>>27501221On release your Nearby Pokemon display would show a number of footprints to show roughly how close you were to that particular pokemon. By walking around you could play hot & cold with a target pokemon to zero in on its location. About a week and a half after launch as Niantic released the game in more countries and the already stressed servers started seriously shitting the bed the footprints conveniently stopped working, always showing 3 steps regardless of your distance from the 'mon.
It's not much of a stretch to infer that given the size of Niantic and the resources it had on hand during this obviously rushed release that this wasn't a bug at all, and was in fact disabled to reduce server load. We may never know the truth, because Niantic has been practically silent apparently because they didn't bother to hire a community manager for the release.
