Pokémon Go ‘Curveballs’ (& More Bugs!)
Curveballs – they score you an extra 10 points in the Pokémon Go game – but when is a curveball not a curveball?
Literally thousands of people have vented their frustration at unintentional curveballs in the app – they swear blind that there were not trying to do a curveball as they watch there perfect throw suddenly veer off suddenly to the left of the screen. A few pokéballs later and they’ve given up. Is it dodgy fingers or is there something more sinister?
Well, we can’t rule out dodgy throws – we’ve all done them (go on, admit it!). But when it seems like time after time, whilst trying to catch the same Pokémon your ball curves off at around 60 degrees and flies off the screen it can’t be just a bad throw that’s to blame surely?
Well, you’re right. I have to say that in nearly a month of playing I haven’t encountered the whoopsie curveball phenomenon…. until today.
I was with everyone else, saying to everyone who was moaning, ‘look, your throw must suck sometimes, you can’t blame the app’. Well it turns out you can.
Now I’m not sure if this bug has been recently introduced (I’ve not experience since the UK launch date until today) but after a little while, particularly if you’ve had your phone in your pocket and you get the buzz or the beep to alert you to a Pokémon, you touch the Pokémon on screen, thanking your lucky stars that the app hasn’t done it’s favourite trick of ‘freezing’ up on you and you throw your first pokéball.
Bam – it flies off the screen. You put it down to a bad throw. You try again. Bam – it flies off the screen again! Your cursing your terrible throw at this point. Why can’t you throw pokéballs all of a sudden? You try again and bam! It flies off the screen again – and always to the left. You then notice that pretty much no matter how you throw it, it ends up curving off at a pretty steep angle to the left – the only realistic chance you have of catching this Pokémon now is if you aim way off right, in which case, the pokéball might land on the Pokémon you’re trying to catch – if you’re lucky.
When I first encountered this bug, it was coincidentally my first time using a ‘Great Ball’. Now they are beasts. I thought that maybe they were harder to throw and aim deliberately because they made catching the Pokémon easier – however, as I later found out, it turns out I was wrong.
I quit the app, restarted, and then (luckily) the same Pokémon appeared again. I throw my ‘Great Ball’ and lo and behold, it’s dead centre and catches the little critter without much ado.
So guys, in the hard life of a Pokémon Trainer, we’ve stumbled across yet another bug (sorry!). If you suddenly find your balls all straying drastically off to the left, there is unfortunately only one way to resolve this. And that’s the tried and tested way of quitting the app and trying again.
Of course we shouldn’t have to do this – this is a bug. And as it only seems to have started happening recently it may well have been introduced in one of the recent updates. Hopefully developers at Niantic will track down this non-Pokémon bug soon and squash it out of the game.
Reassuringly, we’re not going mad and our aims haven’t all get 100% worse!
