A lot of players were dissatisfied when Niantic decided to ban third-party tracking software for their hit game "Pokemon GO." However, to make amends, the latest update includes the new Sightings tool, which ensures that nearby Pokemon will be listed within 200 meters.
According to Game Rant, this is still not the best way to track Pokemon, as compared to the way players were able to do it within the game's first two weeks. Regardless, it is still a huge improvement over the three-step bug as well as its prior replacements.
According to Movie News Guide, this new patch, version 1.3.0, was made in order to ensure that the issues that players faced back in the infamous version 1.2.0 back in July are addressed. This certainly made catching Pokemon a more tedious task for players since it removed the tracker. However, with the new Sightings feature, the list of nearby Pokemon actually represents how near they are to the player within a 200-meter radius.
This is certainly much more reliable than its predecessor, as the Nearby Tool did not indicate whether or not the Pokemon was there. As such, the new Sightings tool will ensure that the map will be refreshed every 10 seconds and that the despawned Pokemon will be purged from the list.
There is another major change with the new update, though. This will affect how the Pokemon will be grouped together, and a good example of this is that if there are four Caterpies nearby, this group will only take up just one spot on the nine-space grid. What this mean is that the top left corner Pokemon will not be necessarily the nearest one to the player. Right now, there is still no way to specifically determine which Pokemon is the closest.
In any case, this is just a short-term fix, and future updates might address the community's grievances.
