The Existential Dread of a Pokémon GO Update

Change is inevitable. It also inevitably seems to break Pokémon GO in various ways.

Few things strike fear into the hearts of avid Pokémon GO players like news of an update to the game.

If you are new to Pokémon GO, didn’t get to play during the Raging Battles event, or if you’re me, a deeply stupid person, you didn’t, prior to this past weekend, build an Annihilape for Great League. Since its introduction to PoGO, Annihilape, a tertiary evolution in the Mankey line, has been a force to be reckoned with in all formats. Its dual Fighting/Ghost typing is shared by only one other Pokémon in the main series games (Marshadow being the other), making it, if not wholly unique, still unusual based on that combination alone. On top of this, it boasts access to Counter, one of the best Fast Attacks in all of PvP play, as well as a host of potent Charged Attacks. And Low Sweep, for some reason. Oh, well. You can’t win ‘em all, folks.

In Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, you can evolve a Primeape into an Annihilape by using the move Rage Fist 20 times, a signature move for only these two Pokémon, and then gaining enough experience to level it up. In Pokémon GO, Rage Fist hasn’t yet been added to the game. If it does come into play by way of an update, I’m presuming it will show up as a Mankey Community Day-exclusive attack, though there are other ways by which it could be made available. In the meantime, however, Niantic’s solution is to have the player defeat 30 Psychic-type or Ghost-type Pokémon with Primeape as their Buddy.

Coming from Scarlet and Violet, this may not sound like much of a requirement. Defeat 30 Pokémon? Easy peasy. Ah, but in the console/handheld universe, battle is the cornerstone of making Pokémon stronger and progressing through the game. While collection is perhaps most foundational to the franchise—”Gotta catch ‘em all,” right?—the main story always ends with some climactic battle. Being a Pokémon Trainer and battling are inextricably linked.

In the world of Pokémon GO, however, there is less of an emphasis on battling and more on catching Pokémon and real-world exploration. You still have ways of engaging in Poké-fisticuffs, whether by way of GO Battle League, Gym Battles, Raids, or Team Rocket encounters. Even so, it’s distinctly possible to play PoGO for hours and not participate in one battle. In fact, most of these battle features weren’t even part of the game at launch. They were added after the fact, whether because that was intended or because Niantic didn’t understand at first that a game built only on catching Pokémon and walking around wasn’t sustainable (the latter seems eminently possible).

In short, what is a relatively banal task in the main series games is a more cumbersome chore in PoGO, especially if you’re trying to build an Annihilape on the quick. Re the former, you can traverse the expanses of the Paldean region from the comfort of your couch, beating up unsuspecting wild Pokémon along the way. Barring unforeseen circumstances like dead batteries, a power outage, or—I don’t know—carpal tunnel symptoms flaring up—you can accomplish the Rage Fist requirement in fairly short order.

In Pokémon GO, on the other hand, if you don’t have a friend at the ready or a secondary account with which to do friendly battles, you literally have to go out of your way to do enough battles with non-player characters (NPCs) to facilitate this achievement. Your next best option is finding a Rocket Grunt utilizing Psychic- or Ghost-type Pokémon and repeatedly beating two of three Pokémon, failing, and restarting the challenge, which isn’t so much time-consuming as much as irritating (not to mention you have to suffer the ignominy of “losing” to a Rocket Grunt). And if these fail, your last refuge? Putting Primeape in a party of three and beating Metagross in a Master League-rules Training battle with Blanche. Thirty times. It’s by far the slowest and most painful of these options, but if you’re desperate and you don’t luck into a Psychic- or Ghost-themed Rocket Grunt Balloon showing up at your location, it may be your saving grace.

So naturally, this is what I, an admittedly stupid man, did.

You may be wondering, “Where is the absurdly long preamble to this post going?” My tale of woe is building up to a point, I assure you. A humbled man after a string of losses during GO Battle Weekend, I took to the Training method to evolve an Annihilape, and what was already an onerous task was made even more tedious by the game freezing. I’ve done several thousands of Training sessions and never once had PoGO crash in the midst of it. That was before this past weekend, though. On three separate occasions, my game froze in time, the “spinning Poké Ball of death” in the corner of the screen idly whirring, trying to revive a process that had no hope of recovery. If you’ve played Pokémon GO, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Sounds frustrating, huh? Again, if I had taken more care to ready an Annihilape for Great League during the Raging Battles event in January or during another Team Rocket-centered in-game promotion, I wouldn’t have been in that position, so the blame is partly (largely?) my own. Even so, that the game didn’t perform as expected made matters worse. From the sound of it, too, it was more than just my Training sessions that were impacted by a recent update.

Per an article by Md Armughanuddin, staff writer at Game Rant, 0.311, PoGO’s latest version, has been causing headaches for players in and out of battle. It’s not just GO Battle League matches, which I can attest to, or Training sessions, which weren’t even touched upon in the piece, that have been affected by crashes, frame rate issues, and lag. Since the update went live about a week ago, even catching Pokémon has been problematic for some Android users, with Trainers unable to accurately land Poké Ball throws and, in some cases, having their throws fly completely off the screen. Well, that doesn’t make for a fun user experience.

Games periodically have bugs. Across different operating systems and by the seeming nature of software itself, there are going to be occasional hiccups when updates are rolled out. With Niantic, however, this seems to be the rule, not the exception. This update, according to the San Francisco-based developer, was pushed to implement “minor bug fixes and performance improvements.” It, ahem, didn’t seem to work, did it?

Under most circumstances, this would be a run-of-the-mill set of glitches in need of patching. No biggie. Given Niantic’s questionable stewardship of its various properties, though, these issues get magnified with every new version of the game that seems to break more things than it clears up. As Armughanuddin writes, “While the season [of World of Wonders] started off on a high with some exciting events, things have gone downhill in the past few weeks with the release of Pokemon GO’s controversial Avatar update. Not only are many fans still unable to make peace with the revamped avatars, it seems like yet another issue has cropped up in the game.” When end users don’t need much more provocation to walk away from the PoGO, its technical struggles couldn’t come at much worse of a time.

---

Niantic’s Dev Diaries feature wasn’t even that much of a concession, but evidently it was too much for a company that makes hundreds of millions of dollars to regularly update.

Speaking personally, while performance issues are a real detriment to the player experience, I feel that they are never as bad as intentional decisions Niantic makes which directly work against the wishes of the fanbase. I went free-to-play after Pokémon GO moved to shrink the radius by which players can activate PokéStops and Gyms following an easing of real-world COVID restrictions, a change the game makers put into effect despite a petition signed by close to 200,000 people and later reversed after widespread protest. I turned off my use of Adventure Sync to limit the amount of location data I was giving Niantic or whoever else uses it after the Remote Raid Pass nerf, a yet more unpopular choice even if it may be more principled. I’m running out of ways to protest the questionable choices Niantic leadership continues to make beyond outright uninstalling. I’m not there yet, but the thought crosses my mind from time to time.

Concerning the aforementioned bugs, errors, and glitches, to stress my earlier point, they come with the territory of game design and implementation. Niantic’s handling of these unfortunate bits of happenstance, meanwhile, seems like it could be improved. Certainly, their communication style could use an overhaul. In response to the PokéStop radius debacle that sparked talks of boycotts and the creation of the hashtag #HearUsNiantic, the developer promised customers it would do better to interact with them through the publication of periodic “Dev Diaries” that would foster an atmosphere of transparency around the company’s operations. That resulted in only a handful of entries, however, and while informative, these really didn’t address the larger frustration players have had with perceived indifference from the people at the top. Nearly eight years into Pokémon GO’s existence, it is somehow a newsworthy event that Niantic does, in fact, listen to customer feedback. That this would even be in doubt is concerning.

I found out about the latest version of PoGO causing problems for people beyond the normal to-be-expected lag by searching on my own, and if not for the Game Rant article linked above, I probably wouldn’t know that my issues were related to the update. For that matter, I probably wouldn’t even know there was an update. As with the Annihilape situation, that’s partly on me, but it’s not like Niantic is making this abundantly clear either. I discovered the details about 0.311’s release, sparing as they were, from a random blog I found by Googling. I didn’t read about it through the official Niantic Support website. Perhaps Niantic isn’t an outlier in this regard, but they’re really not overachieving in this respect by the same token.

Speaking of Niantic Support, I do feel genuinely bad for what I can only imagine is a beleaguered staff. It’s part of the reason I try to only message them sparingly. I’m sure they have their hands full with complaints about the Avatar update, for one. At this point, I’m not sure how much they or we can even do. I’m still hopeful for an upward trajectory for Pokémon GO as long as it’s alive. My patience has its limits, though, and I know I’m not alone.