The challenge interval is narrow, good or bad?
The interval where different game features pose an actual challenge seem in general to be very narrow.
Raids - Solo raids only pose a challenge at level 3 (at 2 if you are lower level), above and below that it is either way to easy or impossible.
Same with higher level raids, they are only a challenge close to the "short-manning limit". If you are 15 people, only a major network error will make you fail.
Gym fighting - Mostly a question of how much time you bother to use (depending of how many fully motivated defenders there are). In some rare cases it may be a challenge, when attackers are met by a matching number of berrying defenders. But it is a narrow gap, 3 or more accounts feeding a gym, it is impossible to take it down without having the network error on your side.
Location - I have a friend living in a small town with one single pokestop, no gym. He is only able to play once a month or so when he drives to the nearest big town, 300 km away. Major cities have pokestops, gym and spawns in abundance, no need to spend time to get to gyms or major spawn areas there.
It continues with catching, special research etc.
Niantic seem to ignore balancing the challenge of older features better, and instead throw new, short lived, challenges at us.
Is this good or bad, what is the opinion?
Answers
This is it.
The whole buddy thing should either be the norm for candy grinding speed (so candy rewards from raid could be smaller) or boosted to match at least little bit the raid effort. 20km for a Mewtwo vs 5 during its raid month was just ridiculous. But current gap makes you never want to buddy anything that's in raids, really. Looks more like a "pet" system, and a bad one at that as you can't really interact much with your buddy like in the console games.
My challenge now as a 2 account users is trio legendaries with 1 more that want to do it whoever he/she is.
Manage to do Creselia trio with a level 32 trainer. But he is good, already has 2 Gengar with L/SB and 4 dark Ttar at level 30-33.
Some higher level trainers probably dont have that good counter already.
At heart Pokemon Go is not a competitive game, but a relaxing one. The idea is to catch & raise a collection and then have fun watching them take out various defenders. But many players are in the habit of focusing on grinding only, then complain that the game is just grinding without purpose. Everything fun they disregard, disable, and ignore.
Hunting Pokemon in virtual reality, carefully sneaking up to them from behind? Inefficient! Switched off!
Walking to hunt in a nice area? I can catch more by slowly driving my car around the block again and again.
Finding other players for group raids? To much of a hassle! Second account! Third account!
Enjoying the graphic effects of many different attacks? But their DPS is not maximized! Let's use only one attack all the time! On only one type of Pokemon!
Placing rare Pokemon in gyms? But they last ten seconds less! Only sandsacks will do!
Figuring out lineups that work? What, I might lose a raid pass! I'll just look up the best attackers on a website and use those all the time!
Trading Pokemon with friends? But not every now and then only, when we have something interesting to trade! Let's trade the same types all the time and every day, so that we might grind candy!
I could go on, but you get my drift.
This game was created so that older fans of Pokemon get excited and casually play GO. Someone said that they made Let's Go to transition players from GO to the main series, this probably has some truth in it. But GO was made targeting the casual player who might open it once in a while and get excited he caught a Pikachu.
On the other hand, hardcore-ish players got excited with the game, cause they wanted a free multiplayer Pokemon game on their phone. There are also people who started casually and ended up wanting hardcore content.
How many casual players are left and how many hardcore? Idk, you can't really find casuals, they wouldn't even google something about Pokemon GO to end up on a site like this. But I'm sure that casuals are abandoning the game on a faster rate than hardcores, so the playerbase is shifting towards the latter.
Hardcore players want a completely different game from casual players. Unfortunately, even if we end up with a 99% hardcore community, I believe Niantic signed up to make a casual game, so I wouldn't expect it to ever be as challenging as the community wants
I see that!
But Niantic have a weird way to do it....
Promoting the three teams, as a kind of global battle.
The for a mobile game weird extremely location dependent quality of game play (Singapore vs random village anywhere).
Loads of 3h-events and Ex-raids that are time and place dependent creating stress on people not able to attend while working or going to school.
In my town the first year of raid battles triggered a fierce and sometimes rather dirty war between groups of from the different teams. A mix of real or fake accusations and a cheating arms race killed much of the fun with gym battles. The introduction of raids and the remake of the gyms actually stopped that and people actually began to work together disregarding team borders. So in one way the rework was a good one.
Unfortunately people seem rather fed up now, and there are probably no easy fix, that appeal both casual and hardcore players.
What pokemon game has ever had a challenge?
In the main series games, you could always grind to over-level your pokemon and the game became trivial. You're doing the same thing here (grinding out to have top-tier top-level counters to each boss) and at least you need other people to help still. Short-manning or using unique-6 or other similar strategies would be similar to not over-leveling in the main games.
Outside of main games, PvP may be a challenge but that's only because other players are as good as you are.
Pokemon stadium games may have offered a challenge by limiting what level Pokemon you could use and forcing you to use the same 6 throughout the entire gym leader castle?
The challenge has always been PvP. Also something that really helped was people making tiers of allowed Pokemon to make tournaments more challenging.
Niantic could give us some basic interface in PvP to help with that... but I doubt it. It's gonna be up to the community once again to make it challenging
Pure filth is what this stands upon.
You can win gym battles extremely easily, but the berry feeders that spam GRB in front of your face and easily rubber band their gyms from 1 to 6, even with 100000 people fighting it will render your efforts worthless. This is filth.
No other pokemon game i know makes all but the 10 to 15 chosen pokemon garbo and likely based on completely randomized and out of order move viability and distribution. Move distribution is partially randomized to cripple otherwise excellent pokemon and move viability is randomized and out of canon. This is filth.
No other game i know has raid battles that encourage sloth instead of hardwork. All of the raid battles seemed to be not of customised teams other than mine, but autoselect Aggrons, Lugias and Regirocks. Less than 6 people in a cresselia raid will result in an automatic timeout, and less than 4 on a worthless tier 4 that i want to use to grind tms and candies are the same. The feebleminded commonfolk, when in masses, will make even the strongest and most noble of warriors fall into their knees and follow their mercy. This is filth. The autoselect team should be deleted and replaced with a moveset type preview and a boss weakness profile, with people needing to choose their own teams.
Pokemon viability is also out of order and is 50% based on moves, other half being the attack stat and usually with a few exceptions alone. Staraptor is garbage because it was given the worst charged move in the game as its sole stab. Heatran, Giratina, Tangrowth, Honchkrow, Lucario, Melmetal etc follow the same rules, as if they knew the moves were bad, deliberately added them on a bad move randomizer, then put it onto the pokemon so only the chosen 15 will prosper until the community day possibly comes, which renders all past and future investments nil. This is filth of the worst form. Do not talk to me about the defensive pokemon that were gods in the main game like Gliscor or Cresselia, i had never saw any game like this and it is worse than the worst filth. If i were a gamepress editor, i'll just give them a 1/5, analyze their movesets, then insert nonsense into the ratings explanation and that's it.
Events take turn for the worse in these 5 months and it shows. It took me 1 year to lose all my sanity playing and reading about this game.
