Posted in: Games, Mobile Games, Niantic, Pokémon GO | Tagged: HearUsNiantic, Niantic, Niantic Labs, pokemon, pokemon go

Niantic Posts Full Pokémon GO Taskforce Follow-Up Part Two

September 1st has arrived, and so has Niantic's full report on their Pokémon GO taskforce. This taskforce was created as a means of addressing the #HearUsNiantic movement on social media and the Pokémon GO boycott that came as a result of Niantic pulling back the pandemic bonus of increased Poké Stop distance. You can catch Part One of this breakdown here. Now, let's get into the second half.

On the official Pokémon GO blog, Niantic posted:

Seasonal Global Bonuses

We went through a rough learning experience recently when we had to adjust the game settings for New Zealand quickly in response to their lockdown. This experience taught us that we are not going to be able to effectively adjust the experience on a country-by-country basis in real-time. Starting with the Season of Mischief all bonuses will be set at a global level and be tied directly to the seasons in Pokémon GO. You can find more details on those bonuses in our announcement yesterday.

Here, I'll consolidate that announcement into bullets. The bonuses they're adding for the Season of Mischief include:

• Triple bonus XP for spinning PokéStops for the first time
• Double Lure duration
• Increased Incense effectiveness
• Additional Incense effectiveness while walking
• Boosted damage for Trainers battling remotely in raids
• Guaranteed Gifts from PokéStop spins
• Buddy Pokémon will bring you Gifts more often

I'm just calling this right now. If the "Boosted damage for Trainers battling remotely in raids" is ever taken away, Niantic will for sure see a bigger outcry than they just did. The gameplay of way, way more people will be impacted by that change in Pokémon GO.

Niantic continues:

Communication

We should be communicating and engaging more with Trainers. I hope that, with your patience and understanding, we can do better here. There are many ways we can improve, but to start, we're making the following commitments to you:

● Starting in October, we will begin publishing a developer diary every other month to share the latest priorities, events, and features for the game.

Listen, I think Niantic has mostly done well with their response to the outcry here about the Pokémon GO changes. Communication is one place, though, that still needs improvement. The bonuses I listed above were written on Twitter, not the blog, and the Tweets were crafted in the most confusing way possible. To be frank, Niantic needs to dramatically streamline their information, because whoever is making the call that their current M.O. works is far off-base. All information should go to the Pokémon GO blog and should pop as a push notification in the game. It's that simple. Post it on Twitter too, sure, but not a single bit of information about the game should be Twitter-exclusive.

● We are going to set up regular conversations with community leaders to continue the dialogue we began this month.

It seemed to work here, so good on them for continuing it.

● We will continue our work on updating the Known Issues page and in those efforts, will prioritize bringing greater visibility into the status of existing bugs for Trainers.

We love how passionate Pokémon GO Trainers are about this game, and we want you to know how passionate we are about the game and community as well. The lack of communication regarding the PokéStop and Gym interaction radius was not handled well on our part, and it was a great learning experience on how to better engage with our players moving forward. Our top priority is and always has been to get people outside into the real world and creating human connections with each other. Thank you for being a part of this journey with us — you'll hear from us again soon.

– Steve Wang (Executive Producer) and the Pokémon GO team

Overall, while some of the communication problems clearly continue, Niantic offered a well-crafted and reasonable response here. I have noted in recent coverage that Pokémon GO's blog has already improved in streamlining information in recent posts. A great improvement is the use of graphics as well as the Shiny icon next to Pokémon that can be Shiny.

Stay tuned to Bleeding Cool for more Pokémon GO news.

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