"A good time for a GBL Sandbox?"

#PokemonGO: When GBL first started there were quite a number of comments from people who wanted a non-competitive sandbox-type mode where the game would matchmake you but you play for fun and the battles wouldn’t count for ranking. This was for a variety of reasons – people wanted to try out new teams or simply because some people enjoyed PvP and wanted to play more than their limit.There may have been good reasons to not do so, such as straining servers that were already showing lag or taking away focus on the competitive PvP environment Niantic wanted to foster. (Indeed somewhere in my comment history I wasn’t in support of a sandbox for those reasons) But now that regular GBL has been shut down, if fixing the exploits needs to take a while, it seems like it would be a good time to open up GBL to a free play sandbox mode that doesn’t count for your rankings. That way those who love PvP would still get to play, and if you lose to someone who’s using the exploit, well, it doesn’t affect anything. It could even include the full access to all leagues so people could test out their teams for Premier Cup and Master League or get used to their Sorcerus Cup teams. From Niantic’s point of view, it keeps people in the habit of doing GBL battles and it’s always good from a business point of view not to break customers’ habit of using your product.Of course if there are technical issues in doing so – like that GBL servers have to be totally shut down to do the exploit testing – that’s understandable. But otherwise now seems like a good time to test out whether the sandbox idea would work. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/3cXJz0D