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Thankfully the one I used was able to refine my Shellder when it involved. I took a big risk with it's Iv's ranging from 96 to 50% but thankfully it was the 96%.

Thankful it's good, because that would have been a large waste. I know why I took the risk though, I needed it for my Pokedex and the wild one I stumbled across earlier ran away. Got to catch like 35 Exeggcutes and rack up KM on my 10k egg though, was cool.

You don't, by entering cp, HP, whether it's upgrades and dust cost, and upgraded or not, it can usually get pretty close.

Haven't seen it mentioned, but should be a somewhat decent patch out there to download now.

The first major patch has been released for Pokémon GO, for both iOS and Android. While other patches have been released, they so far have only included minor changes. This patch brings the game up to version 0.31.0 (labelled version 1.1.0 in the App Store).
The most notable change is that now players can customize their avatar from the profile screen. Additionally, footprints for nearby Pokémon (which have not been functional for a few weeks) have been entirely removed.
Some Medals now have unique icons, rather than all Medals of the same rank using the same image. There have also been some changes to the layout of the Pokémon summary screen. This now prevents the player from transferring a Pokémon that is favorited.
Furthermore, some Gym animations and battle damage calculations have been modified in unspecified ways.
The patch notes also mention that some move powers have been updated, although this is actually a server-side update that was applied yesterday.

http://bulbanews.bulbagarden.net/wiki/First_major_Pok%C3%A9mon_GO_patch_released

-Avatars can now be re-customized from the Trainer profile screen
-Adjusted battle move damage values for some Pokémon
-Refined certain Gym animations
-Improved memory issues
-Removed footprints of nearby Pokémon
-Modified battle damage calculation
-Various bug fixes during wild Pokémon encounter
-Updates to the Pokémon details screen
-Updated achievement medal images
-Fixed issues with displaying certain map features
-Minor text fixes

>removed foot prints of nearby pokemon
I'm not sure if this means they're going to actually get to fixing tracking or not.

I do not even understand why they would just remove the foot print feature, even with the bug. The lack of communication between their team and the community is very distressing to me.

 Dreadwinter wrote:
. The lack of communication between their team and the community is very distressing to me.

I completely agree. That was really the biggest annoyance for me, even over the bugs and crashes is that we practically hadn't heard a peep from them. That kind of service drives me crazy

 Dreadwinter wrote:
I do not even understand why they would just remove the foot print feature, even with the bug. The lack of communication between their team and the community is very distressing to me.

What's especially annoying to me is they have appeared to have killed all 3rd party tracking services too. After the 3 step bug happened I found pokevision.com to be extremely helpful. Now we're all basically just wandering around blindly hoping to find a Pokemon we'd like. I have a 779cp 90% Iv snorlax, and a 172CP 87% Iv lapras id really like to power up but will probably never be able too.

They also apparently removed the xp bonuses for direct throws. I guess people were leveling up to quick so they are looking for ways to slow level grinds down even further, i.e. make it harder to find Pokemon, reduce or eliminate XP, removing pokestops, "re-balancing" attacks. Some of the UI changes, especially the one for transfer are puzzling as was the choice of focus for development resources, such as the aesthetics on medals and the avatar.

All of it seems to be emblematic of a developer out of touch with it's customers.

It's review score on the app store has gone down significantly since the update dropped.

I have mixed feelings about the 3rd party tracking tools, but again, I think the overall goal is to slow the grind. I think also that the developer was embarrassed by how 3rd parties were more successful at developing effective tools that highlighted the problems with the app.

 Dreadwinter wrote:
I do not even understand why they would just remove the foot print feature, even with the bug. The lack of communication between their team and the community is very distressing to me.

They have said they want to improve tracking and that the main reason for the 3-paw bug is because of server strain caused by 3rd party sites accessing Niantic servers.

I believe this is the 1st step in the redesign of how Pokemon tracking and possibly spawns are done. They removed essentially the two-way communication for steps which has essentially broke 3rd party websites. Most likely that meant paws would also not work in phones, hence they removed them. Locations for the Pokemon still update, but that is through a different method and not as accurate as the paws was.

Now they'll have to redo how tracking was implemented. To be fair Ingress had something similar happen as well in terms of interfaces with 3rd party websites used to track information for portals.

If you also notice the google placement map was removed. On the plus side transferring Pokemon to the professor now happens much faster that you don't have to wait for a Google map to load, then scroll to transfer, it is pretty much quick button clicking now. Favorites also prevents transferring to the professor properly now as well.

I could be wrong, but it sure seems like low-level Pokemon now dodge, escape and even run away much more often. I'm going through many more Pokeballs these days...which is probably an intentional deci$ion by Niantic.

There was an XP bonus for straight throws? Granted, I only throw curveballs, but I can see why they removed that bonus. Far too easy to do.

I hit level 15, and the ability to catch <100CP animals is way down. It's ridiculous.

I didn't play much this past weekend, and I may well be approaching "done".

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
I hit level 15, and the ability to catch <100CP animals is way down.

Just curious do you do straight throws or use curve balls?

 Sinful Hero wrote:
There was an XP bonus for straight throws? Granted, I only throw curveballs, but I can see why they removed that bonus. Far too easy to do.

There was XP bonus for nice and great hits but not for straight throws in general. I haven't really payed attention but supposedly curveballs and nice/great hits don't give bonuses to catch% now either.

 Dark Severance wrote:

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
I hit level 15, and the ability to catch <100CP animals is way down.

Just curious do you do straight throws or use curve balls?

I started with curve, but now, that's basically impossible to land the hit, so it's straight throws only. Even then, it's infuriating how many balls break.

*Changed nest types so people can't catch their favorite pokemon.
*Made pokemon break out of balls much more frequent.
*Made Pokemon flee much more frequent.
*Made it harder to actually find wild pokemon without stumbling over them.
*Without endless piles of easily caught trash, EXP growth is now non-existant as no more lucky egg pidgey evolve spam
*No more throwing skillful balls for EXP.
*All Dratini Locations are now Eevee, making it basically an egg hatch only pokemon.

I get it. People were getting too much with pokevision. But there is NOTHING WRONG with being able to WANT to actually catch pokemon opposed to stumble over them.

This morning I had a sqirtle on my radar. as I walked to the corner, it became closer and closer. It was my CLOSEST pokemon on my radar. From the corner, I walked in all 4 compass directions and every direction made squirtle get FARTHER. I was trying to play the game as intended and there simply was no possible way to catch the squirtle or even attempt to find him outside dumb luck.

They know the spawn POINTS and what time they spawn. They never change location or time, simply what it is. CACHE THE CRAP out of that information and have it appear as grass in the game. Let people walk to places that 'hey, the pokemon is here, walk to it to see what it is'.

Is that too much to ask? I will gladly explore and not know types and rely on social media 'hey, did you know gak spawns here' talk as long as the game made it actual possible to find the stuff near by.

The attack balances was a good move... But ruined by the attempt to kill EXP growth and tracking.

Meh I'm not too fussed. My Rhyhorn nest changed to Exeggcute.

I can understand why some people would be upset though.

I'm still getting bonus exp on curve balls, but I haven't noticed nice/great/excellent bonuses either way. When I catch a few tonight I'll try to pay more attention.

I haven't heard anything about Curves and Nice/Great/Excellent no longer making it easier to catch the Pokémon.

Also: 12 candies to evolve pokemon spawn less, 25 to evolve spawn more and are harder to catch. 200cp ratattas which used to be green and catch with a single ball now take 4-6 balls and flee a ton while having an orange ring. And I am level 22.

Seems like a lot was done to try to curb the lucky egg + evolve a bunch of trash technique by making those 12 candy pokemon much less frequent and other pokemon harder to catch in general.

The stealth patches are numerous.

Also, a small patch today to bury the bad reviews on the app store.

There are a LOT more 1-star reviews now.

nkelsch wrote:
Also: 12 candies to evolve pokemon spawn less, 25 to evolve spawn more and are harder to catch. 200cp ratattas which used to be green and catch with a single ball now take 4-6 balls and flee a ton while having an orange ring. And I am level 22.

Seems like a lot was done to try to curb the lucky egg + evolve a bunch of trash technique by making those 12 candy pokemon much less frequent and other pokemon harder to catch in general.

The stealth patches are numerous.

Also, a small patch today to bury the bad reviews on the app store.

I think the 12 candy spawn stuff is anecdotal I've caught exactly as many pidgeys/weedles today as I have for the last week(16 of both so far). Also the update they did today actually made the bad reviews shine WORSE, because most of us who left 1 star reviews made sure to go back and re-up ours while the 5 stars appear to not have done so.

I haven't seen a notable increase in 25s over 12s either. Stil tons of Pidgeys, Weedles, and Caterpies in my neck of the woods.

I think I'm seeing even more Pidgeys and Rattatas now than ever before. At least we still have Eevees fairly common in our area, and Squirtles at our local park. At least the stupid curve ball glitch is gone.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
I hit level 15, and the ability to catch <100CP animals is way down. It's ridiculous.

I didn't play much this past weekend, and I may well be approaching "done".

I had some piddly Spearow escape from two regular balls and a great ball and then flee this morning. Do they think this is fun? I imagine they don't care so long as pokeball sales are up, but that's how you lose players.

FWIW, I also seem to be seeing more low-level pokemon than ever, even as they've gotten much harder to catch. I'm getting more clusters of 2 and 3 at a time.

Can also add my anecdotal experience that Pokemon, especially low CP Pokemon are running/breaking balls more frequently.

Combined with the other changes, IMHO it all adds up to a concerted effort by Niantic to slow xp / increase the grind. I think it is fair to say that Niantic is not earning any good will and seems to be more into spin and damage control than on actually trying to deliver what they advertised.

Suffice to say that I am not spending any more money on this app until I see a more positive direction.

If you have a local area filled with PokéStops you shouldn't ever have to spend money on pokéballs. We have a Civil War battlefield about 20 miles from the house, and the wife and I drive by there every few days to easily farm 300+ pokéballs.

If only super, hyper, and Max potions had a better drop rate.

 Sinful Hero wrote:
If you have a local area filled with PokéStops you shouldn't ever have to spend money on pokéballs.

That's kind of the point...Niantic is counting on most people not having that setup. If you're in a very rural area without historical stuff, it's become almost pay-to-play with how many more balls you spend to catch even low CP Pokemon.

I am actually in a very rural area. The closest cluster of PokéStops is in town about 15 minutes away. The biggest "city" is about an hour. Around my house is nothing for miles. I suppose it's luck of the draw that the battlefield is only about a 20 minute drive.

Niantic wrote:Trainers,
As many of you know, we recently made some changes to Pokémon GO.
- We have removed the ‘3-step’ display in order to improve upon the underlying design. The original feature, although enjoyed by many, was also confusing and did not meet our underlying product goals. We will keep you posted as we strive to improve this feature.
- We have limited access by third-party services which were interfering with our ability to maintain quality of service for our users and to bring Pokémon GO to users around the world. The large number of users has made the roll-out of Pokémon GO around the world an... interesting… challenge. And we aren’t done yet! Yes, Brazil, we want to bring the game to you (and many other countries where it is not yet available).
We have read your posts and emails and we hear the frustration from folks in places where we haven’t launched yet, and from those of you who miss these features. We want you to know that we have been working crazy hours to keep the game running as we continue to launch globally. If you haven’t heard us Tweeting much it’s because we’ve been heads down working on the game. But we’ll do our best going forward to keep you posted on what’s going on.
Be safe, be nice to your fellow trainers, and keep on exploring.
The Pokémon GO team

My (Level 15) game is starting to be Not Fun.

I'm not going to bother except by convenience, and there's a very good chance that I stop playing altogether in the very hear future.

If Niantic was hoping for a 2-week engagement to ragequit, they've done a cracking job of it.

The game has kind of meandered from fun all the time to love/hate for me. I can't be bothered to go out of my way anymore now that the shiny newness has worn off, but it can still be entertaining.

I've noticed a bit more trouble with some pokemon, sometimes 6 balls sometimes they flee... but I dunno today didn't seem any worse than before really. Noticing a tad more variety.