The ‘Task Force’ of Pokémon GO, an internal group of developer Niantic that hopes to respond to player feedback, has issued a statement to players to offer them updates on their progress.
As you may recall, Pokémon GO players joined last month after being frustrated and upset by Niantic’s decision to reclaim the changes initially added to help players stay safe during the pandemic. In open letters to the company, fans expected Niantic to see that the changes, including an increased radius of interaction by PokéStops, had advantages that go beyond the pandemic, as they wanted to see them stay permanently in the game.
The working group was soon convened to address these concerns and it was recently announced that the increase in radius would now remain intact. This, along with other promises related to seasonal bonuses and communication, has been detailed in today’s statement. Here it is complete, written by executive producer Steve Wang:
“First of all, I want to thank you for your patience. Your passion and concerns have not been lost to us in recent weeks and our internal working group has spent a lot of time discussing the changes we made to the distances of PokéStop and Gym interaction We now want to give you an update as promised.
What we have heard from the community
PokéStops and gyms are one of the ways to try to push coaches out and discover new places, walk a mile or two more and meet others. It has been inspiring to see so many players from around the world as a result of this design. To me, it means that Pokémon GO is important to a lot of people, and it means that the coaches expressed their concerns because they care about the game.We’ve been listening to player feedback and have also set up four roundtables where I spoke with over 30 community leaders from around the world (thank you all for your participation!). The two main songs we listened to were:
– The 80-meter interaction radius for PokéStops and gyms has been an incredibly positive quality of life improvement over the past year and a half.
– Niantic has a lot of space to grow when it comes to communicating with our players.
PokéStop and Gym interaction distance
We understand that increasing the interaction distance by 80 meters became a welcome advantage for many players, which is clear from the comments we saw from the community. So we want to keep it: as announced last week, 80 meters (not 40 meters) will be the base interaction radius of PokéStops and gyms worldwide from now on.
We still believe in the importance of discovering interesting places and things in the real world and we don’t want to lose sight of it. The team and I are looking forward to developing new ways to motivate and reward coaches for exploring and exercising in the real world. As a result of the working group, we have new ideas to explore and look forward to sharing more in the coming months.
Seasonal world bonuses
We recently had a tough learning experience when we had to quickly adjust the game settings for New Zealand in response to its lock. This experience taught us that we will not be able to effectively adjust each country’s experience in real time. From the season of the misdeeds, all bonuses will be established worldwide and will be directly linked to the seasons of Pokémon GO.
Communication
We should communicate and interact more with trainers. I hope that, with your patience and understanding, we can do better here. There are many ways to improve, but to get started, we make the following commitments:
– Starting in October, we will start publishing a developer diary every two months to share the latest priorities, events and features of the game.
– We will establish regular conversations with community leaders to continue the dialogue we started this month.
– We will continue our work of updating the page Known issues and, in these efforts, we will prioritize the visibility of the status of existing errors for coaches.
We love the passion of Pokémon GO Trainers for this game and we want you to know what we are passionate about the game and the community. The lack of communication regarding the PokéStop and Gym interaction radius was not well managed by us, and it was a great learning experience on how to better interact with our players going forward. Our top priority is and has always been to get people out into the real world and create human connections with each other. Thank you for being part of this journey with us, you will hear us again soon. “