Image: Niantic
Pokémon Go creator Niantic Labs announced Wednesday that, from April on, the mobile game’s Community Days will revert to their pre-pandemic length of only three hours long. Following the recent enormous nerfing of in-game item Incense, players are not at all pleased at Niantic’s seeming refusal to listen to what had widely been recognized as previous positive changes to the game.
In the last month, Niantic has been making further moves in an attempt to bring Pokémon Go back to where it was before it made changes in response to covid-19. At the beginning of the month, the developer announced it switched Incense, an in-game item that attracts Pokémon, back to its pre-2020 design, reducing its efficacy. It now attracts one Pokémon every five minutes instead of one per minute. Then yesterday, it was announced that April’s Stufful-themed Community Day would last just three hours, down from the six that everyone had grown used to.
Read More: Pokémon Go Fans Mad That Niantic’s Acting Like Pandemic Is Over
To Niantic’s significant credit, the studio was quick to amend its billion-dollar Pokémon Go project in response to 2020’s locking down of planet Earth. As so much of the world responded to the terror of a global pandemic by staying home, a game built around the idea of walking outside made some smart changes, allowing it to maintain its momentum and audience. Among other tweaks, radii for interacting with PokéStops and Gyms were increased, remote raiding was added, Incense was boosted to make challenges possible without having to leave the house, and walking distances for taking part in the PvP GO Battle League were scrapped.
Ever since, Niantic has been trying to change things back, always under its claim that its games’ primary motivations are to get people outside, moving around, getting exercise. Of course, its real primary motivation is to make money, and a number of the necessary changes clearly meant players were able to get more out of the game while spending less.
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Source: https://kotaku.com/pokemon-go-niantic-stufful-community-day-hours-mobile-f-1848697447
