The Game's Getting Fixed Eventually, Right?
Right?!
I had a pretty nice day playing Pokémon GO this past Saturday. It was enjoyable grinding the Ultra Unlock: Hisui Celebration event—you know, as much as fun as grinding for Stardust and Candies could ever be—and I also liked Hisuian Lilligant Raid Day. Of course, it helped matters that I got five Shinies amid my travels, including the featured new release on my first Raid. But yeah—it was a rewarding outing on top of it being a productive one. In the realm of PoGO, mind you. The redeeming real-world consequence of my hours let loose in the mall was that I ended up walking 10–12 kilometers all told. I would hesitate to call it truly productive time spent, but hey—it’s the weekend, baby! You only live once!
Keen-minded observers might note that one game mode in particular is absent from what made the day a positive experience. That would be GO Battle League, or as the kids refer to it, GBL.
In the land of player-versus-player interactions, there are two choices during the current weekly rotation. The first is Ultra League, an open format with a characteristic slow pace mediated by bulky Pokémon. While the days of Cresselia and Giratina being near-ubiquitous are firmly behind us, with the expansion of the pool of available Pokémon thankfully adding much-needed diversity to these proceedings, what hasn’t changed is the emphasis on Legendary Pokémon or Pokémon which otherwise require significant amounts of resource expenditure to ready for battle. Of the top 25 entries in PvPoke’s Ultra League rankings, 19 are either Legendary or need Candies XL to power to a respectable level. Is it possible to win without having these kinds of Pokémon on your squad? Sure. To win consistently and to have plenty of options at your disposal, though? That’s a tough ask.
The alternative—if you can call it that—is Hisui Cup, timed to coincide with the Hisui Celebration. If you are finding success or entertainment in Hisui Cup, more power to you. Mazel tov. It’s not a good limited meta, however. Feel free to fight me in the comments. The matchups involving the highest-rated Pokémon tend to be hard wins or hard losses without a substantial energy, health, or shield advantage. Calling it RPS (rock, paper, scissors) seems like a bit of a copout, but at the same time, it doesn’t feel like too much of a stretch, either. I get the thematic connection, but Niantic/Scopely should’ve just kept this in their bag of tricks. To put this another way, I don’t think a lot of players were clamoring for Hisui Cup—and for good reason.
So, yeah—my dumb ass has been playing Hisui Cup, and I’ve been having a more or less miserable time. Overall, I’ve lost more than I’ve won, with my major sense of value coming from mitigating my rating’s downward plunge. In truth, it could be worse. As far as problems go, this is a first-world problem, to be sure. Still, we all need diversions, and while I can accept that not all Cups are going to be bangers (though they don’t have to be sorry excuses), and while I can accept that I’m not that skilled (though I feel like I’m getting better, present rating notwithstanding), one factor in my decidedly limited sense of satisfaction is harder to stomach.
That factor? Lag, frame drops, and other performance issues. At this juncture, I’m simply not good enough to overcome poorly designed metas, worse plays, and a game that malfunctions at pivotal moments in matches. I already don’t know my move counts/optimal move timing and yet struggle with diagnosing visual cues in real time. Desynchronization? Moves misfiring? Glitches? Just stick a fork in me why don’t you.
It would be one thing if these struggles were relegated to GO Battle League. It’d still suck, mind you, but only a fraction of Trainers even engages with PvP, so if any portion of the program were liable to suffer, it would most understandably be GBL. As long-suffering Pokémon GO players can attest to, meanwhile, it’s not just one feature that’s prone to errors—it’s the whole damn show. Just recently, PoGO had to issue an announcement and an extra day of availability for Gimmighoul encounters when the featured Pokémon, the centerpiece of the event advertised because of its Shiny debut, was unavailable as a Shiny. Going back to Hisuian Lilligant Raid Day, New Zealand had to have its Raid Day extended by an hour because Gyms weren’t loading Hisuian Lilligant a.k.a. the entire freaking reason people went out.
This kind of stuff happens all the time in Pokémon GO—not just in GBL and not just in the APAC region, though it does seem to be most pronounced there. I legitimately feel for who I imagine are beleaguered support staff. At its core player experience, PoGO is a good game, perhaps even a great one. Technically speaking, however, it’s a nightmare.
For merely not being Niantic, Scopely will get a certain amount of grace from fans. If the bugs, glitches, and other maladies don’t meaningfully improve, though, I don’t doubt that the pitchforks and torches will be out in short order. Recently, the game discontinued support for 32-bit Android devices, which, in theory, should only impact a minority of users, but as I can report from reading some curt one-star Google Play Store reviews, it’s not an altogether irrelevant subset of the player base, and it certainly matters to them. On the other hand, maybe they should consider themselves lucky. They’re suddenly spared from a litany of performance woes.
One last thing about the technical issues facing Pokémon GO. Despite the game’s myriad flaws serving as a seemingly limitless source of material for myself and other content creators, I don’t relish having to be as frequently negative as I am about the state of the game, much as I don’t relish, say, having to keep explaining to others around me what a trainwreck the Democratic Party is in its present iteration.
In fairness to this notion, I’m sure some of PoGO’s detractors are in it out of pure spite. Social media is a conduit for the exchange of ideas, and for all its merits, rage bait is a commonly traded currency across platforms (in the case of Twitter lately, it appears to be reserved mainly for the promulgation of Nazi ideology, too, which is, uh, not especially encouraging). These keyboard warriors aren’t interested in community building. They might not even have the game installed, if they ever did. Especially while Niantic was at the helm, they’ve been interested solely in jumping on the bandwagon of tearing down what they see as a soulless corporation. Amid my own cynicism, I can understand the appeal.
All the same, having to routinely deliberate about Pokémon GO’s brokenness becomes tiresome. Not only that, but, well, you feel like kind of a downer. Speaking of content creation, watching GO Battle League content on YouTube, it’s difficult listening to creators trying to get viewers excited about PvP and, in the same breath, needing to acknowledge that their battles were plagued by lag. In some instances, they seem reluctant to even speak on the subject of the app’s suboptimal performance lest the spinning Poké Ball of death on the left-hand side of the screen manifest like a horror movie villain. Did their opponent get a free move or did the Candyman suddenly appear in the mirror?
Indeed, it’s a tough balancing act. Nevertheless, if being a “downer” means being real about the same problems that have persisted for years, then I’d rather be a downer than a shameless PoGO apologist (I know—I’m really angling for that partnership with Scopely, aren’t I?). If anything, I feel like a reluctance to speak on the game’s pitfalls for fear of alienating subscribers only makes it that much more likely that things won’t change for the better. I’m not saying that people need to be unrelentingly critical, mind you. Give credit where credit is due. In either respect, maybe let’s not go overboard, eh?
All of this would be academic, though, if Pokémon GO just, er, got fixed. Again, Scopely inherited a mess from Niantic, so there’s grace to be had. If PoGO’s new owners wanted to share a hint about what they’re doing behind the scenes to alleviate all the bugs, however—even a crumb—it’d be welcomed with open arms.
What, you mean you don't enjoy when you've got a charged attack CLEARLY loaded and you're mashing the button with no response, and then you die? I thought that was a feature!
Fix the bugs! Dear lord do this for the long suffering players. You owe it to them!