Pokémon Go has a major bug, but Niantic wants you to fix it yourself

The playerbase are not keem to this solution.

Pokémon Go
Image via Niantic

Pokémon Go players have been experiencing a major visual bug over the last couple of days that’s preventing their avatar and map from loading.

Recommended Videos

One Pokémon Go player flagged the bug on Twitter and told Niantic, the developer of Pokémon Go, the bug didn’t go away even after restarting their phone, the game, or redownloading the app. To the community’s surprise, however, Niantic didn’t say anything about fixing the bug and instead just told the player one workaround.

“Sorry to hear that, Trainer,” Niantic said. “As a workaround, please try switching between male and female avatars with different costumes and see if it makes any difference in getting the map to load and the avatar to appear. Let us know how it goes.”

Related: Pokémon Go brings back video ads with rewards, and the community just doesn’t care

Niantic’s reply to the player made it all the way to Pokémon Go‘s subreddit, where most of the community criticized the developers for not properly addressing this visual bug that’s affecting part of the playerbase.

“It’s one thing to say ‘we broke a feature please avoid using it’ or ‘use this workaround until we fix it’,” one Redditor said. “But to openly admit they don’t know what the problem is and ask us to try variations to narrow it down is a bit much.”

The player that initially flagged the bug on Twitter told Niantic the bug went away after deleting the app and likely installing Pokémon Go again. It’s unclear how many times the person did this, though.

Although Niantic hasn’t said it’s working on fixing this visual bug, the company will likely tackle this issue in the coming days so that every player can participate in the upcoming “Let’s GO” event that will be available between March 21 and March 29.

Author
Image of Leonardo Biazzi
Leonardo Biazzi
Staff writer and CS:GO lead. Leonardo has been passionate about games since he was a kid and graduated in Journalism in 2018. Before Leonardo joined Dot Esports in 2019, he worked for Brazilian outlet Globo Esporte. Leonardo also worked for HLTV.org between 2020 and 2021 as a senior writer, until he returned to Dot Esports and became part of the staff team.