"Why Sustainability Week Failed: Niantic and Lack of Clarity"

#PokemonGO: *This was originally posted over on r/TheSilphRoad but was removed by the moderators.Okay, “Failed” might be a bit premature, since the Sustainability Week Event hasn’t concluded as of yet, but given how things are going, at least in terms of reaching and unlocking the different Tier Rewards, I think it’s safe to say that Sustainability Week has been less than successful.Aside from the fact that we’re still in the middle of a pandemic and many places are still in lockdown or have restrictions on outside / social activities, I believe the biggest reason why the event failed is due to Niantic’s lack of clarity on not only what players need to do for the event, but also how they would even go about finding the information.On the surface, you’d think it would be pretty straightforward. You launch Pokémon GO, maybe the notification pops up in-game or maybe you go looking for it in ‘News’. Either way, you probably dismiss it, because the Today View gives you a brief rundown of what’s in the Event. In any case, you might think that’s it, and there’s nothing more to it. Just complete the Research and you’re done. But if you want more info, like exactly what kinds of Pokémon will be appearing, you’ll have to go to the News article, so you go there, to the “In Partnership with the Niantic Sustainability Campaign,” etc. post, which tells you that Binacle is the featured Pokémon, and that you can unlock exclusive rewards by completing certain sustainability-related goals. Sounds cool. Play Pokémon GO, help out the environment. It’s a win-win.So what do you need to do? What are the sustainability-related goals? The post doesn’t tell you, instead directing you to the “Pokémon GO Live blog”, so you tap on the link they provide, which takes you to the blog post. This gives you more clear Event details (such as its duration, more specifics on what Pokémon will be appearing – as well as the first mention that Shiny Trubbish will be available) and what the different Tier Unlock criteria and rewards are for the Niantic Sustainability Campaign: stuff like more Five-Star Raids, free Remote Raid Passes, and 2x Catch XP. Pretty nice stuff.Okay, but how do you unlock them? Well, for details on that, you have to go to the link they’ve provided that takes you to the “Niantic Labs” blog, so you tap on that to get taken to a post which explains what the Niantic Sustainability Campaign is for those that might be unfamiliar with it, while not really explaining the specifics on what players need to do. Instead, it implores you to check out their website, which they’ve linked, so you tap on that link, and that link finally takes you to the page on Niantic’s Sustainability Campaign that actually gives you instructions on what you need to do to participate and help unlock the different Tier Rewards.And now you actually have to do it to get the rewards.This is absolutely insane. You haven’t even started doing anything yet, and you’ve had to jump through multiple blog posts and websites to get any sort of information on the extra stuff to do with the Sustainability Week Event. You might get to this point and decide that, because the event requires you to use Social Media, that you’d rather not participate in the event. That’s fine. It’s a personal thing, and Niantic can very easily scale back the amount of participation required for the rewards, or artificially inflate the numbers to reach whatever goal they want, so the amount of players participating really doesn’t matter at the end of the day.The biggest issue for me is how much effort you have to go to, to get the information you want. Niantic sequestered away the most important information, putting up multiple hoops that players have to jump through to even know what they have to do. It’s like you’re trying to put together a piece of furniture, but the instructions are hidden in all of these different places, so you have to go and track down all of the instructions yourself before you can start putting it together. It’s just totally perplexing. I cannot understand how Niantic could look at this and think it’s straightforward. You would have already lost people with having to get them to check the ‘News’ tab, and you lose several more people along the way with how needlessly convoluted a simple explanation needs to be. Then you lose a whole chunk more of players because they don’t want to be posting things to Social Media.Niantic needs to be clearer with future events, especially ones with more real-world or external (Social Media) interaction. It doesn’t need to be as difficult as this. It shouldn’t be as difficult as this. I’m having a hard time understanding the thought process behind this, and it’s not a surprise at all that the Sustainability Week failed.TL;DR: Sustainability Week Event is confusing. Just put all the relevant info in the News tab or something, my goodness! via /r/pokemongo https://ift.tt/3tPdqBA