"A Little Communication Goes A Long Way"

#PokemonGO: I know, we talk about this a lot, but… If we could understand Niantic’s motivation for doing/not doing certain things, I think that would help with some of the community’s frustration.TrackingThis is the big one, why has tracking gone the development route that led to the nearby tracker? Basically, the community has tried to piece together legal reasons for not directly telling us where to find things, but you know what would be helpful? An official explanation on the direction Niantic wishes to take the game. They could tell us that the tracker must be limited in order to comply with x, y, and z etc. Because reactions to tracking range from “Niantic is incompetent” to “They don’t want us to find anything.” I mean, I don’t think anyone could fault Niantic for acting with well-considered legal reasons. But, excuses and theories we make are just guesses. Let’s hear some actual reasons.Spoofers/BottersA significant issue for many people is cheating. Now Niantic is known to ban periodically in waves, however for the most part no one knows when the waves occur. Early in the game I remember there were public announcements about bans, but since then the community has had to figure it out from alternative sources (aka cheating forums), and/or observing the removal of obvious cheating accounts from gyms. While I think it would be good if they actually did more to ban cheaters, at a minimum telling the community when bans have occurred might at least give people reassurance that they do care about the integrity of the game.RestrictionsAnother topic that has stirred controversy: the restriction on playing while traveling. Many people were upset when you could no longer spin stops, catch or even see Pokemon while traveling at certain speeds. While the community can make reasonable inferences as to why this may be, what would really assuage the player base is clear policy statements made by Niantic. They could simply state that they are concerned about the health and safety of the players, and the people who might be affected by those players. Tweeting out the reason for their decision-making would probably have reduced some of the frustration that followed those restrictions.UpdatesI don’t think they can, nor should they, attempt to give the community hard dates for the release of any update. But something that I think is missing is a sense of direction for the game; no one has a sense of what, when, and how things will be released. This, to me, is important. Because it informs how we view and play the game. If we were told that Professor Willow might discover some new species early in the summer, people would stop asking when Gen II is coming. The uncertainty with the future of the game is frustrating for many, and having an idea of what to expect would assuage those feelings. I don’t watch much Mystic7, but he makes the point well in this video. Speculation gets taken to extremes in this community. Because we go so long without hearing anything, people will jump on the tiniest byte of information. I think Niantic should take steps to dampen wild speculation, and instead build up realistic hype. I mean, I see threads for “lowering expectations” and “telling us to lower expectations isn’t helpful” in the same day (lol). This tension and division is a little ridiculous, because it could be alleviated by giving us enough information to let us have an idea of what’s to come, but not so much as to spoil the surprise. Basically, Niantic, you should try to find a balance with how you interact with the community. You don’t need to tell us everything, but we would like to hear from you a little more often.Various Game MechanicsThis might just be a personal quibble, but I’d like to know the reason for many of the game mechanics. For example, could they tell us why the speed stat is just a modifier in the base stat formulas, instead of a separate modifier on attack animation? I’d also like to know the reasoning for why certain moves are in certain movepools, and for that matter why are certain moves “Fast” and others “Charge?” Iron Tail is one of the new fast moves we discovered in the lasted datamine. Well, in the main games Iron Tail is on the heavy hitting side, with 100 base power. There has been a tendency for some moves with high base power to be charge moves, but of course very weak moves like ancient power, twister, and bulldoze were implemented as charge moves. I’d also like to know how cooldown duration was determined, is there a reason why some have short while others have long animations? Someone should get an interview with them and ask them some questions on game design. Or a community manager could make some AMAA threads once in a while.edit: I made some minor text fixes via /r/pokemongo http://ift.tt/2kxCBVl