Barring the very old and the very boring, everyone has given Pokemon Go at least a shot, and for many — repeated shots. From fighting through the frustration of glitchy gyms, suffering through overloaded servers that could bar you from play for an entire day, to the game freezing at the last shake of a Pokeball right as you caught that Gyarados, this game has been punishing to play.

The largest criticism of Niantic has been their radio silence. For many it has a positive effect — inducing a surge of communications between inquisitive players taking to popular social destinations like Facebook and Reddit, spreading and debunking rumors, and discussing and testing the limits of the game, but for others, endless frustration and unease.

Surprisingly, Pokemon Go’s biggest problem has always been its players. The early bugs and issues that appeared after launch, which isn’t uncommon with an MVP (minimum viable product) release, was due to the record breaking deluge of players. And now, as they’ve put some of the functionality on temporary hiatus while they address the problems, it’s the sheer number of players again who are causing headaches. They’ve gone from flooding Pokemon Go’s servers with their approximate distance in meters to one of nine Pokemon, to flooding the Apple and Android app stores with claims of fraud and demands for refunds.

Here’s where we need to take a deep breath, and get a handle on what’s happening. Pokemon Go has been a breakout success with only their MVP product. At release it was clear to everyone who had played the previous games that it had a long road ahead of it with expanding servers, game functionality, and adding an additional 600 Pokemon who don’t appear in the game, including the duplicitous ditto, who was left out of the MVP to hit their release date as its signature ability Transform was finalized.

The tracking feature only worked haphazardly, and took a lot of luck. Once it was clear that the enormous influx of users was hugging their servers to death, it was disabled. Then we had a broken tracker for a couple weeks, and third party apps like PokeVision was created, which not only directed us towards the nearest Pokemon, you could inspect your whole city, or even other cities, and if you had a car and ten minutes worth of gas you now had access to the rarest Pokemon in town.

These third party apps were obviously never intended to replace the tracker, and raised serious concerns over proprietary API, and what should be allowed. There was surely a conversation to leave them undisturbed as they repaired their own tracker, but for the health of the game and their property, they were asked to shut down. So, now players are without PokeVision and without a tracker, leaving a lot of people feeling like they’re wandering blind. This doesn’t include that many players had power leveled into the high 20s and 30s, and are frustrated with a lack of end game content. The response so far has been a lot of angry players who feel that their time, and in many cases their money, has been poorly invested.

Here’s the reality of it as someone who’s released an app for a platform that had half a billion users who we famously overwhelmingly disappointed. When people love something, and invest time and money in it, they feel like they own a piece of it. They feel entitled to answers if things change, and they feel cheated if things are taken away.

Obviously the users are not, nor should they be, privy to long internal discussions where these high level decisions are made. The important thing to keep in mind is that Niantic does know what it’s doing. There’s incredibly complex bureaucracy between multiple companies, approval that has to be made, and a timeline of what’s possible in the short term before they tackle things for the long term. Right now there’s people in that company who are advocates for the users, and are fully aware that players are upset and raising those concerns at every moment, but can’t proceed without the team, and the team has a lot on their plate right now.

Pokemon Go was released as a minimum viable product with a laundry list of functionality and content planned for the future. Unforeseen issues are being tackled as they appear, but we can’t lose sight on what’s important — Niantic needs to push forward, even as it patches up problems, and we need to be patient with them. Let’s not shoot ourselves in the foot by trying to undermine their hard work because the game’s still having temporary issues, Niantic is working on it, and I really want to catch a Scrafty.