"End the Suffering; It's time for an actual PR person!"

#PokemonGO: While acknowledging the #firstworldproblems associated with using "Suffering" in the title, I'd like to open with two quotes."The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." - H.P. Lovecraft"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." Yoda.Communication has been the largest failing of Niantic since the launch of the game. Long term Ingress players will tell you that Niantic wasn't really good with it beforehand.I wrote a post on SilphRoad about PoGoFest detailing the many communication failures - and how I felt it was these failures that really lead to the disaster that was PoGoFest at Grant Park.We were told that Niantic was going to learn from what happened at Grant Park - and, as I've stated before, I never doubted Niantic's ability to eventually rise above the technological hurdles of both the game as a whole and of physical, real-world events. And we've seen that! The expanded Safari Zones in Europe sounded like they went amazingly well. I'd kiss Donald Trump for a time machine and money to have been able to get to Pikachu Outbreak in Yokohama. These events weren't without technical issues, but, overall, they were successful. Huge props to Niantic there.With that said, I've seen no evidence that the communication issue has been addressed. Sure, we're getting some acknowledgement of bugs in the game that are activly costing users money - only after we come together as players to expose these glitches. And we get vague statements like "We're looking into an issue and might have a fix soon."Even with the European Safari events. They were postponed, little details were released, and now, after some amazing days of Pokehunting in select areas, folks have no idea if the events afterwards are even still going on or what they'll consist of.We still don't even know what's going on with Raid Eggs and timers.Today's press release on Mewtwo is the culmination of everything Niantic does wrong with communication. Vague, whispy statements that merely leave users guessing at what is going on and angry at the "worst possible outcome" - because we don't know what it means. Niantic could have released a tweet that said "Mewtwo" and I would have known about as much about my chances of catching Mewtwo than I do with that wordy announcement they made.If someone is already in charge of Public Relations and Communication, I am absolutely sorry to call you to the carpet like this - but you are failing the players of this game.Please, Niantic, I'm super-cereal. You need to go drop a pretty dime or three on someone well experienced with PR. Keep 'em around for a year and get them to work with and train some of your in-house team up. Keep 'em for the next 20 years. Get some, some how. It needs to happen. This needs to be the priority going forward. Today's announcement is just the icing on the cake that says you can't do this alone.Education is the enemy of fear. via /r/pokemongo http://ift.tt/2vyr4xw