A Wish for Long Distance Communication in Pokemon GO
In Pokemon GO, you need some form of communication. A massive part of Pokemon GO requires you to make friends and join each other in raids. Unless you are willing to skip doing Legendary and Mega raids, playing completely solo ends up being tiring rather than fun. The same applies for trading, to get Pokemon you want.
However, Pokemon GO is actually quite strict with trades and raids. You can only trade when close to each other, and you can only send Remote Raid invites to 5 people. And with GPS not being constantly accurate, can make matters worse. At the same time, unless you are face to face, trading and raiding at a distance are a pain in the butt.
So how do we fix this, all the while keeping in Nintendo’s no-talking-to-each-other-it’s-a-kid’s-game rules intact?
Pokemon Home
Funnily enough, there is a place where you can trade very easily. The app Pokemon Home allows you to trade all sorts of Pokemon. However, there’s no actual communication. All you have are some premade sentences to choose from. That being said, the premade options do cover the basics of Pokemon trading. At the very least, you can use the GTS system to clarify what you are looking for. But you’ll be waiting a while if you want anything good. It’s also heavily reliant on, well, hoping someone sees your request. Which might take a while.
Inviting for raids sucks
Remote Raid Passes have been a thing for a while now. These new raid passes allow players to raids at a distance, rather than having to essentially hug a gym with a raid on it. Remote Raid Passes also allow you to invite people who aren’t present at all. But you can only invite 5 people at a time, and the countdown before the raid can cause some people to not make it in. Somewhat ironically, there is too much waiting time on 1-star raids on your own. But 5-star raids don’t quite give you enough time to actually invite people. Doubly so if you are inviting people.
What’s more weird though is that you can’t communicate anything outside of sending a raid invite. Any communication that has to be done (e.g. making sure everyone has the right types, and making sure they are in the raid) via some sort of third party app.
Making Long Trades Special?
A while back, Pokemon GO had a special event, which upped the distance needed for trades. It went from 100m to about 40km. This allowed a nice chunk of flexibility to made trades, especially over the lockdown. However, it seems that longer distance trades are only allowed during events. And even then, they don’t offer that much distance. Arguably, if the distance was upped to world-wide for a week, people would get so much done… except they’d be unable to communicate.
However, world-wide trading is something I assume Niantic don’t want to do. But if we got longer trades with Lucky Friends, well, that’s a big incentive to open gifts and reacting with more friends. I think a good compromise is to allow unlimited difference on Lucky Trades. Anything else would be… not overpowered, but all too easy to abuse.
Another thing I’d really like though is a Wonder Trade system. The idea of getting a random Pokemon from someone random across the world is pretty damn cool. And since it’s random, I think it’d be fairer.
These options require a third party
The big problem for all of these things though is a lack of communication. There is practically no way to communicate with other players in-game. The best you can do is either meet each other in person, or find some other social media to communicate. Many Pokemon GO communities turn to Facebook or even Discord, just so they can organize among themselves. Even raids are bad for communicating. In fact, communication for raids is best left to dedicated apps, which make the whole experience much smoother.
Funnily enough though, this only really applies for Pokemon GO. Ingress, Niantics other mobile game, has communication in multiple forms, showing latest activities but also conversations. Most likely, we won’t ever get chat in Pokemon GO, because otherwise we’d have something similar by now…