If you love Pokemon Go, then you know Niantic’s servers have been unreliable in one critical aspect of the game. The tracker feature that shows you the proximity of nearby Pokemon hasn’t been working properly for a couple of weeks – you may know the issue as the “three-step glitch.” Niantic released a major update for the game over the weekend for both the iPhone and Android, but rather than fixing the bug it chose to remove the feature completely. Players are outraged, as the removal of the “three-step” indicator only makes the game harder to play.
DON’T MISS: Crazy iPhone trick turns your wallpapers into optical illusions
The three-step tracker should provide info at a glance about nearby Pokemon. A three-step icon meant you had to keep walking to get close to the selected creature. Once you’d see two steps, and then just one step, it would mean you were getting closer.
The feature hadn’t been working properly for a few weeks, likely due to the massive numbers of players who flood Niantic’s servers on a regular basis. The game’s gradual rollout didn’t help the company either. Niantic is aware of the glitch, but it hasn’t gotten around to fixing it. Instead, buried in the update’s change log is this listing: “removed footprints of nearby Pokemon.”
This doesn’t seem like a long-term change. Instead, it might be just a temporary way to solve the problem.
Pokemon Go players can choose to “cheat” and load one of the Google Maps-based web services or apps that show the spawn locations of nearby Pokemon, including creature types and timers. The problem with this approach is that Niantic doesn’t like it, and some of these services have already been shut down.
You could also choose not to update your app to the latest version, but that won’t do you much good, considering that the tracker didn’t work before either.
