When the network is up, it's very fun. But yeah, drawing certain UI elements seems to be dependent on the response from the server. You can tell when you're really lagging because the UI stops rendering. It also doesn't seem to have any concept of retrying dropped packets, it just gives up and you need to force-quit.

For those with battery concerns, turn on Battery Saver in the settings.

With that enabled, when the phone is rotated upside-down (i.e put in your pocket), brightness drops to 0% and 3D rendering is disabled, both of which help. A little. Constant GPS and battery sucking can't be fully mitigated.

I did that. The screen turned black, and there was no way to bring the game back, other than killing the app. Ridiculous.

This is a known bug with the app. In power save mode, sometimes the app will stop responding altogether. I had a few instances where I was in power save mode, found a Pokemon and tried to tap it and it would not recognize my actions. I had this happen on Android.

Same, but on iPhone..

What iPhone do you have?

5s

I've also had all of these happen to me. It's quite annoying, (especially the burning hot phone and battery drain), but I'm still enjoying it.

Nostalgia is a powerful force.

When the network is up it's surprisingly fun for a game with so many problems. Makes me hope they actually fix some of them soon we can play the game it should be.

Doesn't seem like they were anticipating the load their servers would get. I've had trouble logging in, and other lags from time to time that really seem to be server overload issues.

Not surprising given the incredible overwhelming number of people trying to play the game. I knew it would be huge, I never imagined it would be the phenomenon it is. (Go to a park at lunch or after work if you don't know what I'm talking about. Any park in the country.)

Especially that they launched US-only (?), but the whole world is playing anyway thanks to game's APK being spread on-line. I'm writing this from Poland, coming straight from 2 hours walk from work, catching Pokemon and leveling up on the way :).

It first launched in Australia, and is available in a few countries right now (Australia/New Zealand/USA). I believe the rollout to the UK/Asia/other countries is on hold due to issues with the huge volume of traffic overwhelming Niantic's servers.

Seems like this would be very easy for them to block since they know your GPS coordinates. They could just pop up a message saying "Pokemon Go is not yet available in your region," although, the good will demonstrated by allowing customers in other countries to play would probably be better than arbitrarily blocking them.

They could. If they did, they'd probably kill the game on the spot, or at least significantly curtail its popularity. As it is right now, the game is a global phenomenon, and it's getting immensely popular worldwide.

Being a semi-Google company, maybe the server code is written in Python, that's why the servers are always overloaded 8-)

Being the guys who wrote Ingress, I'm betting they still host their stuff on Google App Engine... ;).

Yep. Lots of other people are getting this, too. And it sucks. They all seem to be server load problems, but what gets me is that some things just don't need server updates, and they do them anyway. Oh, so you need to check in with the server every time I toss a pokéball. Niantic, it's like you've never heard of caching, combining packets, and client side prediction, or anything clientside for that matter. Sure it's not as secure, but what are you more afraid of, people commiting fraud on your trivial pokeball tossing minigame, or people uninstalling your crashy, broken game, because you didn't understand that releasing a good, free game based on one of the most popular game series the world has ever known would result in a lot of popularity, and that you maybe should have optimized for bandwith? Mmm. I can almost taste the lag.

Yeah, the server loading indicator every ball toss is grueling. It would be OK if it was reliable and always loaded after a few minutes, but a large portion of the time it locks up after several failed attempts to talk to the server and you have to kill the app. Then starting the app again shows the server error page 9/10 times, then you have to try the ball toss again, which may or may not work.

Well then, why do it? Sure, it lessens the chance of a ball dupe, but is that really worth ddosing yourself over?

Yep, that's about right. This app is shit on iOS. I thought the App Store was supposed to have a quality review process, but this thing crashes all the time.

Haven't played it, but testing an app without any significant load would seem to be pretty different from scaling up the backend to twitter-scale in a couple of days.

Why should the app crash or hang for backend issues?

The app isn't very good on Android either. But then it is supposedly version 0.29? The original Ingress app wasn't that stable either, but with all the interest and revenue generation, I imagine it won't be too long before it stabilizes.