Every month it’s the same story. Community Day (or Raid Day, or any other time limited event) happens, players put on their walking shoes, head out to play and farm some limited edition Pokemon. Everyone’s smiling, everyone is playing hard and having a good time – right? Well not really if you happen to live in the APAC region and today GO Hub wants to raise awareness about this issue.
APAC stands for Asia-Pacific and includes some of the largest and most populated areas of the world: India (1.35 billion people) and China (1.41 billion people) and just to name a few. APAC region is also the “earliest” region to get any event, as they happen first in APAC, then in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and then in Americas (South and North). You can see how the APAC region looks like below:
Almost every Pokemon GO event in the APAC region happens with major, game breaking and often infuriating technical issues for the player base. These can happen due to a variety of reasons, but apparently it boils down to this:
- overwhelming server load and
- early event bugs and fixes
For the past 11 months, almost every Community Day was off to a terrible start in the APAC region. Imagine that. Players have repeatedly reported these issues, blamed and protested left and right, but apparently nothing has changed over the past 11 months.
Niantic is always quick to acknowledge the issues and offer “compensation” in form of extended event duration and replacement days:
Trainers, gameplay issues have been resolved and we’re continuing to monitor the situation. Adventure Sync has been restored. Due to the outage, we’ve extended #PokemonGOCommunityDay in the Asia-Pacific region for an additional 2 hours. Thank you for your patience.
— Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp) November 10, 2018
Attention, Trainers. We apologize for gameplay issues impacting Community Day in the Asian-Pacific region. We will be holding an additional Beldum Community Day for Asia-Pacific Trainers to make up for the inconvenience. Please stay tuned as we will announce the new date soon.
— Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp) October 21, 2018
Trainers, the recent service issues have been resolved, and we're continuing to monitor performance. As a result of this outage, we've extended #PokemonGOCommunityDay in the Asia-Pacific region for an additional three hours. The event will now come to an end at 6:00 P.M. JST.
— Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp) February 24, 2018
Thank you for your patience as we continue to investigate and address a variety of service-related issues. As a result of these issues, #PokemonGoCommunityDay has been extended 2 hours in the Asia-Pacific region. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.
— Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp) June 16, 2018
What can be done about the issue?
- Split the APAC region into two – there are enough hours of the day, time zones and geographical land mass to make this possible
- Have the APAC CD on two days, with different countries having it on a different day (basically same as previous)
- Prepare in advance for the incoming load, as there was enough opportunities to capture the load amount and plan the server load in advance
Niantic, if you’re reading this, we sincerely hope you can and will fix the issues for APAC players. They are often incredibly dedicated and passionate (at least according to the emails we get) and it feels like they’ve had enough with bugs and technical issues.