Posted in: Games, Mobile Games, Niantic, Pokémon GO | Tagged: , , , ,


Niantic Pens A Letter To Pokémon GO Battle League Players

Earlier this month, the player-versus-player community of Pokémon GO penned an open letter to mobile game developer Niantic in hopes to call attention to issues within GO Battle League. These issues, laid out in the letter, include both bugs and how Niantic's efforts in fixing existing glitches have led to more, different problems with the game. Niantic has responded in a letter back to Pokémon GO PVPers, laying out their plans on addressing these issues.

Niantic Pens a Letter to Pokémon GO Battle League Players. Credit: Niantic
Niantic Pens a Letter to Pokémon GO Battle League Players. Credit: Niantic

Niantic, in this letter, pledged transparency with GO Battle League players, while also explaining how some of these issues within the system came to be. In their response letter, posted to the Pokémon GO blog, they wrote:

Pokémon GO's battle logic is among our most complicated systems, so a bug fix related to the GO Battle League fundamentally has a higher chance of causing subsequent bugs than some of our other fixes. For example, a fix applied during June's GO Battle League outage is the upstream cause of many of the current Charged Attack, desync, and switch bugs.

What are we doing about it?

Increasing quality-assurance (QA)testing is the best way to resolve issues with inherently complicated systems. As such, we have two improvements to our testing process underway.

  • More testers: We've increased the size of our QA team over the past two months.
  • Automated testing: Automated testing can handle simple, routine tasks so our QA teammates can spend more time on in-depth testing.

Niantic has been quite transparent with their method of addressing these issues. Recent announcements concerning GO Battle League have included efforts to stop a glitch that certain players were exploiting to create an unfair advantage in their matches, as well as a pledge that GBL would no longer have to be unavailable while being serviced for maintenance. Niantic also addressed a concern about their communication regarding GO Battle League issues. Going forward, the developer will not include GBL bugs on their standard page for in-game bugs, but will rather have a page specific to current GBL problems. They continued on to address the PVP community directly:

We are dedicated to continuously improving the Pokémon GO gameplay experience and will do so by making changes to our internal processes (such as testing) and communication (such as the Known Issues page). We hope that these next steps will help address those issues.

GO Battle League is currently in its third season, set to wrap-up in September.


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Theo DwyerAbout Theo Dwyer

Theo Dwyer writes about comics, film, and games.
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