"Monster already slain" when all three hunters were kicked out due to "communication status" error

携帯端末情報(必須)/Mobile Device Information(Required)*

iPhone: various models; iOS: various

アプリのバージョン(必須)/App Version(Required)*

90.0

問題が発生する頻度/Frequency of the issue occurring

ごく稀/Very rare

問題の詳細/Issue Details

Have not experienced this situation before, hence choosing “Very rare”, but this error is extremely common, so the situation is probably not rare.

Three of us hunt together, on the 6*, 8* and 10* maps. We normally hunt as a party, so that we can hunt each other’s monsters.

On this occasion, the guy on the 6* map had a 6* Great Girros on his Monster Tracker, so we all hunted that. The hunt was plagued with “please move to a location with good reception” messages, the Girros’ tail was broken multiple times and then suddenly not broken again, lock-on would suddenly not be locked on, etc, and one by one all of us got kicked out of the hunt with the “Communication Status…” error message. The Great Girros was not slain.

We all rebooted our apps, and the 6* guy went back into his Monster Tracker. The Great Girros was still showing. However, when he went to hunt it again, he got the error message “The monster has already been slain”, despite none of us having got the “kill” notification (all three of us got kicked out of the hunt) and neither of the other two players getting a +1 on their own monster tracker for the kill. So basically, the monster was lost.

I know that it has probably been said a million times, but Niantic NEED to build caching into their games. It is totally unacceptable that something as fundamental as a hunt or a HAT or an EDI should fail just because the app cannot communicate with the server for every second that the app is running. Cache what is needed for the hunt, execute the hunt, “can I communicate with the server to notify whether the hunt succeeded or failed? No. OK, will try later”. The concept of caching has been around for half a century or more. Why has it not reached Niantic?

1 Like

@hacman87
Thank you for your report and we apologize for any inconvenience caused by this.

There might be a chance that the connection with the server got unstable temporary. However, would you mind letting us know the following information as we would like to investigate further?

  • Video of the issue
  • How to reproduce the issue

Also, please tell your friend to contact in-app support so that we can see if he/she got the hunting rewards from Great Girros.

Thank you for your understanding.

Offline processing is a double-edged sword. While it helps with spotty connection issues, it also opens up room for cheaters to manipulate the offline data before reporting to the server and cash it in.

Also, since it was a group hunt, communications have to route through the server anyway, so if the connection is spotty, the data literally cannot flow between the players. That way, how can a group hunt proceed?

Well, we didn’t know that it was going to be unstable when we started the hunt. We are all on different cellular networks, but all had between 2 and 4 bars of coverage, which should have been sufficient. So no video, sorry.

And it regularly happens that we get kicked out of a hunt with this error message, but this was the first time that all three of us got kicked out of the same hunt and certainly the first time that the monster was counted as slain when none of us slew it.

And none of us got the reward for it. At least not in the Monster Tracker. The other two hunters were both on the same score - 4/6 - as before.

Yes, true.

And it would never have occurred to me about the potential cheating aspect, but yes, I can see that that would open up a possibility for fraudulent behaviour.

But, make no mistake, I certainly hope something can be done about genuine mishaps due to unforeseen network instability. I too encountered some unfortunate disconnections, but I’m fortunate that I live in a place where the network is stable for >99% of the hunts.

It’s just that when the hunt drags out, especially in 9★ and 10★ hunts and in EDIs, any network loss becomes a glaring issue.