Niantic is about to annoy Pokemon Go players yet again

ByAdam B Hours

Last Updated on: 27th June 2022, 03:30 pm

Niantic really just cannot help but annoy the players of their games at this stage, can they? They’re back at it again, making yet another predictably unpopular move.

Niantic are making the same mistakes, set to annoy Pokemon Go players, again

Now, what mistake are they making this time, you might be wondering?

Niantic is set to have the Deino Community Day for June 2022 feature raids that are exclusively to non-remote players. Meaning that they will only be accessible to those using Raid passes or Premium Raid passes, which specifically require the player to be in range.

Niantic has been making plenty of moves before and taken backlash repeatedly for trying to slowly inch away from the remote support measures they introduced during the COVID pandemic. From reducing the length of Community day events, messing with the range you can interact with Pokestops, or more unusual moves such as heavily limiting local Heracross spawns during Ultra Unlock or offering the same bundle at differing prices for different players.

And this particular move limiting the use of Remote Raid passes during a Community day event comes following a change to the Remote Raid pass bundle that increases the price from 250 to 300 total Pokecoins.

Deino community day in Pokemon Go June
Credit: Leekduck

The thing about this is, really, they’re about to take criticism for absolutely no reason on this move. Unlike some of the other changes where the motive is clearly making more money, this one actually doesn’t do that.

Why? Because this stops some players from raiding. Rural Players who wanted to use a rural raid pass to do a Zweilous remote raid during the event will not be offered the option to do so. The reasoning for this is somewhat understandable at least, in that there are rewards during the event for being near the raid, so they want players to be near the raid so that they can benefit.

But this also has the effect of shutting out remote raid players who just want to capture Zweilous to try to focus on those bonuses more, leaving rural players entirely shut out of these raids.

If that wasn’t annoying enough alone, it’s a four-star raid, so solo’ing them without multi-accounting (which violates TOS) isn’t much of an option for the vast majority of the playerbase.

If anything this is likely to lose them money, as many players who were raiding via remote raid passes now just won’t be able to partake in these raids, and thus have even less reason to buy remote passes. As for the goal of this change? Presumably, it’s getting players in a city to walk over somewhere to raid in an in-person group, rather than letting them remote raid to it.

Let people play the game how they want to play it. It’s not hard, you’re just damaging your own brand and setting up to annoy your players with moves like this Niantic.