‘Pokemon Go’ Bugs: Red Error Message When Fighting in Gyms

'Pokemon Go' is available now for iOS and Android devices. (Nintendo)

‘Pokemon Go’ is available now for iOS and Android devices. (Nintendo)

Pokemon Go players have in recent days been plagued by an error that kicks them out of gyms at inopportune moments.

With this glitch, what happens is that players are booted from a gym in the middle of their gameplay, and if they try to re-enter it, they get a red error message without any explanation as to what happened. It should look something like this:

What exactly is this? Is there any way to fix it?

This problem seems to come down to errors with the GPS, which is often a bit inaccurate and will cause the player’s avatar to wander even if they aren’t actually moving. This is known as GPS drift, and it’s why you might sometimes notice your Pokemon trainer walking around on the map when you’re standing perfectly still. If this happens while you’re in a gym, and your avatar leaves a certain range, you’re booted from the gym and banned from it for 10 minutes.

If you try to go back into the gym within those 10 minutes, you’ll get the red error message.

In theory, Niantic probably put this in place in order to crack down on people who were cheating by using GPS spoofers to easily take over gyms. But more and more this error has been affecting those who are playing the game completely legitimately, booting them out after they’re already several Pokemon in to a tough battle.

“Now that gyms are starting to get up to 9 and 10 everywhere, it’s way too annoying to be 9 Pokemon in, only to be pushed out with the error and barred entry from the gym for 10 minutes,” one player complained on Reddit.

It also seems this error can pop up for a few other reasons, including if the Pokemon you were going to battle next was kicked out of the gym since you began fighting in there. But for the most part, trainers who encounter this issue tend to find it’s due to the faulty GPS.

Until Niantic fixes this, there’s not much of a way around the problem other than to simply wait the 10 minutes and re-enter the gym, hoping the glitch doesn’t happen again. Sometimes players have found they’ll be allowed back into the gym in closer to five or six minutes, but the wait is usually not more than 10 minutes. Some have also suggested that turning on AR mode helps prevent the 10-minute ban from happening, but this has had mixed success at best, and it’s unclear if there’s really any connection there.

This is yet another Pokemon Go glitch that is seriously impacting how users play the game and in some cases is forcing frustrated fans to quit out of frustration until something is done.

“The game is just one big inconvenience at this point,” another Reddit user complained. “I already have to schedule a block of time to go outside to battle gyms, and to then have that time wasted because of game bugs, it’s too irritating.”

Have you come across any solutions to this annoying glitch? Let us know in the comments below.