Pokemon GO players complain about "extremely laggy appraisals" after the latest update

As is tradition with each passing bug-fix update for Pokemon GO, for every issue Niantic aims to fix, another one takes its place. Recently, trainers on the Silph Road subreddit have reported that they have been experiencing lag when attempting the "appraisal" feature on their collection of captured creatures.

The appraisal is one of the most vital features for the mobile experience's competitive community. This game mechanic is used to look into a Pokemon of the player's choosing to observe their individual values or IVs for short. These values have a heavy impact on the stats of every creature, with those with maxed IVs being seen as "perfect."

Without the ease of accessing this feature, many players may begin to get frustrated with Pokemon GO. Given how crucial differences in IVs can be in close battles, not being able to analyze a player's team may cost several games. But what do players have to say regarding this latest inconvienence?

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Reddit reacts to latest Pokemon GO lag issue

On October 4, user Jaggedbrace in the Silph Road subreddit posted a thread asking the community if any other players have noticed a lag issue with the appraisal feature in Pokemon GO. Shortly after, others began to comment on the thread stating that they were experiencing a similar problem.

Later in the thread, u/nealappeal indicated that they refreshed all their data for the game and also downloaded all the assets. In the same section, u/Jaggedbrace commented that they noticed this issue becoming prevalent after they updated the character portraits for each of the Team Leaders.

With this in mind, many have concluded that this issue with the appraisal lag is rooted in the new artwork displayed for the player's Team Leader in Pokemon GO. Given the recent update to the assets for the three Team Leaders, it is possible that there is an issue with the code where the game is still looking for the old artwork.

Later, u/51stCrash commented that the issue is rooted in the catch location of the Pokemon the trainer is trying to have appraised. For some reason, the game is having issues with pulling up information regarding where each creature has been captured, which has ultimately resulted in a slowdown when appraising.

In an interesting development, others on the thread have commented that this issue is not present on iPhone and other iOS devices. With this in mind, it would be safe to confirm that the problem is only occurring on Android devices as every other player reporting that they have encountered this bug has been using the Android OS.

Using the information reported, we can begin to compile details regarding Pokemon GO's appraisal issue.

It is a bug impacting Android OS users where the mobile title is either having trouble reading the location history or is experiencing issues rendering the recently-updated models for the Team Leaders. It is also possible that both are an issue.

Given that issues like these have been rather common as of late for Pokemon GO, it is safe to assume that it will be fixed in the next update. However, if Niantic does go through with optimizing the artwork used when players appraise their Pokemon, it may not fix the problem if it lies within the location data code.

While it is unclear what the exact root of the issue is with this glitch, players can only have faith that Niantic will promptly address this issue.