One week Niantic dropped the bomb that trading and friends were coming to the game and in mid-June, they released the update with all these features in it. But of course, there's a price to pay for the new features on many levels.
For one, the update itself came with a lot of interesting issues. Or to be more exact, once I installed the update, Research quest rewards were locking up the game, putting eggs in incubators were acting out, and a few other fun issues to torment the trainer with.
Once you get through that phase of acceptance, there's the new added features for everyone to enjoy, especially Niantic, considering these new features will cost trainers more money, depending on how they accept and use these new opportunities.
So now we have Friends, Gifts and Trading.
Friends:
Making friends is easy and it actually does not cost anything. And having friends can help you catch Raid Bosses becuase you get bonus balls when you compete with your friends in raids.
Of course this adds the fun twist of having a quick coordination meeting before raids, so you can exchange friend codes before battling the Raid Boss. I'm sure with time, this will calm down as you get your inventory of friends under your belt.
Being friends is good because the better the friendship, the bigger the discount on trades. (More on that later.) And shockingly, Niantic did not put a price on being friends. They actually let friend status affect trade costs.
But being friends, you can now give each other gift boxes with goodies in them. Which seems great because you can receive special eggs in the gift boxes. But...
Gift Boxes
I've read varying observations on the limit of Gift Boxes you can hold in your inventory, you CAN NOT delete them, and they count against your space in your inventory. Plus opening gift boxes gives you stuff... all stuff that will start taking up space in your inventory.
It's not a bad thing to get gifts, but the space it will use up will force trainers to either start dumping things or buying more space. I'm sure Niantic is hoping for folks to buy more space.
THen again the goodies you get from gift boxes could be sent to your gym defenders for stardust, so that's a little nod to nice.
Of course the special eggs you can get from the gift boxes will need to be incubated for 7Km. You can only get the eggs if you have a space in your egg inventory. So be careful. I've been opening gift boxes as soon as an egg hatches so I don't get caught spinning stops and getting eggs, because this will prevent you from getting the special eggs.
Depending on the player/trainer, I can see people buying incubators to rifle through their egg inventory so they can get those speial hatches.
Then there's the Trading.
The trades initially can cost from 20k to 1M stardust, but the better a friend you are with someone, the bigger a discount you can get on trades. But that means participating in more raids with that friend or friends which of course will quietly cost the trainers more money to heal up their Pokemon and buy more raid passes than they might normally, as you pursue levelling up your friend status.
Trading will cost both trainers stardust, and people argue that will help cheaters not mess up the system. But when you trade, if you were trading for that perfect IV Pidgey, the stats get changed in the trade so you won't get what you're looking at in your friend's screen. It will be something slightly different. So I'm not sure what the point is there.
But trading will cost a bundle of stardust and for the 'free to play' trainer, this and all the other quirks of this new process will make it even more challenging to get your gym defenders in there and get your 50 coin a day.
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The 'play for free' trainer will have new hurdles to tackle while figuring out what next to spend their hard-earned money on. It's a hard grind, but it's possible as long as you're patient with how you play this game.
Patience is the big key... but it's hard when others around you are dumping bucks here and there to play the game.
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