Either Make Pokémon Go Better or Fix It, Niantic

Please pick one. Quickly.

Dawn is all of us right now.

The early reviews for Pokémon GO: Max Out are in, and the consensus is—still kinda meh?

OK, so my sources here are the responses to one Jonkus tweet, so take this assertion with a grain of salt, but there’s a good chance we can extrapolate these sentiments to a larger sample of PoGO Trainers. Quoth the German-born Pokémon GO PvP content creator:

Worst start in terms of interest in Pokémon GO I have seen in a while... And this with all the changes... but I guess we don't have any good cups and all the performance issues...

At least the remaining schedule for this season looks fun, lag is a bit better for me as well already, how is it for you?

The vibes of the replies are, as the kids say, less than immaculate. While Jonkus’s lag may have improved, one respondent hasn’t even bothered to claim last season’s GO Battle League rewards owing to the brokenness of the game. For those who have attempted to battle, lag is the primary contributor to a sense of user dissatisfaction. We’re not just talking momentary stutter or frame drops, either. These are the kinds of bugs that force the player to force close the app and restart or are otherwise severe enough to turn comfortable wins into losses.

The other major gripe is the content itself. Lest you think the aversion to Psychic Cup stated in my last post was merely one disgruntled man’s personal vendetta, as it turns out, nope—others have disdain for it as well, with one respondent calling it “rubbish” and another slamming it as both “boring” and “unfair,” critical of the relative strength of Pokémon which rely on Fast Attack damage from moves like Astonish and Charm. A third reply harped on the perceived laziness of the schedule altogether, citing Niantic’s reuse of the same limited metas again and again and again.

Overall, while these players extended praise to the move updates/changes as well as the switch timer, ahem, switch-up, the performance issues and deliberate choices made by Niantic have definitely cast a shadow on the season of Max Out. Moreover, while their concerns are mostly relegated to matters of player-versus-player combat, one Twitter/X user opined that Dynamax “seems like a pointless, boring addition” to the game, “a completely unnecessary layer to add in.” This is Dynamax Pokémon, mind you, the focal point of this three-month campaign and another feature which, at least in theory, is supposed to make up for the rollback of COVID-era additions like Remote Raid Passes. It’s doubtless that not only do Trainers still very painfully remember having beloved amenities taken away from them, but seeing their effective replacements arrive to much fanfare and little apparent use is understandably galling.

While, as with Jonkus, framing his thoughts in terms of GBL/PvP, JRESeawolf, unwitting friend of the program, called the shakeups of this season “lipstick on a pig.” Especially for battlers, it has never felt truer. We’re to the point where Niantic knows about the issues and refuses to fix them, or worse, somehow thinks they are fixed and is carrying on like that’s the case. Experienced players know better, however. This is impacting battles at the highest level, too, as was observed at the first regional tournament of the Play! Pokémon season last weekend in Baltimore. Esports ready? Hardly.

In terms of my personal experience herein, while I haven’t done a ton of battling this season, especially not when Galar Cup: Little Cup Edition and Psychic Cup have been my primary options, I, too, have experienced lag, frame drops, and Charged Attacks not registering because of game mechanics not mechanicking. Even when not trying to tap my way to a higher rank, though, there are still performance issues to be had.

Sometimes, when aiming to catch Pokémon, my curveball throws don’t finish their full rotation, laterally missing their target by a wide margin or limply falling to the earth well short of their intended destination. I’m having less of a problem with wild encounters not popping up until twenty, thirty seconds after I’ve opened the app, but almost always now, when I start up Pokémon GO, I have to wait to see how much time is left on my Buddy Pokémon’s clock to properly kick in before feeding it again or swapping in a different Buddy. Whirr. Whirr. Whirr. Loading. Loading. Loading. That damned spinning Poké Ball in the top-left corner of the screen, mocking me with its endless gyrations.

As for Dynamax, I’ve done a few Max Battles here and there, but I haven’t really been eager to do them—mostly because I don’t see the point. Can I use them for battles? No? Should I use them for Raids? No? Guess I’ll go f**k myself, then! Zeroghan, founder of the PoGO resource website Pokémon GO Hub, penned an article around the start of the season explaining why you should care about Dynamax and Max Battles, but a lot of it rings hollow to me.

The most compelling reasons within the piece, as I found, were that the rewards are solid for the fairly low difficulty it takes to complete them and that you don’t have to buy Raid Passes to do Max Battles. That someone felt the need to make an itemized list to persuade readers that this feature is worth your time, meanwhile, would seem to speak volumes. This is to say that if Dynamax were really that fun and exciting, it should be more readily apparent. Regularly, I will hit the maximum Max Particles I can earn in a day, putting a cap on the number of battles I can do given the meager MP limit afforded by the game without purchasing an upgrade.

Zeroghan’s entry also extols the notion that Max Battles are optimized for small groups, but if you are a group of one, you’re probably not going to be able to complete anything beyond a one-star battle. I tried soloing a Dynamax Beldum, a three-star Max Battle, as part of a post-dinner walk around my neighborhood the other night and found myself abandoning the challenge after a minute or two when I saw my Pokémon’s attacks doing virtually no damage. It cost more Max Particles to attempt to defeat Beldum to boot, which would’ve been devastating if, like I said, I saw a need for Dynamax Pokémon. At present, however, I’m certainly not going to go out of my way for them or desperately ping friends on Discord in hopes of conquering them. Unless I find myself in a crowd, as I might on a Community Day, I’ll probably do what I already do with Shadow Raids: walk right by them.

You can have a fun game that’s kind of janky, or you can have a game that looks and feels like a well-developed game yet lacking in content, but you can’t have a broken game bereft of fun and expect to draw new players/retain existing players over the long haul. Though it probably won’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, I will keep beating this drum in the hopes that someone with the power to make a difference with respect to one or both of these elements actually listens. Niantic, either make a better game or fix it. Pokémon GO is your cash cow, and if you do neither, you’re putting the game’s future and your own survival at risk.