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> From a user point of view it did not go nearly as smoothly as it is made to sound in this post. I think a large part of that was due to the non-Google login

> From a user point of view it did not go nearly as smoothly as it is made to sound in this post. I think a large part of that was due to the non-Google login from Pokemon Trainer Club (which must have been handled by Nintendo's servers, AFAIK), as opposed to the Google OAuth. Both groups of users had problems, but people who used their pre-existing, Nintendo-issued logins had much more problems (and it took a lot longer for those to get fixed). There was a period of about a week or so during which time people who used the Pokemon Trainer Club accounts were still having just as much trouble logging in and staying logged in, but people who used their Google accounts were fine. I wouldn't be surprised if providing multiple login options made it harder for them to properly separate their login servers from their game servers, and if this coupling meant that millions of users (effectively) DDoSing the PTC servers ended up impacting the game's uptime more than simply doing all authentication themselves would have.

ge0rg 10y ago
Not just that, playing the game (once logged in) turned out to be hardly possible at certain times of the day, and the game freezes due to communication timeouts didn't help the situation either.
natdempk 10y ago
There were plenty of login issues with Google accounts as well for days following launch in the US. I think you could attribute issues primarily to the way they did load-balancing though. The app assigned you a server at login time, so if something happened to that server or it got overloaded, you were out of luck until you restarted the app and logged in again. I would guess this probably caused cascading failures of servers as thousands of users got booted from one server and then all put onto the next one in line when they realized their app had frozen and logged back in. Don't forget that at launch it was common for users to have to restart their application and re-login every time they caught a pokemon. A real dynamic load-balancing scheme would probably have solved their issues. Maybe Pokemon trainer club login went down, but there were still plenty of unrelated server issues for those using Google accounts as well.
- jandrese 10y ago
  It took me a couple of weeks before I saw the capture animation. The game had serious issues at launch.
jklinger410 10y ago
>I think a large part of that was due to the non-Google login from Pokemon Trainer Club I can't think of anything further from the problems this game had at launch than the login. So few people actually had pokemon logins this comment is honestly comical to me.

ge0rg 10y ago

Not just that, playing the game (once logged in) turned out to be hardly possible at certain times of the day, and the game freezes due to communication timeouts didn't help the situation either.

natdempk 10y ago

There were plenty of login issues with Google accounts as well for days following launch in the US. I think you could attribute issues primarily to the way they did load-balancing though. The app assigned you a server at login time, so if something happened to that server or it got overloaded, you were out of luck until you restarted the app and logged in again. I would guess this probably caused cascading failures of servers as thousands of users got booted from one server and then all put onto the next one in line when they realized their app had frozen and logged back in. Don't forget that at launch it was common for users to have to restart their application and re-login every time they caught a pokemon. A real dynamic load-balancing scheme would probably have solved their issues. Maybe Pokemon trainer club login went down, but there were still plenty of unrelated server issues for those using Google accounts as well.

jandrese 10y ago
It took me a couple of weeks before I saw the capture animation. The game had serious issues at launch.

jklinger410 10y ago

>I think a large part of that was due to the non-Google login from Pokemon Trainer Club I can't think of anything further from the problems this game had at launch than the login. So few people actually had pokemon logins this comment is honestly comical to me.