Niantic have improved the game
I used to have a rep here for posting how boring the game is and how i don't play. However IMO Niantic have improved it in recent times, so i've been playing again.
Trading has been done surprisingly well, for Niantics standards. I do though wish there was a way to communicate with your Pokemon friends, not all of them i have on facebook. Perhaps Niantic will add this in future.
Community days are fun, and the best part of the game imo. I don't particularly enjoy raids, which are repetitive and de-value legendary pokemon. Community days are more my thing, it's like i actually have to get my fishing rod out and fish. Which is more satisfying than buying big fish from Wal-mart, aka raids. So the community days are a very good addition. I do though enjoy the new community day raid days, which is like a treasure hunt.
The hope of catching wild shinies everytime you play is nice, though i don't seem to catch any myself. Infact outside of community days i've only ever caught one wild shiny, a single Swablu. It's the hope that kills you, as they say.
I'm looking forward to gen 4, which has lots of good pokemon. Hopefully they will arrive once the regis are out the way, since then all the legendary pokemon up to gen 3 will have been released.
So i'm happy Niantic have improved the game enough for me to have a moderate interest in playing once again.
Answers
The game is vastly superior now than how it was even a year back.
It has never been more fun IMO, and the systems implemented since the infamous gym rework have actually been very well though-out and planned, bar a new bug or two every time an update comes along.
Research tasks are the BOMB, and trading re-rolls are actually quite smart if you know how to play your cards right.
Shinies are plentiful now and by the time you realize it's actually quite impossible to get them all by now, it becomes truly exciting to find one casually, especially on species not native to your biome.
Weather boosts kicked the game into a dangerous leveling era but it was necessary when the stat conversion of legendaries from the main series into GO powercreeped the hell out of Dragon, Water, Electric and Ground types.
Community days are a brilliant concept because they schedule a day where whole local communities can gather together and enjoy it in a more orderly fashion by appealing to people's FOMO.
Also, it gives some subpar species to reach performance levels that are close enough to their legendary counterparts.
This is how the game should have been since launch. This is the bare minimum a game like this should have had in order to keep a surmountable number of players still around and I feel PoGO could potentially still be the huge mobile behemoth it was when it was first released.
Anything extra they could add would just be adding icing on the cake and it's never been more fun, despite the current legendaries bogging people's raid enthusiasm down (they should have been released simultaneously as tier 4 raid bosses with Regigigas as the main tier 5 boss with the release of gen 4, that would have been swell).
I do wish they found a way already to integrate abilities (or that they had thought about it from the start) since that would make all battles a thousand times more interesting and gym meta so more varied than it is right now. I guess it's a little bit too late to retroactively do that at this point, but who knows. Here's to wishful thinking.
But yeah, gen 4 is around the corner an just the opportunity of looking for the new champs is gonna revitalize the spirit of the few of us still hanging around.
The game has got a lot better for those that it was already best for. It has improved for those that had the worst experiences in the early stages...but in rural areas, or areas outside the big cities they have not had their biggest issues addressed yet.
A system where we could submit stops/gyms would be nice, so areas that are not well represented may enjoy all these nice additions as much as the more built up cities do.
Niantic have done well to add much wanted content, but there are some fundamental issues that have been highlighted since the game began that still could be improved.
No, the features had improved but the fact that EVERYTHING and ANYTHING can be outclassed in 3 hours, when a pokemon flees there is NOTHING you can do about it, The fact that Gen 3 is the most unconceivably horrible attempt in balancing a battle system in ANY possible smartphone game (Can sometone tell me why is Salamence and Metagross made blatantly WORSE than ANY pokemon with similar stats, Latias is worse than Dragonite, and Swampert/Milotic is outright MEDIOCRE? All of these are FACTS and NO Pokemon game i know but this one works like that, remember. Do not forget Suicune either.) and the fact is that scanners are dead fish and we get 3 STRAIGHT MONTHS of TRASH CAN RAIDS?
I forgot one thing, Trading is a CASINO fit for a Las Vegas attraction. The IV reshuffle system basically means that your pokemon NEED to get lucky to have any form of value in them. It's a one way trip because you CANNOT trade back the pokemon for a refund and once it fails to get lucky and gets low ivs your pokemon is DEAD meat. There is NO way to redeem the pokemon and your pokemon is impotent and will forever be impotent, and you wasted stardust for absolutely nothing other than the feeling of DREAD.
I'm suprised that a person like you will have the will to play now.
Oh hey, it's the "trading is literally rape" guy.
The 3 hour exclusive raid only special legendary thing sucks, there's no denying that. HOPEFULLY Niantic will have learned something from all the bitching done about that but odds are it still printed enough money for them to tell us to go fuck ourselves. Gen 3 balancing has less to do with Niantic and more to do with the base stats from the main series. Many of those Pokemon (Swampert, Milotic) have averaged stats that get the shaft from the conversion formula. Metagross needs better moves and it will be a beast, Salamence currently is a beast, I don't know where the idea that it sucks comes from. Latias suffers from being a defensive legendary, where it would be better suited for gyms except it can't be placed in them.
Scanners were never an official part of the game. If you're mad about that yell at the people who cracked the api before about not being fast enough for you, Niantic themselves have nothing to do with scanners.
They have their reasons for the IV reshuffle. Love it or hate it, it serves its purpose. All this does is place a higher trade value to high cp/low IV Pokemon and keeps someone from transferring all their perfects to one account then selling it. The most reliable method of getting battle-ready Pokemon is from raids and egg hatches, the way it's been since before trading.
I'm surprised a person like you still plays, you seem to have nothing but contempt for the game. I'm not saying Niantic hasn't made questionable at best decisions along the way but you can't honestly say the game isn't in a better place now than when it launched 2 years ago.
This is nothing but a polished turd situation. Trading and battling and catching are extremely limited compared to the main series. There's no reason to play it, and no I don't play it for anyone asking. Personally I just find it humorous to read all of the ridiculous arguments defending it and praising it.
