Pokemon Go is the most popular broken app to ever hit the market, and its legion of fans has been hard at work creating third-party tools to make up for the game’s shortcomings. Unfortunately, the studio behind the game, Niantic Inc, would rather have players wandering around aimlessly hoping to stumble upon Pokemon than allow fan-made sites to help users track them down.

Niantic recently forced the closure of Pokévision, a third-party website that provided users with information on when and where certain Pokemon would appear on their map.

Hey guys. We wish we had some news for you

At this moment, we are respecting Niantic and Nintendo's wishes.

Will keep you guys posted

<3

— Pokevision – Yang (@PokeVisionGo) July 31, 2016

In a recent interview with Forbes, Niantic CEO John Hanke said that he was “not a fan” of players using tracking sites, and he warned that those tools may not be around for long.

“We have priorities right now but they might find in the future that those things may not work,” Hanke said at the time. “People are only hurting themselves because it takes some fun out of the game. People are hacking around trying to take data out of our system and that’s against our terms of service.”

To be fair, tools like Pokévision exploit data taken from the Pokemon Go app, something that is against the game’s Terms of Service, and considering the fact that The Pokemon Company is notoriously litigious when it comes to protecting its intellectual property, it is not particularly surprising that the site was forced to close.

Sadly, the closure of Pokévision could not have come at a worse time for players, as Niantic has disabled the footprint tracking feature in Pokemon Go due to numerous problems with its functionality. In theory, the footprints are supposed to help players track down Pokemon by letting them know if they were getting closer or farther away, but the feature rarely worked the way it was supposed to. With the footprint feature removed, players are effectively hunting blind, with no way of knowing whether or not they are moving in the right direction.

Niantic has said that it plans on re-enabling the feature at a later date once it has been reworked, but until then, the already buggy app will be even more frustrating to use.

Photo by Yoshikazu TAKADA