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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

You seem borderline vitriolic about this.

Nobody including Niantic would ever have dreamed that Pokemon Go would be as huge a sensation as it has been. Nobody. And they have smartly realised that this opportunity is potentially fleeting and so they need to capitalise as quick as possible i.e. grow into other regions.

To expect them to do accurate capacity planning is ridiculous. Likewise it is ridiculous to assume that they can react any quicker than they can. It's very hard to scale quickly whilst still maintaining a high level of uptime.

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I am, indeed, quite angry towards Niantic. They made a very fun and addictive game, I'm not denying that.

However, they behaved in a way that really makes it difficult for us, players, to support them. They weren't ready for their success, sure, but they could at least bring some explanations on why would they ship without a trade system, why are they struggling with traffic and downtime, why would they delay bug fixes for more than 3 weeks, why they decided to remove one of the key feature of the game, and why they decided to ban third party apps made by people trying to fix their mistakes (and not with a broken graph!). I remember terrific launches from Blizzard, but even with all issues combined from Wow, Diablo and Hearthstone, this is nothing compared to Pogo's. I care about this game, because it's different from the long trail of duplicates we've seen for a long time; but, I really wish, Niantic, as a company, was more mature.

I don't think these are very interesting questions.

Why did a product ship without features? Not enough time to make them.

Why are their servers struggling? The game is significantly more popular than they expected.

How much did you pay for the game?

Pokemon Go does have ingame micro-transactions.

This still doesn't explain the graph without scale on Y axis and especially one without a clear 0 label. This is like stats 101, and not doing so implies either utter incompetence or intentional attempt to mislead the audience. There is no reason whatsoever to omit the scale and 0 label on a graph if the data actually supports the argued thesis, so most of the time lack of those elements means you're being lied to.

More likely, the nominal values of the y-axis are confidential, and they just want to show the % reduction in traffic. I do assume the crossing with the x-axis is actually at 0.

You assume. The graph itself doesn't justify that assumption. If you want to lie to someone using a graph, this is exactly the assumption you're hoping they'll make while reading it. Not labeling axis and not starting the graph at 0 are two most basic techniques from the book of Dark Patterns.

Of course this could be an innocent mistake made by Niantic. Could be. But given that PR statements in general tend to be manipulative, I'm not willing to trust that. If they didn't want to reveal their resource capacity, they could have labeled the Y-axis with percentages.

They could show that by placing a 100% at the peak, and marking the axis relative to it.

Given that the "gameplay"/code of the game itself also implies either utter incompetence or intentional attempts to mislead the audience, I find myself unsurprised by this. :-)

Not every person who works at Niantic is working on capacity planning and programming. There are non-tech and marginally-tech savvy people who could... Oh, I don't know, draft reasonable press releases? Post-mortems when the service is unavailable or broken? Actual explanations of their actions?

Like all good companies do in the tech/gaming space?

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