As people begin the flood the streets staring at their smartphone screens looking for ever elusive Jigglypuff and Dratini in Nintendo Co., Ltd. and Niantic, Inc.’s recently released mobile game Pokémon GO, players are encountering more obstacles than just walking to complete their goals. Like most extremely popular game launches, some players have experienced connectivity issues as well as errors when attempting to capture pokémon or enjoy other game features.

Pokémon GO has been an amazing boon for Nintendo, leading to a surge of posts on Twitter regarding people playing the mobile game, capturing pokémon and flipping gyms in their city over to their team (Mystic, Valor or Instinct). Nintendo also received a $7.5 billion USD bump to the company’s market cap in two days (as part of a 56 percent jump in share value).

It has also been estimated that within days of launch, the game had already been installed on an amazing 5.16 percent of all Android devices in the United States. As of today, Pokémon GO downloads exceeded 15 million between the Google Play store and Apple’s App Store. It’s also reported that as of July 11, the game saw approximately 11 million daily active users in the U.S.

That’s a lot of people and a great deal of strain for servers to handle.

This is not an uncommon problem for large product launches, especially gaming-related launches, that see a massive spike in popularity. Massively multiplayer games such as Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft typically saw problems with every major expansion including the recent Warlords of Draenor. Obvioiusly stranger to server problems, Blizzard still saw massive server outages with the launch of Diablo 3. The list goes on and on.

To its credit, Niantic Labs, developer and operator of Pokemon GO‘s servers, has been working continuously to add more resources to deal with the increased popularity and there have been reports that many of the errors have eased up; but there’s still some glitches in the system and it affects how players approach the game.

Thank you for your patience. We have been working to fix the server issues. We will continue rolling out #PokemonGO to new countries soon.

— Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp) July 8, 2016

The result of an extremely popular launch means that servers struggle to keep up

The Pokémon GO community uses mobile phones to hunt down digital creatures and capture them (the premise of the Pokémon series) and as a result is also extremely connected to social media. As a result, much of their experience can be gleaned from Twitter. Earlier this week complaints about server problems abounded.

Day #2 of not being able to connect to Pokemon Go because of server "issues". We all have issues, Pokemon Go. Suck it up. Get it together.

— AmaLee (@AmaAmaLeeLee) July 8, 2016

Artist's rendition of the Pokémon Go server room right now: pic.twitter.com/uZJY1CdkwH

— Daniel Tack (@dantack) July 8, 2016

While this is clearing up, initially players reported an inability to complete log in attempts, culminating in a “Unable to authenticate” error appearing then the client could not contact Niantic’s servers. In some cases this was because Pokémon GO’s servers were actually down a week ago. If you’re experiencing this problem you can check on the health status of the servers here (crowdsourced from community feedback).

Screenshot of current Pokemon GO server status. Crowdsourced on cmmcd.com.

Another bug that players have encountered involves an inability to take over a gym. Gyms are basically Pokémon GO landmarks that players can control by placing a trainer (themselves) and a pokémon to defend it. This means to take control of a gym, players first must battle the pokemon stationed at it. This is where the bug comes in.

Known as the “1HP bug,” this occurs when a player is attempting to take over a gym by battling a pokemon and the player gets the pokemon down to 1 hitpoint (the metric of remaining health before a pokemon is defeated) but cannot actually defeat the pokemon.

How the server problems have affected community gameplay

As gyms are an important component of the competitive part of Pokémon GO, being unable to flip one to your team can be extremely frustrating. Especially for people who have walked around their neighborhood, prepped a team of pokémon and arrived to do just that.

In order to increase chances of capturing a gym, some players have taken to going out extremely late at night (sometimes between midnight and 5AM). While this tactic works because there are less people outside to compete with, it also has served a secondary purpose: the U.S. servers are more stable late at night with less people playing.

“When it comes to capturing the White House its really about fighting the servers not the pokémon,” Jesus Rodriguez, 28-year-old Pokemon Go player interviewed for taking over the Washington D.C. White House gym, told gaming news site Kotaku. “You have to attack it when they are more stable. So late in the night when most people are sleeping.”

Screenshot via The Official Pokémon Channel | YouTube

Players have reported that night time is much better for collecting pokémon and taking over gyms because the servers are not as clogged with traffic. As a result, encounters with the dreaded 1HP bug happen less often and the gym can be taken over by players more easily. It also means that the more dedicated players become night owls as a result and tend to wander near their own homes. Of course, particular pokémon (specifically ghost-types) are rumored to only come out at night, so this is just yet another added incentive to stay up late.

Over the week, many players who reported problems with connectivity and servers simply chose to wait and try again later; but some have also reported totally giving up on trying to take local gyms due to being unable to beat the bosses on them. Other players report suddenly getting kicked out of the app–as server response worsens–sometimes in the middle of attempting to capture rare or interesting pokémon. Those players spoken to by SiliconANGLE experiencing these issues have not given up on the game, however, because while some problems exist, the game is running just well enough to keep going.

Pokémon GO has only been out in the U.S. since July 6 this year; now the game just launched in the U.K. today. Now that problems for U.S. users are just beginning to clear up, it’s possibly time that U.K. players will be feeling the same pain.

Featured image: courtesy of The Pokemon Company