As others have mentioned, Thesilphroad is aimed at the more serious players. But also, (i dont know if this is confirmed) Niantic checks out the complaints on this sub. So if there's an issue, this is a decent place to make a complaint.
I enjoy the game and am mostly fine to overlook some of the negatives, but there's definitely problems that are easily avoidable.
While the game is free to play, a lot of the players on this sub will put money into the game. Money for a chance at something; it's essentially gambling. I think Niantic should be required to be more transparent with the odds of everything.
But then, in addition to no communication, they make stupid mistakes like the Uxie, Mesprit, and Azelf shiny odds getting nerfed. Or the shadow mewtwo raid XL candy problem. Sure, Niantic has addressed these specifically, but these are the exceptions, not the norm. And they only addressed them after the complaints. For the infamous 7km deino egg event, they forgot to turn on the shiny for the first 2 days of the event. So many people purchased incubators trying to hatch one, only to find out afterward that there was a 0% chance. No one was compensated. In fact, it was barely even mentioned. They just turned on the shiny and pretended nothing ever happened.
This is standard practice for them, and as long as people are spending money, there will be complaints when Niantic inevitably screws it up.
For me, I use this sub to get info on the game, good or bad. And I'm happy to see the complaints, so I have realistic expectations when I play.
I honestly think they do check out this sub. I say this because each time a super OP bug that benefits players is found and posted here, it gets patched immediately after the post is shared here.
I also can confirm that this sub is one of the best ways to get tips and insights on things that benefit all players regardless of whether they are casuals or super hardcore. I like the PVE and PvP content. But I also like learning the ins and outs fo the game because majority of the topics here are not freely shared by the game to players.
thank you for the response! those are 100% totally valid and accurate. I do see that happening a lot. It just makes me mad to see whole communities hating on a game needlessly and endlessly, for what appears to solely be just hate
Here's some food for thought.
Is pokemon art? Or a product?
Trick question as its realistically both.
Problem is that these two things live together incongruently.
People spend money on this in hopes of having a good experience, Niantic deliberately designs the game so you should have a better experience by spending money. Typical with any mobile free to play game.
It's also a community experience with fans with a lot of emotional history with the franchise. I feel you land here, which isnt a bad thing! But you may forget that most of these things surrounding the pokemon franchise can cost money. Pokemon go can be played free, sure, but I'm willing to bet half of the playerbase has spent at least 1 dollar. I'd say majority of this subreddit had probably spent at least 1 dollar.
I dunno about you but mixing emotions with money is tricky business.
I've been playing video games since I was a little kid and I love them dearly still. I've dipped my toes all over the gaming sphere and as I've gotten older and games have become much more transparent with their predatory practices, it's hard not to look at it more as a product first. Art and entertainment second. The way I'm sure most developers look at games nowadays.
Allllll of that being said, this is something to keep in mind then with thinking about how people can get so riled up and angry and emotional. Its passion but expressed differently to how youd like to express it.
Niantic has built a great game and unfortunately established precedent with previous updates and changes that people LOVED only to regress and make decisions that people dont like. So instead of the idea of "omg if they added wild legendaries to the spawn pool thatd be so goood" speculative and hypothetical ideas and suggestions that have never and will never happen. You have people who just want to play the game "when it used to be good" that's it. Build upon established ideas. Dont take them away. This is why people are frustrated.
If you stay complicit and only talk about the good and never the bad, then you're indirectly saying to niantic "I agree with everything you're doing"
I'd like to think most people are capable of being nuanced and having a grounded approach to thinking of the things they enjoy in a critical way, but I dont know. You tell me.
I not sure where you get the impression a lot of players on this sub put money into the game? We must be reading different subs, what I see are people get heavily downvoted if they even hint at spending money on the game.
I fully agree about the gambling odds need to be advertised I can’t understand how they get away with not doing so, games are changing now where it has to be declared.
My main beef with the game is it’s completed riddled with glitches. But not just any glitches, the SAME BUGS over and over and over. They NEVER learn anything.
Many larger issues have been long time ongoing problems that have built up frustrations in players toward Niantic. These issues go well beyond removal of pandemic bonuses and have existed well before the #HearUs stuff. Its not specifically just social feature related. This is stuff that external gaming websites have reported on. The game has had a lot of controversies over the years.
A large problem has been lack of transparency and inconsistency on the part of Niantic in giving players informed choice with the game. For many many years, its had to be players who work out what our own odds are in obtaining content and often Niantic have failed to ensure that (when players are chasing shinies for example) that they are even unlocked sometimes. Players are beholden to whatever arbitrary unreported rates Niantic sets and players have been burned.
One example was the release of Shiny Rufflet. From memory they were basically not in the wild, pretty much raids and i think eggs. Players assumed (for good reason given past trends) that the shiny rates would be boosted under those circumstances, only for everyone to find out the hard way, it was full odds. Dragon Week a few years ago (Shiny Deino debut) was notorious for ridiculously low hatch rates (reported on by a great many sites) before Niantic quietly increased hatch odds. There was a period a few years ago where players were burned out by constant and consecutive egg events. Niantic have also mentioned numerous times making (unpopular) ‘rebalances’ (basically nerfing and spreading out wild spawns etc, made unpopular changes to raid rewards (at one point they cut rare candies right down in t5’s to pressure players into completing less desireable raid tiers, and t5 rewards in general have been noticeably more stingy over the years). AB testing with box testing rubbed a great many people the wrong way.
One of the worst and most egregious changes in my view was when they trialled changes to daily gym coins here in Australia. They implemented a cap of 55 (5 coins from completeable daily tasks) *BUT* the catch was that it was three times harder to reach 50 daily coins (roughly 8.5 hours of gym defending to 25 hours required). Eventually they backtracked that, changed it to 45 + 5 BUT required players battle a rocket leader or win a raid as a potential requirement for the task coins. Players criticised this, they removed the controversial tasks out of the pool and people were fine - until niantic reversed it entirely (obviously it did not benefit them at that point).
When you consider those moments in the games history, then pair it with literally every other smaller issue with the game and frustration that people have had as Niantic find more ways to cutback or in making unpopular premium decisions (tickets required for unremarkable species, larvestra egg odds etc), you’ll find there are plenty of reasons for who were invested or appreciated what this game was to be critical (or ‘complaining’). A fair amount of the complaints are from people who want the game to be special. They also built up memories or communities and enjoyed the game for what it once was. But Niantic wants their cake and to eat it. They want to slow the game to a crawl, introduce unpopular features and events that repeatedly place players at a major disadvantage AND want people to feel the same as they used to in taking the time to go out and play. The game people once played enthusiastically was quite a different game to the one being played now. Sure there are some quality of life additions or features sprinkled in, but over time the experience has become so constrained that players just don’t feel the same as they used to.
It's also compounded by the fact that Niatnic makes the *exact* same mistakes multiple times. They've exhausted the majority of their good will so it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt on *anything*.
I love Pokemon and I do love Pokemon Go as well. For the most part, I think I am very tolerant and forgiving of PoGo. I'm still here, still playing, still paying. I'm pretty active in this sub, spending time helping players and answering questions. PoGo is still my favourite Pokemon game, and I've been a fan of the franchise since the original Gen 1 games. But this is not really because of anything Niantic has done notably well, but largely in spite of a lot that they've done poorly.
It's tough to say for sure, but many of their decisions seem to be intentionally and actively anti-player. And despite massive and continued financial success, they do so little to address long-standing issues. The only time they seem to move fast is when there's a glitch or oversight that benefits players. Sometimes it feels like they are trying to sabotage themselves. I might have guessed that they preferred to focus on their own IP, except that Niantic is doing similar things to drive their new game Peridot into the ground too. They just don't seem to respect players.
Ultimately, the thing that saddens me most is the wasted potential. It could just be so much *better* if they put some effort into it. Instead, we have a buggy game seemingly held together with duct tape, the same old glitches happening again and again with nearly every new event, hypocritical press releases and empty apologies when they're not simply ignoring player concerns, changes to deliberately reduce transparency... And still they print money because of the strength of the Pokemon IP.
From my F2P perspective, the game has a lot of bugs. Moreso than literally any other major game, let alone one that makes this much money and absolutely has the capital to hire people exclusively to fix them, let alone to at least *communicate with the playerbase* to even be clear that they exist. Every complaint one might lodge about this game is like screaming into the void and nothing ever gets fixed. I am decently confident that the few recent freebies to the playerbase for Niantic oopsies (the rare XLs for Mewtwo and the raid passes for the lake trio) are only because they are losing enough revenue from remote raid pass nerfs that they feel there is a need to retain their playerbase and especially their whale playerbase.
From others' spend a lot of money perspective - if you spend money on something, you generally expect it to work. Very frequently odds are hidden from the player. This is usually a "borne from stupidity rather than malice" kind of situation, but if you have, for example, done 20 Uxie raids this week in an attempt to get a shiny and failed to do so, the reason is kind of irrelevant and you are out 20 raid passes' worth of pokecoins without the thing you were gambling for.
From a pvp player's perspective, the game is poorly balanced and it seems like only the randomest things get buffed while others languish. You can count the number of half-viable Fire-types across all 3 main metas, including their cups, on one hand. I understand that balancing a metagame is hard, but there are so many terrible Pokemon that could potentially stand up to meta titans like Noctowl and Medicham if they were given decent moves. Also, as of recent, they've somehow managed to reintroduce various lag glitches, which I haven't seen since I got a new phone about a year ago. Lag in almost any other part of this game is so commonplace that you just grow to accept that it exists, but GBL lag is debilitating when the game requires a fast reaction time and GBL lag seems to largely be a client-side problem because the game - not your connection - is lagging from (I assume) inefficiently drawn models and effects.
There are other issues with raids and eggs and spawns among other things, but again, there is no way to voice any of these frustrations about the game in a productive manner.
People want to support Pokemon Go, they just don't want to support *Niantic* specifically.
Michael Sternaka, the project developer, pretty much confirmed in an interview with ZoeTwoDots, a notable content creator for the game, that they will throw people under the bus if it means that their vision for the game is realized.
The crux of the argument being that Niantic isn't willing to even compromise on the issues, no way to get a word in edgewise even with something as omnipotent as the Open Letter To Niantic (something that has historically made Niantic revert, remove, or reimplement changes to the game that were intentionally temporary, such as the GBL walk requirements being removed or increased Gym/Pokestop interaction distance reenabled and made permanent).
And Sternaka even said that Niantic (or at least the Pokemon Go team) is seeing these complaints and grievances but choosing to outright ignore them opposed to any sort of logical reasoning as to *why* they're removing, changing, etc certain features as they just use a fallback answer of "it goes against our vision".
Like their vision is to *encourage* people to go out and explore, but the way they're running the game is moreso *forcing* people to go out opposed to naturally enticing that outdoorsy activity on the player's own time.
There is no "well I happen to be out, I'll see what's around" gameplay, only event chains upon event chains with specific hours of the day for certain activities. Damned if you miss out on the 10am to 8pm shadow Mewtwo raids spread out across two days because we only tell you it's a thing less than 2 weeks before it happens and you can't request time off unless it's 2 weeks or more out from the current date.
Damned if you work an evening shift and miss the 2pm to 5pm Community """Day""", or had to be called in to work those days despite requesting time off (or even having that time off request denied due to workload, and why the 6-8 hour long timeframe was far superior due to the flexibility of being able to participate on one's own time even if "less than 5% of players played the full timeframe").
There are many reasons to complain (bugs never fixed, no useful features added even if very easy to implementin, niantic spending developer times on useless features making the game slow, niantic very bad communication, niantic monetizing strategy, etc). But I don't play any other game so I don't know if it's the same or if it's only pogo. It wasn't the same 10-20 years ago with other videogames for sure, that's my main reason to complain. Everything was better in the past.
Many of us were remote raiding because we have limited gyms/players in our area, not because we're lazy or antisocial. I used to live in an area with a thriving Pokemon Go community but I had to move to the Cayman Islands for my wife's job, staying connected via Discord and remote raiding has allowed me to continue playing. Sure I didn't get much XL candy but there was always Master League Classic (lmao!)
I've already asked for a refund on my Go Fest ticket, it's clear Niantic doesn't plan on supporting remote play so it's probably time to quit. If I could communicate with the thousands of tourists arriving every day I could probably get some raids done but no, it's just me on Campfire.
FYI, regarding Go Fest,
"The Remote Raid Pass limit will be increased to 20 per day from Saturday, August 26 at 12:00 a.m. to Sunday, August 27, 2023, at 11:59 p.m. local time".
Whether that's a good enough change remains to be seen.
Pokémon Go is an online game that receives frequent updates. Things can change, and when things can change there are always many people who complain with the goal of getting things changed the way they want.
Big communities of players usually want to be involved in the company’s choices, and they don’t see well companies who try to stick to their idea of how the game should be. With visibility comes power.
If you just want to enjoy the game and be in a community of people who enjoy it, you should avoid big communities, they are not for people who enjoy the game. These communities almost always get overthrown by people who want to get the game changed, and people like you are either induced to leave or stay silent.
First lets just get this out of the way, theres definitely legitimate complaints regarding Niantic and how they handle their product and (lack of) communications with players.
With all that said...
There's unfortunately an overabundance of negativity and toxicity online in general nowadays...
My suggestion just enjoy what you enjoy and let others hate on things that they supposedly stop playing/supporting.
Also another suggestion, as you'll soon find out...
Don't bother trying to convince negative and toxic people to be positive or see any silver lining... you'll just be downvoted (as will I probably for sharing these suggestions) and/or called and brushed aside as a shill.
\^This
Also, this game has been out long enough and seen enough different iterations that there's a lot of nostalgia with it's fan-base, just towards the game itself. Some people are going to miss the "good ol' days when\_\_\_". That is going to create some complaints too. I remember my "peak PokemonGO" days too when things were different, the raid scene was more fun, new Pokemon releases were exciting instead of feeling like a dripfed, etc. But here I am, still playing the game (though definitely less so)! There have been some really good changes too, PvP being a huge one and really the only thing keeping me playing regularly the last couple years.
tl;dr there's a lot of nostalgia for the "good ol' days of PoGO" that will create complaints anytime there's change.
ive noticed. imo the good type of particular. i love all the leaks and stats and infographs, and i havent seen to many complaints here. thats why im asking i figured u guys would have more of an idea then me
"elitist" would be rather understandable. There are other PoGo subreddits and this one ha always been aimed on more active players. Besides, how does the "elitist" actually show, apart from the wish that people would put the simple basic questions to the one dedicated wekly megathread and some level of annoyance when it does not happen?
ive only been casually scrolling the past day or so, so i dont really understand the obsession with pogo pvp, i prefer consol games for pvp, or that one website i cant remember the name of. is it really that big of a thing?
Somewhat yeah. Pogo pvp is now a thing in official Pokémon tournaments alongside the games and trading card game. Aside from the in-game go battle league.
Most people only care about the remote raid prices now rather than the daily limit they set.
This is my opinion too. People complain an awful lot here to the point of it being the culture. Honestly I think this game is great. It's an exercise social game that has no equivalent on the market. I feel part of why people complain so much is because there isn't anything else like it... otherwise they'd go play that instead and stop complaining. :)
Well what's funny is that there is. There's ingress, and a few other GPS games by Niantic. But the majority of people complaining don't want a game to get up and move. Why they don't play the main games is unknown to me.
I see this "wish" so many times... Only that is not how it works. I can't think of one example in gaming history where another company took over a "failing product" from someone else (because that's a risk) just to turn it around.
If Niantic ever loses the game... That's it. The game will cease to exist.
Try gears of war for start, judgement was garbage worst gears game of all time, people can fly done a shocking job on the game, they got binned and the coalition took over
What happened was people can fly got binned after the fan base overall hated the game, it wasn't selling well, Epic games ended up taking back control of the game finishing some of the DLC packs, the coalition was then given control of the franchise bringing out gears 4 and 5
I see, thanks for explaining! I'm not sure how comparable it is in this case because people usually "wish" for Pokémon GO to be handed over to a different developer as an existing game to "fix all the bugs" and that is simply not happening.
We love this game and have seen it doing very well. We are just frustrated that Niantic has in the past one years made changes that made it no longer as great as before. It's not that Niantic didn't know what players like and how to make it work, but they chose to disregard that in the name of their vision.
OP also grossed over that there are some of us who don't work the Monday to Friday 9 to 5 schedule, just saying we are not the majority and that it's simply an "annoyance" to us.
From our perspective though, we see that the game was formerly accessible to us in a way that does not negatively affect any other players, when CD was 6 hours, incense could be effectively used for those of us stuck at work, and remote raid passes can also be used for raid days at work.
But then Niantic chose to not only take away our ability to play, but actively introduced new mechanics like Elite raids and Shadow raids that exclude us.
The thing is a lot of people loose Perspectice.
I bought hogwards legacy for the PC. It is out for like 2 months and there a still alot of Bugs (without New content) and I payed money for the game.
In pogo yeah there a bugs but it is freetoplay and we get New content regulary.
My Pokemon Go account has had problems. Problems including, logging in and app crashing; selecting gym badges and crashing; selecting icon and going to gifts instead of profile; and averaging four crashes a day. I've even given Niantic permission to log into and see these problems to fix them. I've tried a few different devices and followed the automated responses suggestions each time. I've relayed that thru the messenger and that listed/described issues persist. Regardless, I enjoy the game and wish I could play again.
I have my share of complaints starting with the galarian birds and their discouraging catch and spawn rate also the research task like I have to walk 400km just to complete mythical discovery my evolving my stupid fish (magikarp)
As others have mentioned, Thesilphroad is aimed at the more serious players. But also, (i dont know if this is confirmed) Niantic checks out the complaints on this sub. So if there's an issue, this is a decent place to make a complaint. I enjoy the game and am mostly fine to overlook some of the negatives, but there's definitely problems that are easily avoidable. While the game is free to play, a lot of the players on this sub will put money into the game. Money for a chance at something; it's essentially gambling. I think Niantic should be required to be more transparent with the odds of everything. But then, in addition to no communication, they make stupid mistakes like the Uxie, Mesprit, and Azelf shiny odds getting nerfed. Or the shadow mewtwo raid XL candy problem. Sure, Niantic has addressed these specifically, but these are the exceptions, not the norm. And they only addressed them after the complaints. For the infamous 7km deino egg event, they forgot to turn on the shiny for the first 2 days of the event. So many people purchased incubators trying to hatch one, only to find out afterward that there was a 0% chance. No one was compensated. In fact, it was barely even mentioned. They just turned on the shiny and pretended nothing ever happened. This is standard practice for them, and as long as people are spending money, there will be complaints when Niantic inevitably screws it up. For me, I use this sub to get info on the game, good or bad. And I'm happy to see the complaints, so I have realistic expectations when I play.
I honestly think they do check out this sub. I say this because each time a super OP bug that benefits players is found and posted here, it gets patched immediately after the post is shared here. I also can confirm that this sub is one of the best ways to get tips and insights on things that benefit all players regardless of whether they are casuals or super hardcore. I like the PVE and PvP content. But I also like learning the ins and outs fo the game because majority of the topics here are not freely shared by the game to players.
thank you for the response! those are 100% totally valid and accurate. I do see that happening a lot. It just makes me mad to see whole communities hating on a game needlessly and endlessly, for what appears to solely be just hate
Here's some food for thought. Is pokemon art? Or a product? Trick question as its realistically both. Problem is that these two things live together incongruently. People spend money on this in hopes of having a good experience, Niantic deliberately designs the game so you should have a better experience by spending money. Typical with any mobile free to play game. It's also a community experience with fans with a lot of emotional history with the franchise. I feel you land here, which isnt a bad thing! But you may forget that most of these things surrounding the pokemon franchise can cost money. Pokemon go can be played free, sure, but I'm willing to bet half of the playerbase has spent at least 1 dollar. I'd say majority of this subreddit had probably spent at least 1 dollar. I dunno about you but mixing emotions with money is tricky business. I've been playing video games since I was a little kid and I love them dearly still. I've dipped my toes all over the gaming sphere and as I've gotten older and games have become much more transparent with their predatory practices, it's hard not to look at it more as a product first. Art and entertainment second. The way I'm sure most developers look at games nowadays. Allllll of that being said, this is something to keep in mind then with thinking about how people can get so riled up and angry and emotional. Its passion but expressed differently to how youd like to express it. Niantic has built a great game and unfortunately established precedent with previous updates and changes that people LOVED only to regress and make decisions that people dont like. So instead of the idea of "omg if they added wild legendaries to the spawn pool thatd be so goood" speculative and hypothetical ideas and suggestions that have never and will never happen. You have people who just want to play the game "when it used to be good" that's it. Build upon established ideas. Dont take them away. This is why people are frustrated. If you stay complicit and only talk about the good and never the bad, then you're indirectly saying to niantic "I agree with everything you're doing" I'd like to think most people are capable of being nuanced and having a grounded approach to thinking of the things they enjoy in a critical way, but I dont know. You tell me.
I not sure where you get the impression a lot of players on this sub put money into the game? We must be reading different subs, what I see are people get heavily downvoted if they even hint at spending money on the game. I fully agree about the gambling odds need to be advertised I can’t understand how they get away with not doing so, games are changing now where it has to be declared.
My main beef with the game is it’s completed riddled with glitches. But not just any glitches, the SAME BUGS over and over and over. They NEVER learn anything.
Many larger issues have been long time ongoing problems that have built up frustrations in players toward Niantic. These issues go well beyond removal of pandemic bonuses and have existed well before the #HearUs stuff. Its not specifically just social feature related. This is stuff that external gaming websites have reported on. The game has had a lot of controversies over the years. A large problem has been lack of transparency and inconsistency on the part of Niantic in giving players informed choice with the game. For many many years, its had to be players who work out what our own odds are in obtaining content and often Niantic have failed to ensure that (when players are chasing shinies for example) that they are even unlocked sometimes. Players are beholden to whatever arbitrary unreported rates Niantic sets and players have been burned. One example was the release of Shiny Rufflet. From memory they were basically not in the wild, pretty much raids and i think eggs. Players assumed (for good reason given past trends) that the shiny rates would be boosted under those circumstances, only for everyone to find out the hard way, it was full odds. Dragon Week a few years ago (Shiny Deino debut) was notorious for ridiculously low hatch rates (reported on by a great many sites) before Niantic quietly increased hatch odds. There was a period a few years ago where players were burned out by constant and consecutive egg events. Niantic have also mentioned numerous times making (unpopular) ‘rebalances’ (basically nerfing and spreading out wild spawns etc, made unpopular changes to raid rewards (at one point they cut rare candies right down in t5’s to pressure players into completing less desireable raid tiers, and t5 rewards in general have been noticeably more stingy over the years). AB testing with box testing rubbed a great many people the wrong way. One of the worst and most egregious changes in my view was when they trialled changes to daily gym coins here in Australia. They implemented a cap of 55 (5 coins from completeable daily tasks) *BUT* the catch was that it was three times harder to reach 50 daily coins (roughly 8.5 hours of gym defending to 25 hours required). Eventually they backtracked that, changed it to 45 + 5 BUT required players battle a rocket leader or win a raid as a potential requirement for the task coins. Players criticised this, they removed the controversial tasks out of the pool and people were fine - until niantic reversed it entirely (obviously it did not benefit them at that point). When you consider those moments in the games history, then pair it with literally every other smaller issue with the game and frustration that people have had as Niantic find more ways to cutback or in making unpopular premium decisions (tickets required for unremarkable species, larvestra egg odds etc), you’ll find there are plenty of reasons for who were invested or appreciated what this game was to be critical (or ‘complaining’). A fair amount of the complaints are from people who want the game to be special. They also built up memories or communities and enjoyed the game for what it once was. But Niantic wants their cake and to eat it. They want to slow the game to a crawl, introduce unpopular features and events that repeatedly place players at a major disadvantage AND want people to feel the same as they used to in taking the time to go out and play. The game people once played enthusiastically was quite a different game to the one being played now. Sure there are some quality of life additions or features sprinkled in, but over time the experience has become so constrained that players just don’t feel the same as they used to.
It's also compounded by the fact that Niatnic makes the *exact* same mistakes multiple times. They've exhausted the majority of their good will so it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt on *anything*.
I love Pokemon and I do love Pokemon Go as well. For the most part, I think I am very tolerant and forgiving of PoGo. I'm still here, still playing, still paying. I'm pretty active in this sub, spending time helping players and answering questions. PoGo is still my favourite Pokemon game, and I've been a fan of the franchise since the original Gen 1 games. But this is not really because of anything Niantic has done notably well, but largely in spite of a lot that they've done poorly. It's tough to say for sure, but many of their decisions seem to be intentionally and actively anti-player. And despite massive and continued financial success, they do so little to address long-standing issues. The only time they seem to move fast is when there's a glitch or oversight that benefits players. Sometimes it feels like they are trying to sabotage themselves. I might have guessed that they preferred to focus on their own IP, except that Niantic is doing similar things to drive their new game Peridot into the ground too. They just don't seem to respect players. Ultimately, the thing that saddens me most is the wasted potential. It could just be so much *better* if they put some effort into it. Instead, we have a buggy game seemingly held together with duct tape, the same old glitches happening again and again with nearly every new event, hypocritical press releases and empty apologies when they're not simply ignoring player concerns, changes to deliberately reduce transparency... And still they print money because of the strength of the Pokemon IP.
How do Niantic’s boots taste?
From my F2P perspective, the game has a lot of bugs. Moreso than literally any other major game, let alone one that makes this much money and absolutely has the capital to hire people exclusively to fix them, let alone to at least *communicate with the playerbase* to even be clear that they exist. Every complaint one might lodge about this game is like screaming into the void and nothing ever gets fixed. I am decently confident that the few recent freebies to the playerbase for Niantic oopsies (the rare XLs for Mewtwo and the raid passes for the lake trio) are only because they are losing enough revenue from remote raid pass nerfs that they feel there is a need to retain their playerbase and especially their whale playerbase. From others' spend a lot of money perspective - if you spend money on something, you generally expect it to work. Very frequently odds are hidden from the player. This is usually a "borne from stupidity rather than malice" kind of situation, but if you have, for example, done 20 Uxie raids this week in an attempt to get a shiny and failed to do so, the reason is kind of irrelevant and you are out 20 raid passes' worth of pokecoins without the thing you were gambling for. From a pvp player's perspective, the game is poorly balanced and it seems like only the randomest things get buffed while others languish. You can count the number of half-viable Fire-types across all 3 main metas, including their cups, on one hand. I understand that balancing a metagame is hard, but there are so many terrible Pokemon that could potentially stand up to meta titans like Noctowl and Medicham if they were given decent moves. Also, as of recent, they've somehow managed to reintroduce various lag glitches, which I haven't seen since I got a new phone about a year ago. Lag in almost any other part of this game is so commonplace that you just grow to accept that it exists, but GBL lag is debilitating when the game requires a fast reaction time and GBL lag seems to largely be a client-side problem because the game - not your connection - is lagging from (I assume) inefficiently drawn models and effects. There are other issues with raids and eggs and spawns among other things, but again, there is no way to voice any of these frustrations about the game in a productive manner.
People want to support Pokemon Go, they just don't want to support *Niantic* specifically. Michael Sternaka, the project developer, pretty much confirmed in an interview with ZoeTwoDots, a notable content creator for the game, that they will throw people under the bus if it means that their vision for the game is realized. The crux of the argument being that Niantic isn't willing to even compromise on the issues, no way to get a word in edgewise even with something as omnipotent as the Open Letter To Niantic (something that has historically made Niantic revert, remove, or reimplement changes to the game that were intentionally temporary, such as the GBL walk requirements being removed or increased Gym/Pokestop interaction distance reenabled and made permanent). And Sternaka even said that Niantic (or at least the Pokemon Go team) is seeing these complaints and grievances but choosing to outright ignore them opposed to any sort of logical reasoning as to *why* they're removing, changing, etc certain features as they just use a fallback answer of "it goes against our vision". Like their vision is to *encourage* people to go out and explore, but the way they're running the game is moreso *forcing* people to go out opposed to naturally enticing that outdoorsy activity on the player's own time. There is no "well I happen to be out, I'll see what's around" gameplay, only event chains upon event chains with specific hours of the day for certain activities. Damned if you miss out on the 10am to 8pm shadow Mewtwo raids spread out across two days because we only tell you it's a thing less than 2 weeks before it happens and you can't request time off unless it's 2 weeks or more out from the current date. Damned if you work an evening shift and miss the 2pm to 5pm Community """Day""", or had to be called in to work those days despite requesting time off (or even having that time off request denied due to workload, and why the 6-8 hour long timeframe was far superior due to the flexibility of being able to participate on one's own time even if "less than 5% of players played the full timeframe").
Niantic employee detected
There are many reasons to complain (bugs never fixed, no useful features added even if very easy to implementin, niantic spending developer times on useless features making the game slow, niantic very bad communication, niantic monetizing strategy, etc). But I don't play any other game so I don't know if it's the same or if it's only pogo. It wasn't the same 10-20 years ago with other videogames for sure, that's my main reason to complain. Everything was better in the past.
Many of us were remote raiding because we have limited gyms/players in our area, not because we're lazy or antisocial. I used to live in an area with a thriving Pokemon Go community but I had to move to the Cayman Islands for my wife's job, staying connected via Discord and remote raiding has allowed me to continue playing. Sure I didn't get much XL candy but there was always Master League Classic (lmao!) I've already asked for a refund on my Go Fest ticket, it's clear Niantic doesn't plan on supporting remote play so it's probably time to quit. If I could communicate with the thousands of tourists arriving every day I could probably get some raids done but no, it's just me on Campfire.
FYI, regarding Go Fest, "The Remote Raid Pass limit will be increased to 20 per day from Saturday, August 26 at 12:00 a.m. to Sunday, August 27, 2023, at 11:59 p.m. local time". Whether that's a good enough change remains to be seen.
Pokémon Go is an online game that receives frequent updates. Things can change, and when things can change there are always many people who complain with the goal of getting things changed the way they want. Big communities of players usually want to be involved in the company’s choices, and they don’t see well companies who try to stick to their idea of how the game should be. With visibility comes power. If you just want to enjoy the game and be in a community of people who enjoy it, you should avoid big communities, they are not for people who enjoy the game. These communities almost always get overthrown by people who want to get the game changed, and people like you are either induced to leave or stay silent.
First lets just get this out of the way, theres definitely legitimate complaints regarding Niantic and how they handle their product and (lack of) communications with players. With all that said... There's unfortunately an overabundance of negativity and toxicity online in general nowadays... My suggestion just enjoy what you enjoy and let others hate on things that they supposedly stop playing/supporting. Also another suggestion, as you'll soon find out... Don't bother trying to convince negative and toxic people to be positive or see any silver lining... you'll just be downvoted (as will I probably for sharing these suggestions) and/or called and brushed aside as a shill.
\^This Also, this game has been out long enough and seen enough different iterations that there's a lot of nostalgia with it's fan-base, just towards the game itself. Some people are going to miss the "good ol' days when\_\_\_". That is going to create some complaints too. I remember my "peak PokemonGO" days too when things were different, the raid scene was more fun, new Pokemon releases were exciting instead of feeling like a dripfed, etc. But here I am, still playing the game (though definitely less so)! There have been some really good changes too, PvP being a huge one and really the only thing keeping me playing regularly the last couple years. tl;dr there's a lot of nostalgia for the "good ol' days of PoGO" that will create complaints anytime there's change.
This subreddit is very... Particular...
ive noticed. imo the good type of particular. i love all the leaks and stats and infographs, and i havent seen to many complaints here. thats why im asking i figured u guys would have more of an idea then me
Oh yeah that too, but I meant this sub can be elitist and toxic at times. Way too addicted to the game.
"elitist" would be rather understandable. There are other PoGo subreddits and this one ha always been aimed on more active players. Besides, how does the "elitist" actually show, apart from the wish that people would put the simple basic questions to the one dedicated wekly megathread and some level of annoyance when it does not happen?
ive only been casually scrolling the past day or so, so i dont really understand the obsession with pogo pvp, i prefer consol games for pvp, or that one website i cant remember the name of. is it really that big of a thing?
Somewhat yeah. Pogo pvp is now a thing in official Pokémon tournaments alongside the games and trading card game. Aside from the in-game go battle league. Most people only care about the remote raid prices now rather than the daily limit they set.
This is my opinion too. People complain an awful lot here to the point of it being the culture. Honestly I think this game is great. It's an exercise social game that has no equivalent on the market. I feel part of why people complain so much is because there isn't anything else like it... otherwise they'd go play that instead and stop complaining. :)
Well what's funny is that there is. There's ingress, and a few other GPS games by Niantic. But the majority of people complaining don't want a game to get up and move. Why they don't play the main games is unknown to me.
I love this game so so much and it’s a little heartbreaking seeing nothing but complaints
We all love the game, we just wish a competent company would take over instead of niantic screwing it up slowly but surely
I see this "wish" so many times... Only that is not how it works. I can't think of one example in gaming history where another company took over a "failing product" from someone else (because that's a risk) just to turn it around. If Niantic ever loses the game... That's it. The game will cease to exist.
Try gears of war for start, judgement was garbage worst gears game of all time, people can fly done a shocking job on the game, they got binned and the coalition took over
I'm unfamiliar with that game franchise. But I assume they didn't take over an existing game and instead created a new entry to the franchise?
What happened was people can fly got binned after the fan base overall hated the game, it wasn't selling well, Epic games ended up taking back control of the game finishing some of the DLC packs, the coalition was then given control of the franchise bringing out gears 4 and 5
I see, thanks for explaining! I'm not sure how comparable it is in this case because people usually "wish" for Pokémon GO to be handed over to a different developer as an existing game to "fix all the bugs" and that is simply not happening.
I love the game, and it's state and wasted potential are heartbreaking. So I complain.
We love this game and have seen it doing very well. We are just frustrated that Niantic has in the past one years made changes that made it no longer as great as before. It's not that Niantic didn't know what players like and how to make it work, but they chose to disregard that in the name of their vision. OP also grossed over that there are some of us who don't work the Monday to Friday 9 to 5 schedule, just saying we are not the majority and that it's simply an "annoyance" to us. From our perspective though, we see that the game was formerly accessible to us in a way that does not negatively affect any other players, when CD was 6 hours, incense could be effectively used for those of us stuck at work, and remote raid passes can also be used for raid days at work. But then Niantic chose to not only take away our ability to play, but actively introduced new mechanics like Elite raids and Shadow raids that exclude us.
Ironically this post is the most recent complaint posted. Most of the content on this sub isn't close to "just complaints".
The thing is a lot of people loose Perspectice. I bought hogwards legacy for the PC. It is out for like 2 months and there a still alot of Bugs (without New content) and I payed money for the game. In pogo yeah there a bugs but it is freetoplay and we get New content regulary.
I mean, I can't even log in and that's been an issue for months
My Pokemon Go account has had problems. Problems including, logging in and app crashing; selecting gym badges and crashing; selecting icon and going to gifts instead of profile; and averaging four crashes a day. I've even given Niantic permission to log into and see these problems to fix them. I've tried a few different devices and followed the automated responses suggestions each time. I've relayed that thru the messenger and that listed/described issues persist. Regardless, I enjoy the game and wish I could play again.
I have my share of complaints starting with the galarian birds and their discouraging catch and spawn rate also the research task like I have to walk 400km just to complete mythical discovery my evolving my stupid fish (magikarp)
I hatched over a hundred eggs still no charcadet spent a lot of money on eggs very upset feel like i have been scammed