There’s Something Wrong With Niantic Lately

Playing Pokemon GO has been a bit weird lately. There have been lots of little issues and problems, but nothing really going towards fixing them. We’ve had weird glitches and bugs and a lot of late, weird or wrong information. And there have been updates that no one has liked in any way. It seems like there is something wrong with Niantic as of late.

As of writing, the most recent oddity is a bonus on the current Sustainability event. We have a Sustainability event every year, generally focused on green things, and with common Pokemon related to the environment spawning. In order to promote the event, Niantic released an infographic detailing what would actually be in the event. One of the bonuses was a halved distance when it comes to walking Pokemon and getting candy. This would mean that, instead of walking 20km for a Legendary Pokemon, it would be reduced to 10km. However, despite this bonus being on the infographic, Niantic Support said that the bonus was unavailable for this event. This was only discovered when players in New Zealand realized, when the event started in their time zone, that the bonus wasn’t active.

Now, we don’t know the reason why the bonus was cancelled, but it seems weird that they didn’t just turn the bonus on anyway.

But that’s not all that’s being weird. Adventure Sync, which records movement and stuff when the Pokemon GO game isn’t open, has also been basically broken. But it’s been broken for a while, and it’s still not fixed. People have reported the bug, and there are posts on r/thesilphroad about the bug, but nothing has been done. Other bugs are also popping up and not being quickly fixed, like a research task randomly resetting progress.

It’s not all been bugs though. Some of Niantic’s decisions have been pretty insane. Over the last two months, they have been constantly switching boxes in the shop, a lot of them being either stupidly expensive, having useless stuff in them, or only being slightly cheaper than buying the items on their own. These have been changing so fast that I’ve not bothered buying them. Events haven’t been much better, it’s just been constant mini-ish events with only a handful of spawns, even less Pokemon than older events. They’ve even seemingly forgotten about various events, announcing them rather late in the season. At the time of writing, we’re getting a Stunfisk event this weekend, but it was only announced three days in advance.

And on top of it all, they are still sticking to the Remote Raid Pass nerfs. Absolutely no one seems to like these nerfs, but Niantic won’t change their minds on this. I’ve already noticed a drop in people doing remote raids, even when I’ve been playing local. It used to be that we’d get 1-3 people from random invites into raids, but now we see almost no one. I haven’t bought any Remote Raid Passes at all, since they’ve doubled in price. And the fact that they’re limited to five remote raids a day is fucking insane.

It does feel like something is wrong with Niantic. Maybe these things are all just accidental? Or is there malice involved? Clearly, something is going on, but I doubt we’ll never know why. All we can do is speculate…