PokeMiners, Pokemon Go’s largest and most popular datamining group, announced this week that it is further reducing its efforts and participation in the game, owing entirely to studio Niantic’s activities.
The folks behind the datamining site remind players that they’d already cut back their free work and promotion and “unpaid QA” of the game back in December, saying the game is “in the worst state it’s been in years” with “zero quality control or care to improve broken events, blog posts, and infographics leading to more bugs and confusion, not taking responsibility for their mistakes, breaking promises to the community, and refusing to communicate even basic things.” Now, the miners suggest Niantic is targeting them directly.
“Niantic has changed obfuscation in 275’s APK, for the 6th time since the start of the year. So most of our tools broke on this update. To fix it we would have to give up our weekend again to get things running. Considering they are clearly intentionally doing this at this point to make our lives more difficult (even after we said all those nice things about them, how rude), we are just done with this cat-and-mouse game. So we are announcing our ‘soft’ shutdown. Think of us going on life support basically.”
While the site will stay up, most of its tools and repo will go unmaintained, meaning everything that hasn’t already broken surely will soon.
You might be thinking, eh, who cares, dataminers are a net negative for games, and this might very well be a fair line of thinking for some online games where sometimes dataminers just spoil the game for everyone. However, as MOP’s Andrew has chronicled exhaustively for the last few years, it’s not at all the case for Pokemon Go, whose caretakers offer shockingly poor communication of new content, and the information Niantic does release is often wrong or even intentionally deceptive. Dataminers for the game have not only helped correct misinfo from the company and provided clarity and bug reporting for the game but also provided proof of privacy breaches and even exposed fraudulent event data from Niantic.
Readers might recall that the highly regarded seven-year-old Silph Road Pokemon Go community site also quit publishing back in May when Niantic dropped its sponsorship. It closes August 1st. All in all, it’s been a sad year for the POGO community with no silver linings in sight.
