were not on the game's engineering side. Still, there was an acceptance that the game needed to improve — and that Niantic needed to do better, as quality had been an issue «maybe throughout much of our history».
«It was a technical bug in nature, but I do know with 100 percent confidence, our engineering team [are] super aware of the root cause,» Pokémon Go's director of product management Alex Moffit told Eurogamer. «The issue is resolved as we communicated, which is good.
»But the broader point that I would touch on there: quality. Clearly
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