>>27456089At launch, Pokemon Go included a feature that worked like a "hot and cold" game. Basically there's a screen where you can see which Pokemon are spawning nearby, and the Pokemon portraits would display 1-3 footprints to indicate how close you are to that Pokemon. It allowed players to track down specific Pokemon when they were nearby instead of wandering aimlessly and hoping the Pokemon shows up.
Unfortunately, the unexpected success of the game made the servers shit the bed constantly, and the footprint tracking system just straight up stopped working somewhere around week 2. Niantic scrambled to find which features they could remove to de-stress the servers a bit without completely breaking the game, and made the call to turn the footprint tracking system off without telling anyone. As of today's patch, the footprints have been removed entirely, so the hope that they were working on fixing the system has died.
This wouldn't be so bad, because several third party groups quickly developed sites or apps that would serve as replacements for tracking Pokemon, essentially crowd-sourced google map layovers where people can report Pokemon when and where they run into them.
Niantic made the decision to issue all of these third parties with Cease-and-Desist orders, which removes all ability to actually hunt Pokemon in their Pokemon hunting game. As of today the only way to play the game is to walk around blindly and hope to get lucky.
