海角大神

Pok茅mon聽Go's ratings fell to one-and-a-half stars on the App Store as players flooded the app with negative reviews in frustration over the most recent updates to the game, which failed to fix the game's bugs.

Niantic Labs, the game's developer, completely eliminated the broken tool used to track nearby聽Pok茅mon and shut down the third party map apps that facilitated tracking the virtual critters roaming city streets.聽Using your phone鈥檚 GPS and clock, the game makes聽Pok茅mon pop up on your phone's screen depending on where you walk and when. But without tools to indicate nearby Pok茅mon, users are left wandering more than many of them bargained for.

Still, the app聽聽worldwide over the weekend, according to App Store analytics firm App Annie. But the ever-growing online community is not too pleased with the app's developers, and their lack of responsiveness about the server issues and glitches that have dogged the game.

Defending its choice to remove the "footprints" feature from the app, which denoted approximately how far away monsters were located,聽Pok茅mon Go creator Niantic said it was "confusing and did not meet our underlying product goals" in a Facebook post Tuesday.

For weeks, the "footprints" feature had all monsters appearing at "three footprints," or the maximum distance away, and聽, even when asked by the press, Kotaku reported. Then this feature disappeared altogether on the July 30 update.

Amid the trouble with the "footprints" radar, users became dependent on third-party map apps to locate nearby Pok茅mon, but those, too, including the most popular one, Pokevision, came down over the weekend.

Niantic chief executive officer John Hanke expressed displeasure with the third-party maps in July, telling Forbes that using them not only "," but violates the app's terms of service. As聽Pok茅mon Go looks to expand to more countries around the world, it claims it's necessary to limit access to third-party services that interfere with its service provision.

But for some players, the removal of the maps is a dealbreaker. These former fans have been reported to be asking for 鈥� 鈥� full refunds of in-app purchases, since they can no longer play the game as they want.

Still, glitches and all,聽Pok茅mon Go remains a phenomenal success. It is also a shaky but sure way to聽introduce app users to a technology that is likely to play a large role in daily life within the next decade, Anna Mulrine reported for 海角大神.

Utilizing augmented reality, or the ability to make video game characters appear to be in your physical surroundings, and geolocation, to track players, has implications far beyond catching Pok茅mon, writes Ms. Mulrine. The tech behind the game may soon be doing everything from giving businesses new ways to attract customers to allowing firefighters to 鈥渟ee鈥� structural vulnerabilities in burning buildings to find an exit route.