An Open Letter to Niantic, Why Not Help Us More?


Dear Niantic,

Why don't you help the trainers in the game? No, I know, you do help us when you release community days, ex-raid passes, special double bonus stardust or XP or hatching egg hatcing extravaganzas, and the new quest features, to name a few.

So thank you for that!

But all your special events end up costing the trainer money as we get revved up in participating in these events. I know, I know, it's what this is about really... you've fine tuned the balance of what squeezes the bucks out of trainers versus keeping us engaged! I mean, can you imagine how many Rats, Pigeons and what not I had to catch before someone told me where a Ditto was actually hiding? I was getting very very bored and on the verge of not caring... considering that my track record of seeing Dittos is about 2 a year!

Your latest move has been to take out all the third-party trackers (for now) so now we're in the dark about various events unless we hit up heavy usage on Discord or what not among other trainers to learn about things.

Here's the curiosity we have in the trainers playing field: Why don't you help us play? In the beginning the demographic included kids, parents and adults. Now-a-days though, I have not seen any kids playing the game. Every single raid or nest or what have you seems fully populated by adults. You know... the car driving kind!

-

-Why don't you generate bigger and better gym maps so we know that there might be something just outside our present range of "view" in the game? Do you realize how many trainers hop in cars and hit up raids that weren't on their radar?  In the end, we spend more money on raid passes and potentially more healing potions after getting roughed up in the raids.

-Why not show us bigger and better maps to chase down Pokemon with? Honestly, the adults of the game eat that up, chase their Pokemon down, and in the end spend more money on storage space or inventory space.

-Why not give us a practice mode where we can work on different kinds of Pokemon ball throws? I can't really catch a Latios to save my life. I'm getting so frustrated that I've stopped going out of my way to hit up the raids. But if I could practice what I needed, I might possibly get more motivated to hit up raids or even hop in those car caravans to raids.

-Why not give us a mechanism to remove defending monsters from gyms? Right now we're tossing junk in some gyms because the last time I put my best Mon forward in what I know know is a remote gym, well, it sat there for three weeks. And that didn't help me in any way shape or form. Heck, at this point, I could slap a Weedle in there and be done with the place for a while!

-Why not give us ways to transfer or change the candies of some Pokemon that we will never, ever use? Luvdiscs are the first thing that comes to mind. OMG, what the bloody heck is that about! And I have a ton of Swablu (cotton candy winged) candies, and other mons that just collect. I've stopped hitting those mons up because I don't see the point of having several hundred candy of something that I won't use them on. Let us trade those in for candy we want to use, even if it comes at a fee, like in special Incubators or something where we get what we want and you get what you want... a little bit more of our money?

-

I know I have a lot of questions, and I'm sure, from the reputation of your company, that I'm just noise in the wind that you will probably never see, but I had to put this out there. But there are a lot of people out here that wonder these and other questions, wondering why you aren't taking advantage of buffing up your income stream? Are you hitting a limit on computing power, storage, bandwidth? Meh, those are just curiosities the player trainers continue to wonder.

For the time being, thanks for this fun game though. It's definitely got a good core of people engaged.
-

Comments