When Friends Are An Inconvenience

I should be talking about the Pokemon Go anniversary event where you can get SHINY ALOLAN EXEGGCUTOR (one of my favourite Pokemon) but frankly, I’m kinda annoyed. Not just because there’s no shiny Exeggcute, but because of the friend system. The first task of the new ‘Catch Up’ special research is to make a new friend and all it does is bring up the flaws in the friendship system. The friend system in Pokemon Go makes no sense.

The first issue is that you can never really interact with these people, outside of PvP battles, battling Pokemon in Gyms and in raids. Sure, you can give them gifts and stuff, but there’s zero way of communicating with each other or even knowing that your friends are online and playing. Sure, it’s supposed to be a kid-friendly game, but zero communication means that simple things, like organizing raids, meeting up to do lucky trades and coordinating lucky eggs for friendship level ups are impossible, outside of using literally any third party app.

But most of the time though, you’re unaware that these friends ever exist. Unless you are Best Friends with someone (something that requires over 3 months of commitment to sending gifts and playing together), there’s… not much point. You do get more premiere balls for raids if you are friends with more people but you get way more for having best friends. The only other noticeable thing is that trades are discounted the higher your friendship level is, and you can only do PvP battles with Ultra Friends or higher.

The irritating thing though is just how SLOOOOOOOWWWWWW the friendship process is. It’s one gift to get to Good Friends. It’s 7 days of interactions (normally more gifts) to get to Great Friends. It’s 30 days for Ultra Friends and 60 days for Best Friends. Which would be somewhat reasonable if you didn’t have limitations on how many friends you can send gifts to per day AND can only hold 10 gifts in your inventory at a time.

Heck, I put up my trainer code on my local Pokemon Go Discord server to help people get the first stage of the new quest, I got 12 friend requests and could only send gifts to 10 of them.

But the sending and opening of gifts TAKES SO LONG. The animations take forever and the most you can do to skip them is to tap as fast as you can and miss what you get from the gifts! It’s a slow tedious process just opening and sending gifts and I can’t stand it!

Sure, it’s fine if you have like 10, maybe 20 friends, but I have over 50 friends (including aabicus, who was my first Best Friend) and it’s just… ugh. It takes so long. There’s no way to speed it up, I just have to sit through long animations, whether I am sending or opening gifts.

We’ve ended up with a very tedious system that can’t be sped up in any way what so ever.

So I apologise to all of you who send me gifts, all of you who don’t get gifts from me. Between the fact that my backpack is always full and I only ever have 10 gifts at any one time and the fact that everything is SO DAMN SLOW, it’ll be a long time before any of us become Ultra or Best Friends.

Sorry about that.