"The game feels incoherent. Features are added to the game with no consideration to what exists. Those existing features are hardly ever revised."

#PokemonGO: Niantic is almost exclusively adding features. Tacking them on. With no consideration to what already exists, and no desire to revise what exists with their new ideas.Just a few examples of the current state of the game and how they are not uniform or integrated with each other.1. Battles.If you want to battle with a new/good/great friend, you have to scan their QR code. Why can't we just tap on the battle icon to check if we're within 100m of each other like trades do? And if we're ultra friends, just skip that distance check?To do battles with the team leaders, you need to go to the Nearby menu. Which never really fit. But now that we have actual NPCs in the overworld, why are Rockets (and potentially other NPCs to come in the future) not available on the Nearby under "Battle"?2. StreaksStreaks have been around for a while, but other than doing that first action of the day, you can't see your progress. Now that datamining discovered rocket battles as a streak, we really could use a page somewhere on our profile talking about our streaks.3. Hatching EggsThe uncontrollable animation has been long complained about. It could be made skippable, at least when it's not going to give us a new dex entry. But we can take a note from how quests are handled -- there are quests specifically for hatching eggs which often times let you know you hatched an egg even before the hatch animation plays. Why not just make that a standard separate feature - give a notification whenever an egg hatches regardless of what quests you are currently working on?We can even revise this feature to address other complaints. If Niantic insists on keeping the animation, just put the egg in our Pokemon storage, and when we tap on it or swipe into viewing its status screen, it plays the animation. In this way, we have control over when the animation plays. (Then the new dex entry animation can play as needed; which is why we disguise it in the egg still so you get the surprise.)Alternatively, keep the egg in the incubator. Then we need to tap the egg in our egg storage to play the hatch animation and officially move it to our pokemon storage. This carries the benefit of letting us choose when to make an empty egg slot -- huge benefit when it comes to AS awards as you can save your hatched egg until Sunday night when you're done playing. (As the incubator remains tied to the egg, a free player can't line up multiple egg hatches off of just the ∞ incubator.)I'm sure plenty of people can think of other ways that this game can become more coherent and different features lend support to each other and work in tandem. I hope Niantic has something in the works for a strong UI and feature overhaul to make the game feel polished, rather than clunky as it is now. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2JyanJ6