"Our first concrete update on trading! (From an overlooked interview with Niantic yesterday!)"

#PokemonGO: Travelers,We all know trading was put on the backburner when Pokemon GO exploded in popularity and spoofing/botting with it. Since that point, there have been rumors that trading was still a long ways out.Yesterday, Polygon interviewed Niantic's senior product manager over Pokemon GO (Tatsuo Nomura) at Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and got a little bit of concrete intel:“[Trading] won’t be through the internet,” he said of the mechanic, which remains in development and heavily under wraps. “You shouldn’t be able to exchange your Pokémon with someone who is 100 miles away from you. ... The person needs to be in your proximity.”...“We don’t want to just have that be an online game that you can just exchange virtually.”Well, that confirms it, travelers. Trading is currently intended not to be a worldwide exchange, wondertrade, or internet hookup, but is instead proximity based.Everyone's next thought is, of course, "well won't spoofers just destroy it?"Nomura recognizes just how much weight the feature holds for hardcore players.“We’re still trying to come up with an answer [to trading] that makes sense so it doesn’t kill the game,” he said. “If we fail this, we can easily kill the game.”It's great to see Niantic articulate how aware they are of the devastating potential of a flawed trading economy. We wish them the best in creating a solution that makes everyone happy.We're also ... a little bit HYPED that proximity-based trading may be what we dreamed up over a year ago at the birth of the Silph Road! This could mean that global trade routes may indeed help us all complete our dex. Time will tell!Polygon goes on to speculate that trading may come out in 2017, but personally... I'm not willing to bet an incubator on it.Expect Niantic to implement trading sometime later this year, once the developer is confident it has the feature right. ~ source: PolygonGreat news all around, travelers. Here's to a bright future!- Executive Dronpes - via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2lWghsc