An Updated Ramble about the GO Battle League

One of the more-viewed posts on the Daily SPUF is an article about the GO Battle League. The article was released when the GO Battle League first came out. However, the new battling feature was… pretty broken. There were lots of issues and the experience was all-round pretty bad. But that article is pretty damn old now, and things have changed with the GBL. Mostly positive changes.

More leagues and options

A lot more Pokemon are viable for each league now. Although not all Community Days have been amazing for the GBL, we do have a lot more options. Niantic also takes a bit of time at the beginning of each new season to help balance various Pokemon. There are still a lot of meta picks, but the number of viable Pokemon really has increased massively.

This is made better by having leagues with banned Pokemon. Recently, we have had leagues where the top most-used Pokemon aren’t available, and it is always interesting to see how players adapt.

One of the bigger changes was adding more Leagues to fight in. Originally, we were stuck with whatever league came first, and it would just rotate around. Now though, we get more options. There are options for players for all levels, including a ‘classic’ league that doesn’t allow Pokemon above level 40. But we also get some great event leagues as well. There have been gimmick-y leagues for baby Pokemon, Kanto-only Pokemon and GO Battle Leagues based on whatever rest-of-the-game events are happening too.

Rewards and rankings have been improved too. Ranks now go past 10, and it’s much easier to get to a decent ranks for rewards. The Pokemon rewards are also better now, with a requirement of 3 out of 5 wins instead of 4 out of 5.

It’s less buggy overall

A lot of the early bugs now are gone. It’s less common to have lag that will screw up your matches. Issues like having extra shields and being unable to attack are far less frequent. And whenever there is a big issue, Niantic does take down the GBL to fix said issues. A lot of work has been put into the GBL and it shows. Probably because it does make Niantic money.

By far the best fix though was removing the walking requirement. The whole walk-to-play was really broken and glitchy at first. However, now you can just play PvP as you please, the experience is better.

There are still issues

Unfortunately, there is still more that can be done. Bugs and lag do occasionally appear, and they can easily ruin a match. During GBL-related events, the game can still get slow, and Weak Connection popups are occasionally still a problem. If you aren’t playing on a strong internet connection, you will have issues. And, of course, new bugs can creep in. But at least the bugs aren’t constant, the way GBL originally was.

The GBL has come a long, long way since it was released. Although my personal interest as waned significantly for PvP, I will happy admit that it is a massive step up from how it used to be. Of course, Pokemon GO’s battling is nothing like the main series games. But at least it’s much more tolerable now.