"Niantic Employees were at the Amstelveen Mall on Saturday talking to trainers, here are some answers to common questions."

#PokemonGO: Intro Even though the events were 'cancelled' there were big banners up, Pikachu hats and two Niantic employees from SF office there going round talking to trainers. They were asking us to do a small questionnaire in exchange for some free team stickers. I'd just like to say at this point they were really friendly and easy to talk to and everyone really appreciated them being there to anwser our concerns and questions. We were first approached by them for a general chat for about 20mins or so and then we went back to ask them more questions. The person we spoke to was in the 'Operations' department and had a deep understanding of the 'big picture' of the game.Disclaimer: The answers to the questions are not quotes, It all from memory a few days after the event so don't take the answers as official word from Niantic. Q&AWhy are the raids finishing so early?This was a leftover bug from the Chicago event as eggs are still meant to be part of raids but they didn't want to risk updating the code while all these big events are currently going on. They want to extend the raid times. When pushed on what time they will be extended too, we mentioned midnight but they said that was too late. Will we be able to spin Gyms with our Go+?This is something they are working on but it isn't as easy as spinning a normal stop due to bonus for badges, team bonus and raid passes. So this still needs more time in QA. Will Pokemon Go players be able to add stops like Ingress players?(This was quite a big picture anwser) The data they have from all the portals/stops are what set Niantic apart from other companies so its in Niantic's best interest to make sure there are a good supply of pokestops around the whole world for everyone to access. This is on their roadmap but we were also then reminded that they are still '6 months behind' their original schedule so sounds like it isn't coming anytime soon. At this point we also got a demo of Ingress portal submissions and how it all worked. (I really appreciated the fact they took so much time to explain this, it showed how important it was to them.) How do raid spawns work, are they random?(This was explained so eloquently and I'm going to butcher it, sorry!) Raids spawns are spilt into blocks across the world and it's set to spawn X amount of raids across a certain area in X amount of time. Will there be a in-game chat?(This was the most vague anwser of them all so wasn't sure what the take away was here) They were being very vague but the main point they were getting across was - to think about if it would be in Niantic/Pokemon Company best interest to have one. We were also reminded again they are 6 months behind. I hope this helps clear some things up for everyone, and kinda wish Niantic would just do a Q&A with one of the Youtubers or a AMA here etc as they seemed very happy to anwser questions.We asked lots of other questions and reported a few bugs but it's hard to remember them all. If this post takes off and you want 'proof' I have some but I'd only feel comfortable sending it to the Mods as I don't want to give out personal info of myself/the Niantic employees. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2vXSiyj