The Pokémon Go community has been pretty angry about the removal of the in-game tracker and the blocking of third-party tracking sites, but it turns out at least one of these decisions actually benefited the game significantly.

According to a lengthy blog post by developer Niantic, the third-party websites, such as PokéVision, were putting a serious strain on server resources and preventing the developer from delivering a stable game to players.

“As some of you may have noticed we recently rolled out Pokémon GO to Latin America including Brazil. We were very excited to finally be able to take this step,” the developer wrote. “We were delayed in doing that due to aggressive efforts by third parties to access our servers outside of the Pokémon GO game client and our terms of service. We blocked some more of those attempts yesterday. Since there has been some public discussion about this, we wanted to shed some more light on why we did this and why these seemingly innocuous sites and apps actually hurt our ability to deliver the game to new and existing players.”

Niantic offered the handy chart below to show the impact that blocking third-party sites has had on the game’s server loads.

“In addition to hampering our ability to bring Pokémon GO to new markets, dealing with this issue also has opportunity cost. Developers have to spend time controlling this problem vs. building new features,” the developer added. “It’s worth noting that some of the tools used to access servers to scrape data have also served as platforms for bots and cheating which negatively impact all Trainers. There is a range of motives here from blatant commercial ventures to enthusiastic fans but the negative impact on game resources is the same.”

Niantic concluded by promising that it is “actively working on” restoring the in-game tracker and thanked fans for their support.