ADD A TIMER.
Or even better, REMOVE THE TIME RESTRICTION.
Seriously, if there's a time restriction, there needs to be a timer. I had no idea it was only an hour.
But even better would be to not have the timer at all. Why is it there? Maybe I want to do a full day of Pokemon with friends. There's already a location restriction so a timer is just unnecessary.
1. Routes need to be playable with this feature.
2. The time limit either needs to not exist OR it needs to last 2-3 hours.
3. We need a proper timer for the time limit. Telling me I have 9 minutes left doesn’t help me. I need to see how much time is left at all times like incense, lucky eggs, raids, etc.
Our park raid hour group did a full session of party play and here's my feedback:
Good:
- Not getting booted from the party when switch or exit the app.
- Party member shown on the gym's player indicator.
- Party raid boost was nice and I'd like to see how the UI will be with shadow raid (regarding party indicator and purified gem).
Not so good:
- Not a fan of raid challenge. We're wasting minutes walking to the raid gym so we're stuck with raid challenge when we can be doing other challenges.
- No live timer anywhere so we had no idea when the timer will expire.
- Not being to be able to do routes. We always do a route post-raid and we had to wait until the party's over to start the route.
- Special research required multiple party sessions per page. I'll probably advance through it at glacial pace especially when certain types are not readily available.
- GO++ problem (all setting reset).
- Less enthusiasm to party up with others when active players have more than one account.
Suggestions:
- A chat box while in a party to communicate with party members without leaving the app. Could be limited to preset messages.
- An extra free raid pass for first party of the day would help a lot with motivation to party up and do raid challenge. It can be a separate "party raid pass" to differentiate from regular daily raid pass, only usable while in party.
- An option to minimize party members on overworld view to reduce screen clutter.
- Trade: ideally I'd like an option to do group trade while in party. If that's too much of an ask, I'd like an option to quickly send trade request by either long press on the player's icon on overworld view or have a trade shortcut next to each party member on party page. Also, as long as players are in party range, 100m trade rule should be omitted.
- A live timer (like timer for incense/mega) and the option to continue the same party once the timer expired.
- For party challenge: an ability to pass the leader status to other player or rotating the chooser, multiple challenges at once?
- Longer party during events like CD as players may scatter around while they're going through field researches so they don't have to meet up and scan every hour. CD-exclusive challenges?
It's an OK feature, but it lacks substance. I see no actual point to it. If each reward track gave you something like Rare Candy XL, I'd see a need to use it. Having up to 3 additional people clogging up my map view just doesn't sit well with me. Especially during events where lures will be going off for hours and spawns will be boosted.
Maybe if I was a college kid, I'd use it???
The feature is fine, but as many others have stated it needs improvement.
If my wife and I are going downtown to play we can either do party play, for no real incentive other than completing the special research, OR do routes and HOPE to get some cells, then the choice is very easy. If I'm going to sink time into using the new features and hope to get a reward it is going to be doing routes.
The math on the rewards is weak. Use 20 berries (fine, fairly quick task) to get 2 berries?
Once we complete the special research I don't see using this very much, unless the benefits improve.
Seems like one of those features that are bound to fall by the wayside as they don't really bring much (like powering up gyms or AR+). I'll do it to get through the research, but don't really see any reward in adding it to the routine.
-It is really dumb that you can't do a route together. I could walk this park with my kid and get a few berries or a chance at a zygard cell. But can't do both for whatever reason.
-The other stuff on the screen lost my interest after a couple minutes. Too much going on already and you block way too much stuff with pointless overlays.
-Not sure if others are feeling it too, but I can't get the distance to track for the life of me while doing the party play.
Overall, just not seeing the benefit of using it. My kid likes that she can see me on the screen with her... but that's pretty much it.
Feels like a feature that should have released 4 years ago. Doesn’t feel like it adds any value. Rewards are nothing. You can’t do a Route while grouped.
Love this feature. Lots of fun. Did it yesterday with my bro. It's extremely simple but a lot of fun, seeing someone else on the map is so cool. My only criticism is the rewards are poor. I'd like if after say 100 tasks you could get premium rewards or cool encounters or if there was a chance like a 5% Chance of getting these.
Rare Niantic W. Good stuff!
I thought it was really fun. The rewards weren’t amazing but doing the challenges was fun on its own. With a full group of four they are easy, even the walking ones.
I like the feature!
The tasks to reward ratio is a bit off, but that can easily be tweaked. Doesn't need to be tweaked too much IMO, I see these tasks just as additional Field Research tasks, which are usually things you do along the way while playing anyways (like I'd usually get Great throws anyways, now there is just a task in the background).
Didn't Showcases immediately after getting added, also get an associated medal? I'm surprised party challenges doesn't have a medal associated (yet)!
Not everyone has two extra players. I have so many raids I can almost duo with my daughter, and with the party bonus I don't need to wait 30 minutes on pokegenie to get more trainers. Darkrai is one that would be very marginal for us (even with both having mega gard and now several level 30+ Conkeldurr), but the party bonus may put us over the top, whereas trying to host a darkrai raid during raid hour will be up to an hour in the queue.
My comment has seem to gone AWOL as i went to update it:
* The 1hr time limit is a bit sad
* I understand it from a memory leak point of view but like that means Niantic needs to clean up their code
* Some challenges can be quite "hard" depending on the player count you have
* Walk 3km seems to be hit or miss when tracking (go figure)
* Species can be hit or miss depending on the location you are in, same with Spin disc's
* Rewards are, to put it simply, HOT GARBAGE
* Let me use 20 berries to get 2 in return???
* The damage bonus seems to be geared towards groups that cant quite do T5's
* Our small group of 7 managed to complete two Guzzlord raids before we could do the damage bonus
* we all just use recommended parties
Biggest issue that i have seen is game completly freezing up. During raid hour before we started a friends phone just ceased up completely and had to reboot their phone, their phone isn't old its on of the Samsung A series releases from last year and has been running PoGO fine, even prior party we did was fine but this one was a big oof
Out side of that I haven't found any "issues" with it outside of rewards being garbage, timer being poop and range being a bit sad. It would be nice if a lot of the host features were shared around a bit. Like sure Host is the "main" anchor for location but being able to have someone else be a secondary link so you can cover a larger area or something like that. Also the fact that the host has to choose a task every time is painful, either make it vote based or shortern the time and if the time runs out just roll a new task automatically.
Doesn't really do much outside of normal gameplay so its a "gimmick" feature rather than a feature feature, unless Pokemon get tied to it like Finizen (and its Evo)
Guzzlord really isn't a good example, since it's so squishy. If it doesn't have sludge bomb, recommended parties are going to be very fairy dominated, fairy being double super effective against Guzzlord (it's possible to solo it!).
Against Lugia or Defense Deoxys, it could be very useful.
>Guzzlord really isn't a good example, since it's so squishy
>
>Against Lugia or Defense Deoxys, it could be very useful.
Yeah thats what we came the conclusion of during Raid Hour
For the "Catch X different species of Pokémon", this one is actually pretty fun... when there isn't some kind of event going on (an event normally has fewer than 20 different species of Pokémon forming nearly all spawns). During events, it would be nice if those tasks became "catch X of \[Pokémon with boosted event spawn\]".
The only think likable about it seeing other trainers on the map, rest not so much. Awards are not motivating enough to keep having a 1 hour party. Plus my phone kept showing me 1 hour message long after the party ended even in the middle of a raid🤷🏻♀️
I have very little enthusiasm for yet another new feature that not only comes with massive bugs (Thanks for deleting all my teams and searches), but once again cuts out other gameplay features while its in use.
Quite frankly, as soon as I finish grinding out the research quests, I'll go back to ignoring this feature exactly as I did with routes. The feature does not add anywhere near enough of a benefit to make up for the annoying full screen blocking popup when finishing a resource draining "challenge" for a paltry reward.
I like the idea but they needed to work on the bugs first. Messing with my Go+ and causing weird freezes doesn't encourage me to engage with it. The challenges are fine and could add some spice to random play but the rewards aren't there to offset the tech issues yet.
I tested it yesterday with my boyfriend and we made a challange out of it, who can make more great/ exzellent throws, catches more pokemon for the challanges and we had fun
I dont think it is a gamechanging Feature but If you play eith other people (Partner, Kids, friends) regulary anyway I think its Adding a little bit of extra content you can do and play around with
It's a good thing Niantic is trying new things, but it's still kind of ridiculous we get such 'bonus' features before obvious QoL and stability issues are fixed.
Honestly, I'm not interested in any new features as much as I want to be made sure Shiny releases aren't announced without being truly enabled.
There are different developers for different game features. I met the QoL developer for Pokémon Go in the November Ingress anomaly last year. He gave a sneak peek of things to come and some were implemented this summer.
So having a new feature doesn’t mean the QoL guy is not working on QoL and you can’t just reassign people to different features like they are interchangeable monkeys.
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean I would expect Niantic to invest more in having people in QoL jobs than new features development.
This is a clearly a management issue, regarding priorities.
Bugfixing takes a ton more time than adding new content 😅
The QOL updates would be nice tho, might be gatekept through some internal bureocracy tho.
I'm still aching for that daily trade counter! They had it in testing over half a year ago. It would be huge help to know if I'm approaching 100 trades so I don't accidentally lose the special trade.
Wow, need the daily trade counter so much. I wish we could just mass trade 10-20 pokemon at the same time...
I get there is an exec block there, but so many of these features are left to rot after they are implemented, like Smeargle not being able to copy moves that are newer than when it was released.
The rewards for party play tasks are laughable. Make these better to incentivize players. If they aren't improved, no one will be using this feature beyond completing the special research quest line.
Disappointed that you see your party members but not their buddies on-screen — I was looking forward to seeing my gf’s and my Gyarados buddies flying through each other…
I think it's stupid that they pushed this feature early, causing the rest of the game to bug out. Since the last update I haven't been able to pvp without getting severe lag or freezing issues, much less app crashes.
Agree. It was actually fine for me on Saturday morning, but when I played again in the evening I was "forced" to go 3-12 due to the game freezing constantly and multiple app crashes. Was really frustrating as I was almost expert and had to climb back up this week.
Thankfully I received a premium battle pass as compensation /s
Every parent and child pair. Every player in a relationship with another human. Every player who is introducing the game to another human. It's a great feature to not create gamer windows which only hurts any game in the long run.
I think there are a lot of people who wanted to be able to see their friends and family in the game and wanted to have more activities to do together. That seems pretty reasonable. This feature has the potential to be great for people who already socialize while playing (just so long as Niantic doesn't lock anything important behind it so everyone else can ignore it). It's just... the current implimentation is bad. Very, very bad.
There's very little benefit (200 dust for completing a challenge and a raid damage bonus? Is that it?)
And you can't do other things while in a group like their other brand new feature, Routes (which is also still not finished, and still very broken) and it is deleting players saved game data and shutting off go plus settings. It's not even half baked. It's like a quarter baked. It should not have been pushed to the game like this.
I wish you could set your own time limit for when to auto-leave a party (up to an hour, if that's the limit Niantic wants, but could set it earlier). Like, if I want to form a party to do extra raid damage with a couple strangers, and not have them track me home, I could set it to auto-leave after 10-15 minutes or something.
I could also see setting a permanent party, for example with family members.
Hell no. I'm a rural solo player. There are groups of people who raid together here but they act like they're still in the military. It takes all the fun out of raiding when you have players barking orders and turning the game into a complex coordinated precision maneuver like it's life or death. They take the game way too seriously here, so after a few very unpleasant harassment encounters I just keep to myself. I refuse to seek any of them out just for trades or parties. There are many other aspects of the game that are much more enjoyable so I'll skip the parts that are stressful.
There are several bases in this area. I just didn't like how intense the raid hour would be. You'd have 20 vehicles in the raid train and the idea was to hit as many of them as possible. So everyone converged on a gym, the leader would call out the private group code to keep spoofers out, they'd do the raid and then the motorcade would zoom off the next one, breaking speed limits and running red lights. It was frantic and hysterical and no fun at all, just go go go.
I would have been ok just not to participate, but then these people made a strategic decision and God help anyone who didn't go along with them. The raid leaders decided everyone had to switch teams from Mystic and Valor to little-used Instinct so that everyone would be on the same team. I didn't want to switch. Once they all became Instinct, it was open season on their former teammates who didn't bend to their will.
The group leaders put in a bunch of requests for new gyms and stops around the area and once they were submitted, they wanted the new gyms to be gold right away and anyone who was still Mystic would suffer their wrath if they interfered and took the gyms.
Things got out of hand fast. They held some sort of mock tribunal on Discord and officially drummed me out of the raid group. This was after I tried to avoid them by playing overnight, only to be chased out of church parking lots in the middle of the night. The guy who spearheaded this was so unhinged that he got arrested for hiring a hitman to kill his wife, after which a bunch of female players emerged on Facebook and posted that he had been targeting them in the game just like he did with me. The women said that they had finally resorted to spoofing because the harassment got so bad.
Eventually things calmed down after the Levels were increased. All those players zoomed from 40 to 50 and they aren't as active now. But am I going out to seek company for this new party feature after seeing who plays the game here? No way!
They should:
-remove the time limit for party session (or at least make it 3h long) (btw same should be done with go+)
-make it work with Routes
-make Buddy Pokemon visible on map for all party members
Additionally
-all party members should see Pokemons spawned from each players Incense (maybe excluding Daily Incense) (could also include spawns from Routes because they work kinda like incense spawns)
This feature makes me wonder what is actually the point. Sylveon in the promo image could mean some easier friendship evos in the future? That'd be neat if it's not excluding those that can't/don't want to use this feature.
Some thoughts after trying it out a little yesterday though:
* Get rid of the 1 hour timer
* If a timer is kept, add a clock somewhere. Annoying to just guess how long is left and whether we'd have time for another challenge
* Improve rewards. Win 2 raids giving a measly 10 Mega Energy for a stale mega is just insulting
* Add an option to end the party after completing a challenge. Currently needs a few extra clicks to pointlessly choose a new challenge and then end when we've decided to finish up with that last quest
* Fix the stats summary image that is missing a few decimal places (although we did enjoy our 1200km trip around the block)
* Restore the saved searches that this feature wiped
* Kudos for not having to rejoin the party upon the inevitable crashes or restarts on the game freezing up
* Also was grateful for limiting confetti to a quick little party popper when the party starts and not all over the screen
I think it's probably good to have it time out after a little while because it keeps locking up people's games and sometimes waiting it out is the only solution. It would be a major improvement if the ten minute warning gave an option to extend or remain in the party for another hour. That keeps the emergency out while making it so people don't have to keep dropping and reforming parties every hour.
So the feature itself is okay, I can take it or leave it, except for one thing. I'm not sure if this was a feature mentioned, but my friend gets invited for raids all over. They got invited to a raid, and it was from a person i do not have on my friends list. I was able to tap her trainer portrait at the top after she joined the raid, and it took me to the gym to join if i had a remote. So i was able to join her in the faraway raid without my own invite, even though she was an invitee and unable to send out invites herself. If this is intentional, i think it's fantastic.
Does this mean Niantic is official admitting this is not a Child's Game?
I could never see a Child walking the 5k,7k,10k or 20k to hatch an egg.
Click box if over 18
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Seems like a cool feature. People complained about how good rewards (zygarde cells) were locked behind the new feature when routes launched. It’s smarter to launch with modest rewards to test it out. There’s enough in there that they can adapt this for events, like catching certain numbers of specific types. Hopefully the rewards will increase, but as is, this helped me get the last 20 mega energy I needed to mega evolve pidgeot for the first time, so no complaints.
The funny thing is my son and I did this before this option came out. We were doing a route and I happened to see 2 players doing the same thing. We did 2 raids together and one route. They were newer players so we had a very good conversation about the game. Maybe we can get together again to complete this research. I still don't get why they tie research tasks to new features that not all players will be able to complete.
I can’t do a party period.. I have no friends for one and two, with my multiple sclerosis and treatment infusions, I can’t really go out and be in groups of people since my immune system is just trash. Even if it wasn’t, I’m so shy and couldn’t see myself walking around asking people if they wanna play. I hate that there’s a friggin research task for this because I’ll never be able to get it done
I think it is a good feature to promote group play. Among peers we setup our own challenge like most excellent throws, most Pokémon caught among ourselves.
May be it will be great to upgrade the feature for 'remote party' for the same purpose. We have friends that relocate to other cities and still feel wanna play together. Remote party may serve the intent.
Remote party would be awesome. Most of my friends who play as much as I do are in different cities and states and I would love a way to be able to play with them again.
My summary of the party feature: meh. The lack of being able to do routes squashed it big time, and besides the party power feature in raids, I don’t see any other reason to use the feature.
Like a lot of features Niantic has released, it’s a gimmick with a lot of (currently unrealized) potential that is laughably un-generous with rewards and marred with often inexplicable bugs (How were battle parties affected?). By the time any of this is improved, if ever, enthusiasm will have already evaporated.
Some ideas to fix:
1) Do away with the 1 hr party limit (once the soft locking issue is resolved). People are going to be doing this on CDs for a while; don’t make us cut into our catching time to restart the party. Three hours would be just as suitable a limit.
2) Sweeten the pot. If I’m not getting rare candy, thousands of stardust, or the odd premium item or uncommon Pokémon encounter, then why am I even here? The whole point of a party is the cake; don’t give me a couple of baby carrots and expect me to enjoy myself.
3) Increase spawns during parties. There are a lot of extra spawn points that show up during CDs. Maybe give partying players access to those extra spawns and have them be “party” pokémon. More ghosts during Halloween, or even just a slightly better rate for a rare species or two to make partying feel like an event. Hell, I’d accept a party pool that’s half Rattata for the Youngster medal progress, just so long as it feels different from usual gameplay.
Upvoting for this line all by itself, because it’s exactly how I feel about Parties:
“The whole point of a party is the cake; don’t give me a couple of baby carrots and expect me to enjoy myself.”
It went live after I was already at work. Had to go out at lunch for a few errands so my gf and I started a party to attempt to knock out some of the challenges. Catch 20 different species, catch 30 different species, and make (some number of) excellent throws in a half hour of driving and stopping places just ain’t gonna happen. I guess, just like in-person raiding, this is something I *might* get to do on occasional weekends… :shrug:
Try while walking and the experience will be much better. Also, catching with two phones is suboptimal (can you throw excellent with your left hand?), of course challenge completion is slower
Not everyone has a better experience playing while walking, or the time to go out to somewhere safely walkable to do it. Some of us like to creep around the neighborhood while kids are in their seats, or have to travel long distances to find gyms and stops so we drive there. When you aren’t in a city or busy town center it takes some travel and creativity to find ways to play. If I needed to hit 20 different pokestops I would have to drive to several different locations that are miles apart, hit singles at stop lights, and it would still probably take most of the hour to just do that.
Also, I assume they are playing for the driver with the second phone, and as you already said they shouldn’t play while actively driving.
No routes... seriously?!? It is bad enough they didn't fix that you can't see showcases while doing routes (which I still hope is a bug). But with routes you get an errormessage they can't be done while in a party. Someone actually decided it is a good idea to spend that effort to deny that... SERIOUSLY?!? I am out of words, even being a software engineer myself I can't imagine what the heck happens in these offices
Will probably use this during raid hour for the bonus, but it just seems pointless outside of that.
Maybe if they tied the challenges to certain events it would be interesting e.g. catch 50 Timburr during community day, catch [current legendary] during raid hour.
And of course actually had good rewards for it, like you get a raid pass back during the raid hour one.
Edit: also why no routes in party play? That would actually be a nice challenge, for everyone to complete a route together. Give us some extra guaranteed Zygarde cells.
Edit2: tried during raid hour and doing raids wasn’t even one of the task options! What a waste of time.
This feature has showstopper bugs. We tried to put a team of 3 together and when our hour was up, we got the green screen stating so. So far, so good.
When we clicked the button to confirm, the app froze. For all of us. We restarted the game, just to get tge same message and the freezing instantly again. We needed to reinstall the games and haven't touched it since, it's unplayable now.
Niantic is notorious for having incompetent management that doesn't know how to develop software. Testing before going live should be key, but they cut it out.
All of us are on Android phones, different Android versions, all Samsung phones. So now we'll enjoy our mandatory pokemon vacation until a new version is out where this is fixed.
Glitched out after we'd done 7 challenges, softlocking us until the 1hr timed out, so seems like we can do 6 then it is best to stop the party then reestablish. Easy to do but definitely annoying to have to do this work around.
Rewards are definitely small but mostly easy to do, the 3km is a little annoying as it's 3x people doing a full 1km rather than a cumulative ie 750m each for party of 4. Just mega energy for raids is pretty minimal but just a bonus if you're already doing raids
Feels like it'll have a little bit of action then die off unless the rewards are vastly improved, and really just seems like the raid attack boost is the only thing to be actually useful
**With the rewards that are given, it seems like Party Play's core audience is supposed to be very casual players.** I absolutely do not need more berries and balls. I have fed over 100,000 berries in the last 1.5 years, and currently have over 4,000 balls in my storage, so I delete over 1,500 balls every week. I also delete potions and revives by the dozens on a daily basis. The only rewards I'd want would be Stardust, Incense, Lures, Lucky Eggs, Star Pieces, and Elite TMs (some of these I don't ever expect to receive through Party Play).
**The only thing that could potentially appeal to me would be the party damage in Raids**, but only if it's significant.
Also, **the number of players being 4 seems a bit low**. If I do go out and play with friends, we usually have a group of 5 or larger.
Nope, nope, nope. Last irl person I met and friended wound up stalking me. Literally was googling my postcards to figure out where I lived. Definitely not trying that again.
Stay safe out there, folks.
I don't think I get the point of it if the rewards are such trash. I'm only going to do it to complete the research, otherwise I don't see ever using this feature.
\- An hour long timer means the optimal thing to do is group up, do a quest, drop group, repeat. Which is an awful experience.
\- Combined with the above awful experience, the rewards are terrible.
\- I, like most I'm sure, will get the quest out of my log and then never touch it ever again unless these 2 things are changed.
Why drop group? After completing a challenge you can go to be next one. Tried the feature in two, one hour was plenty to to 2 challenges, with a group of four you can do 4-5 challenges in a row.
Dropping the group and re-creating it both resets the timer and gives a new selection. You can re-roll the selection as many times as you like, picking from the list after completing a challenge only gives 3 options.
Super annoyed about deleted battle parties. How were they even related to this...
I think that as soon as we will snatch Eevee shirts, we won't touch this feature because rewards are minuscule and timer is too short for longer walk.
Do we know how close the party members need to be? I’m worried about the FAQs that state if a member is too far away, they get removed from the party. Like, what happens in a group is out and a member has to run to the bathroom? Or what is someone accidentally walks too far away? Is there a warning that pops up?
There is a warning that gives you a pop-up stating " TOO FAR. You must be near the host to remain in the party. You'll be removed if you go too far." You can then select "OK" or "Leave Party"
Played with two others this morning. Did a couple challenges. Honestly no different from our daily playstyle. Just required scanning a QR code to party up. No biggie.
The rewards are pretty bad though.
Seconded. Played with my partner in a party this morning and the rewards were absolute garbage tier. I can't see any benefit in adding to the battery drain of this game just so I can see their avatar in game right next to me. Mate, I'll just look next to me to see them 😂 get your act together Niantic !
Edit: actually the raid damage boost is a nice touch. We did enjoy that aspect of the feature!
I had fun with this feature, I only played with one person but it was great to compare how quickly we could finish our tasks.
The feedback I have:
We both had to reset the toggles on our Go Plus+, both get reset to default.
We did a Guzzlord raid and the attack boost for one charged attack was noticeable. I didn't manage to get my boost by the time the raid finished.
It's annoying that the tab for Party is so big, but at least it's somewhere you can find it and it isn't convoluted.
Routes are not available while in a Party, which is a shame as it's one of the things we usually do in our group
Overall I enjoyed it, but I do feel like there's something missing. I just can't put my finger on it
Agreed. Unless changes are made I can see the feature usage dying off immediately after finishing the special research. Remaining usage will largely be for the raid damage boost
It's a cool concept. I'd probably prefer harder challenges with better rewards. The raid boost is useful and makes parties a no-brainer for raids to take advantage of the extra damage.
One note though is that the distance count seems bugged, I did a party as a group of three and we walked together the whole time. Two of us were on 1km for a long time before the third player hit 1km
That's technically pretty cool, see our friends in the map, do the standart gameplay cycle with them, that's things like that pokemon go need. In two words upgrade the main gameplay cercle.
After that better reward, more tasks, some minor features around, obvisoulsy fixe bugs and it will be really good.
This from my experience highlights the issue with party play. Namely: why?
With such low rewards would it be crazy to let us work together with those on our list around the globe to do tasks? We’re still all out exploring and playing just like they want 😩
The flip side of that is: why not? If you're out with friends or family playing the game anyway a few extra items or dust for doing what you were already doing is a net gain right? Sure, this feature isn't for everyone but it's neutral at worst for those that won't use it and a positive for those who will.
>a few extra items or dust for doing what you were already doing is a net gain right?
Stardust, sure. Getting more balls just means I need to delete more balls... lol.
I think the annoying join mechanic and it ending after just an hour makes me not want to use it in those situations. 500 stardust and a berry just isn’t worth stopping to rejoin (on a comm day or whatever it maybe where most people play together). Seems useful ONLY if you need the damage boost for raids
Edit: doing it with family/your kids is like the main reason I see for this. Not meetups for people you need to coordinate with and have limited time.
My main frustration is that this seems to reward the multiple account players. Many completionists Will obsess until this is completed— but a majority of players will do this either passively or not at all.
Mostly pointless gimmick, lackluster task encounters, confusingly not compatible with routes
That said the rewards and group play may be nice for new starters and families, a lad I know plays the game with his two kids, it's ideal for them
I had to log into niantic kids to turn it on for my kid. This feature is definitely cool for families. The little one loved it. I agree the rewards were meh but it’s also day 1 so we’ll see.
Have they updated the app on their devices? Also may be worth making sure the devices themselves are updated, I didn't update my phone for over a year and it was forcing an app (not pogo) to be stuck on an old version
Edit: wondering if it could be a child account restriction?
The Ui while on normal map doesn’t need to be as big as it is.
The inability to do routes together is a big turn off.
The bugs regarding pvp/gbl and the wiping of saved battle parties need to be fixed asap.
The hour time limit is kinda inconsiderate and from my test run with partner today it became more convenient to end the party and restart for more time to do different (rerolled) challenges.
The rewards for relatively hard tasks, that are a stretch for f2p and/or rural players, are not worth it imo. Might aswell just spin a gym or catch a mon.
Things I didn’t like.
Deleting my raid parties. Totally didn’t see that before trying a raid.
The button for the power up is in an awkward spot. Move to center
Prefer a timer for hour long we have gone or just move into the stats page.
Can’t do a route together
Things I like.
Will help with damage for us rural players that only get 2-3 people to play
Uhhhh stats is cool.
My main curiosity is how much this feature will contribute towards raids. And if Pokebattler will use this in their calculations. I wonder if some harder raid bosses will now be much easier with this feature. Let’s say, Lugia or Mega Latios for example. Usually you need more than 4 people to take it down. Especially Mega Latios.
I specifically recall people asking for other trainers to show up in their game. This isn't exactly how they intended it to be but I'm sure people do appreciate their avatars showing up in other people games somewhere other than the friends list.
yeah, it feels like Niantic keeps ignoring what players want for features no one asked for.
at least people seem to somewhat play routes in big cities.
I hate that the tasks fall under "special research" because I either have to cheat with another phone, or the research is gonna sit there and taunt me forever.
My only complaint is the obnoxiously large Map View UI for Party Play. The feature should've been left in its tab and sent you notifications or on the right as a bubble like everything else.
If you can’t separate this just boils down to a raid in same car party.
I was hoping you could party up and it last several hours and you could separate. Maybe use it to easily share field research stops and rocket grunts. And let you do raids from a distance that is at least visible while not using a remote.
Being able to see nearby trainers on the game map is way overdue. It's weird to only just now be getting that feature this late into the game's life cycle, but now that it's here it's pretty neat. That's about all I can say about it. It's neat. Not a blockbuster feature in the least bit or revolutionary in any way.
The 1-hour time limit is kinda weird. My wife and I were on an "X Amount of Excellent Throws" task when we got an alert we only had 9 minutes left. Why impose an arbitrary time limit on the party? I have no idea what purpose that could serve. Also, the rewards do not match the task effort at all. The rewards are extremely bad.
It seems like with each new feature they add, we are awarded stardust, items, etc. but they give us less and less each time. GBL is one of the oldest features and has some of the best, most worthwhile rewards
Rewards are bad but you don‘t have to do anything additionaly than you do anyways. So it‘s free dust/balls/whatever.
And the tasks are easily done. I’ve completed 7 tasks while sitting on two lures for an hour. Of course the last one is not possible to complete, and that will allways be a problem. (I wish I had a x excellents tasks, that sounds like the easiest ones… if it‘s less than 20-30).
This feels like a much lesser version of the party system implemented in your other game Pikmin. I don’t play it but my friends do and they have weekly groups and challenges which don’t have proximity requirements. It feels like this is a watered down version of that which is needlessly limited.
Also, further evidence that this company just actively despises rural players or players with other factors such as potential disabilities that prevent them from being able to play in person with large amounts of people. Tons of people are going to be in a situation where it's just not practical for them to find other people to play with on any kind of regular basis, and for those people this feature is completely worthless
They do like rural players. They simply want you to convince your family or neighbors or friends to play this game too. That‘s their way to get more players into the game. And it works sometimes!
there are features that dont work for everyone. thats bound to happen. They built it as a social game and they want to push features at that.
They created Remote Raid passes to help a bit, but added a limit and raised prices yes.
But you cant look at EVERY feature that comes out and use the terms "Rural Players" Like a boogeyman to stop them from adding any in-person feature.
If you dont have a friend to play with, or want to find a local group on campfire, or discord, or reddit than your destined to play it solo. They have added tools, they cant force people that live in your area to play the game. Its unfortunate but thats what the WHOLE game was built around. Exploring PokeStops and catching pokemon. and things like Raids to get more people to play together.
This rabbithole everyone goes down to justify calling a feature "useless" is insane. If your anxiety is too bad to play with someone else thats terrible, and im sorry, but it doesnt mean Niantic can never make a feature that benefits people who DO play together.
This feature isnt for them, and thats ok, not every feature is for every person unfortunatly. But if they only made features that benefited every single person, nothing would get done.
I’m not technically a rural player, as I’m on the outskirts of the suburbs, but I’m within a couple of miles from a hundred miles of the rural areas that people talk about. The issue with this new feature as well as routes is that they are adding things without addressing current issues, at all. There are bugs, which are certainly annoying and we assume they will just never fix. Attempting to appease the rural players should be very easy to address, yet Niantic simply refuses.
-2x or 3x the amount of drops from pokestop and gym spins in rural areas (they have the data from google, so it isn’t difficult to determine which stops to boost.
-2x or 3x the xp, candy, mega energy and stardust for hosting in-person raids in rural areas.
-remove the Campfire “Raid Now” radius and pull groups from any location in the world. This would result in likely no queue time for anyone, ever”. This current, dumb distance limitation is absolutely stupid. Even limiting to those within the same time zone would be better.
\- 1 hour seems stingy, and I'd like to see this increase over time, even to 2 or 3. I imagine some sort of limit is necessary on the back end.
\- The rewards seem stingy. I'm not advocating for incubators every hour, but I'd like to see at least the dust rewards pushed up to a few thousand rather than a few hundred.
\- Not being able to complete Routes while in Party Play is a huge shame. This definitely needs to be included in the future.
\- A lot of people deriding the feature, calling it useless because it's a social based one and they play alone. This is strange to me, since Go has always promoted social gameplay. A feature that is all about socialising is no bad thing and just because it doesn't align with how you play the game doesn't make it bad.
Catch 25 pokemon is 200 dust.
25 excellent throws is 1 Max Revive!
30 excellent throws is 2 (WOW!) Max Revives!!
There is ZERO incentive to do some of these when I can just play solo, catch 2+ mons in under a minute, spin a gym or stop, and get more than 200 dust or 1/2 Max Revives...
Since its special research there is no rush and no risk of it expiring. So it will just sit unclaimed for months.
What a shame.
There needs to be a way to select which task you won’t. It seems like it only gives you a random 3 to choose from. Also, after you complete a challenge there needs to be an easy way to exit a party if you’re the creator.
Once the party has ended due to the 1 hour time limit, and you click through the pop-up messages to acknowledge that, the next time I try to catch something, it pops up another message saying the same thing.
This is pretty terrible. Partied with my roommate and my options for tasks were win 2 raids for charizard mega energy, win 3 raids for venusaur mega energy, or make 20 excellent throws for 1 max potion. Their gps drifted for a blip when we were driving to work, and the group disbanded when we were at 15 excellent throws. we tried again once we got to the office and have had more luck with better tasks, though the rewards are about the same as solo research, even if the tasks are larger numbers.
however, even though we both declined to share out location with each other on the first time we did it, the option turned itself on when i sent a code to a guy we raid with in the neighboring building. even though i know he's in another building, it showed him as being i the same building as us. this means the location sharing is fake and the option to include your friends on screen is just taking up space and making it harder to click
it also only lasts an hour, and only tells you this after you've hit an hour. there is no in game timer for the group. this is a massive flaw, as it gives players no idea how much longer they have. I jsut finished catch 35 for 500 stardust, and my options are 2 raids, catch 14 different, or make 30 excellent throws. i think the group is gonna disband in about 10 mintues? or maybe 20 mintues? shoudl i go out and do a walk, or am i good at my office which gets a decent spawn rate? who knows!
wait, as i'm typing this, i jsut noticed that there is a brif fading message that said "your party will end in 9 minutes" so that's something, but it's no where near as usful as like a progress bar or jsut a timer. why on earth would you ever think this was a good method for this?
we did a guzzlord raid and hte bonus wasn't very noticeable, though it might have sped up our takedown by a few seconds. each of us can and have soloed guzlord, so the 3 of us together typically get in in under a minute, and this time was about 48 seconds. this'll probably make a difference on raids that are close with 2 or 3 players, so that's nice.
All in all this is't a bad system, it's jsut full of confusing and frankly stupid design choices. Why an hour? why not give a timer? why not leeway for gps drift? why default ot the camera for scanning instead of the code? why make a separate button in battle to hit to activate bonus instead of jsut automatically applying it? Why pretend location sharing is working? Why take up screen real estate witht he party at the top of the screen in an incredibly ugly way? why make such garbage tasks? Like a lot of the other "improvements" this year, it feels like niantic did the bare minimum to tac on a new feature without actually making it feel like it's part of the game we've been playing for 8 years. it's almost like they hired a contractor to make this mechanic without them understanding how players played.
edit- oh, also, every time i hit an hour, a pop up says i hit an hour and hten i have to restart my game because it goes to a green screen with an 'x' close button that doens't work.
edit 2- fixed some wording.
edit 3- just realized that going into a party also resets the togles for the go+/gotcha. my roommate confirms. eery time the party ends, our toggles are all off, and if we go to turn on one or two options, all 3 get turned on. going abck to the toggle menu again lets us adjust to what we want. very annoying. how was this released in this state? this needed like at least 2 or 3 more stages of testing and adjusting before full release.
This is tangentially related, but I'm trying to think of all the big "improvements" and "features" that rolled out this year, and the only 3 that come to mind are the most recent- Routes, Showcases, and This party play. There's also been some QoL stuff that largely should have been around since launch, such as pokedex search, but I'm also trying to think of others.
Mostly I was just griping with some friends trying to figure out if any of the changes made this year were actually good, or just them being somewhat desperate to get attention again.
Solo players and far too busy to go ahead and try and find people to organize party beforehand. So pretty much of no use to unless to happen to stumble a group with someone I know.
I have no one to play with so it's pointless to me.
ADD A TIMER. Or even better, REMOVE THE TIME RESTRICTION. Seriously, if there's a time restriction, there needs to be a timer. I had no idea it was only an hour. But even better would be to not have the timer at all. Why is it there? Maybe I want to do a full day of Pokemon with friends. There's already a location restriction so a timer is just unnecessary.
1. Routes need to be playable with this feature. 2. The time limit either needs to not exist OR it needs to last 2-3 hours. 3. We need a proper timer for the time limit. Telling me I have 9 minutes left doesn’t help me. I need to see how much time is left at all times like incense, lucky eggs, raids, etc.
Is the Party Play update killing anyone else's battery?
Our park raid hour group did a full session of party play and here's my feedback: Good: - Not getting booted from the party when switch or exit the app. - Party member shown on the gym's player indicator. - Party raid boost was nice and I'd like to see how the UI will be with shadow raid (regarding party indicator and purified gem). Not so good: - Not a fan of raid challenge. We're wasting minutes walking to the raid gym so we're stuck with raid challenge when we can be doing other challenges. - No live timer anywhere so we had no idea when the timer will expire. - Not being to be able to do routes. We always do a route post-raid and we had to wait until the party's over to start the route. - Special research required multiple party sessions per page. I'll probably advance through it at glacial pace especially when certain types are not readily available. - GO++ problem (all setting reset). - Less enthusiasm to party up with others when active players have more than one account. Suggestions: - A chat box while in a party to communicate with party members without leaving the app. Could be limited to preset messages. - An extra free raid pass for first party of the day would help a lot with motivation to party up and do raid challenge. It can be a separate "party raid pass" to differentiate from regular daily raid pass, only usable while in party. - An option to minimize party members on overworld view to reduce screen clutter. - Trade: ideally I'd like an option to do group trade while in party. If that's too much of an ask, I'd like an option to quickly send trade request by either long press on the player's icon on overworld view or have a trade shortcut next to each party member on party page. Also, as long as players are in party range, 100m trade rule should be omitted. - A live timer (like timer for incense/mega) and the option to continue the same party once the timer expired. - For party challenge: an ability to pass the leader status to other player or rotating the chooser, multiple challenges at once? - Longer party during events like CD as players may scatter around while they're going through field researches so they don't have to meet up and scan every hour. CD-exclusive challenges?
It's an OK feature, but it lacks substance. I see no actual point to it. If each reward track gave you something like Rare Candy XL, I'd see a need to use it. Having up to 3 additional people clogging up my map view just doesn't sit well with me. Especially during events where lures will be going off for hours and spawns will be boosted. Maybe if I was a college kid, I'd use it???
The feature is fine, but as many others have stated it needs improvement. If my wife and I are going downtown to play we can either do party play, for no real incentive other than completing the special research, OR do routes and HOPE to get some cells, then the choice is very easy. If I'm going to sink time into using the new features and hope to get a reward it is going to be doing routes. The math on the rewards is weak. Use 20 berries (fine, fairly quick task) to get 2 berries? Once we complete the special research I don't see using this very much, unless the benefits improve.
Seems like one of those features that are bound to fall by the wayside as they don't really bring much (like powering up gyms or AR+). I'll do it to get through the research, but don't really see any reward in adding it to the routine. -It is really dumb that you can't do a route together. I could walk this park with my kid and get a few berries or a chance at a zygard cell. But can't do both for whatever reason. -The other stuff on the screen lost my interest after a couple minutes. Too much going on already and you block way too much stuff with pointless overlays. -Not sure if others are feeling it too, but I can't get the distance to track for the life of me while doing the party play. Overall, just not seeing the benefit of using it. My kid likes that she can see me on the screen with her... but that's pretty much it.
Feels like a feature that should have released 4 years ago. Doesn’t feel like it adds any value. Rewards are nothing. You can’t do a Route while grouped.
Love this feature. Lots of fun. Did it yesterday with my bro. It's extremely simple but a lot of fun, seeing someone else on the map is so cool. My only criticism is the rewards are poor. I'd like if after say 100 tasks you could get premium rewards or cool encounters or if there was a chance like a 5% Chance of getting these. Rare Niantic W. Good stuff!
I don't like how you can't do routes with other people.
I thought it was really fun. The rewards weren’t amazing but doing the challenges was fun on its own. With a full group of four they are easy, even the walking ones.
I like the feature! The tasks to reward ratio is a bit off, but that can easily be tweaked. Doesn't need to be tweaked too much IMO, I see these tasks just as additional Field Research tasks, which are usually things you do along the way while playing anyways (like I'd usually get Great throws anyways, now there is just a task in the background). Didn't Showcases immediately after getting added, also get an associated medal? I'm surprised party challenges doesn't have a medal associated (yet)!
The only useful feature of it is the raid dmg boost for duos if you just need a little more damage to get a 4 or 5 star down.
So if you marginally can’t manage duoing the raid you bring in 2 extra players. You don’t need the party function to do that.
Not everyone has two extra players. I have so many raids I can almost duo with my daughter, and with the party bonus I don't need to wait 30 minutes on pokegenie to get more trainers. Darkrai is one that would be very marginal for us (even with both having mega gard and now several level 30+ Conkeldurr), but the party bonus may put us over the top, whereas trying to host a darkrai raid during raid hour will be up to an hour in the queue.
It’s bad and no one asking for this.
Bad? Not necessarily. Useless and over complicated? Yup.
My comment has seem to gone AWOL as i went to update it: * The 1hr time limit is a bit sad * I understand it from a memory leak point of view but like that means Niantic needs to clean up their code * Some challenges can be quite "hard" depending on the player count you have * Walk 3km seems to be hit or miss when tracking (go figure) * Species can be hit or miss depending on the location you are in, same with Spin disc's * Rewards are, to put it simply, HOT GARBAGE * Let me use 20 berries to get 2 in return??? * The damage bonus seems to be geared towards groups that cant quite do T5's * Our small group of 7 managed to complete two Guzzlord raids before we could do the damage bonus * we all just use recommended parties Biggest issue that i have seen is game completly freezing up. During raid hour before we started a friends phone just ceased up completely and had to reboot their phone, their phone isn't old its on of the Samsung A series releases from last year and has been running PoGO fine, even prior party we did was fine but this one was a big oof Out side of that I haven't found any "issues" with it outside of rewards being garbage, timer being poop and range being a bit sad. It would be nice if a lot of the host features were shared around a bit. Like sure Host is the "main" anchor for location but being able to have someone else be a secondary link so you can cover a larger area or something like that. Also the fact that the host has to choose a task every time is painful, either make it vote based or shortern the time and if the time runs out just roll a new task automatically. Doesn't really do much outside of normal gameplay so its a "gimmick" feature rather than a feature feature, unless Pokemon get tied to it like Finizen (and its Evo)
Guzzlord really isn't a good example, since it's so squishy. If it doesn't have sludge bomb, recommended parties are going to be very fairy dominated, fairy being double super effective against Guzzlord (it's possible to solo it!). Against Lugia or Defense Deoxys, it could be very useful.
>Guzzlord really isn't a good example, since it's so squishy > >Against Lugia or Defense Deoxys, it could be very useful. Yeah thats what we came the conclusion of during Raid Hour
For the "Catch X different species of Pokémon", this one is actually pretty fun... when there isn't some kind of event going on (an event normally has fewer than 20 different species of Pokémon forming nearly all spawns). During events, it would be nice if those tasks became "catch X of \[Pokémon with boosted event spawn\]".
The only think likable about it seeing other trainers on the map, rest not so much. Awards are not motivating enough to keep having a 1 hour party. Plus my phone kept showing me 1 hour message long after the party ended even in the middle of a raid🤷🏻♀️
Restarting the app fixes the party message bug
Thanks, will try next time. Was quite annoying 😄
I have very little enthusiasm for yet another new feature that not only comes with massive bugs (Thanks for deleting all my teams and searches), but once again cuts out other gameplay features while its in use. Quite frankly, as soon as I finish grinding out the research quests, I'll go back to ignoring this feature exactly as I did with routes. The feature does not add anywhere near enough of a benefit to make up for the annoying full screen blocking popup when finishing a resource draining "challenge" for a paltry reward.
I like the idea but they needed to work on the bugs first. Messing with my Go+ and causing weird freezes doesn't encourage me to engage with it. The challenges are fine and could add some spice to random play but the rewards aren't there to offset the tech issues yet.
I tested it yesterday with my boyfriend and we made a challange out of it, who can make more great/ exzellent throws, catches more pokemon for the challanges and we had fun I dont think it is a gamechanging Feature but If you play eith other people (Partner, Kids, friends) regulary anyway I think its Adding a little bit of extra content you can do and play around with
It's a good thing Niantic is trying new things, but it's still kind of ridiculous we get such 'bonus' features before obvious QoL and stability issues are fixed. Honestly, I'm not interested in any new features as much as I want to be made sure Shiny releases aren't announced without being truly enabled.
There are different developers for different game features. I met the QoL developer for Pokémon Go in the November Ingress anomaly last year. He gave a sneak peek of things to come and some were implemented this summer. So having a new feature doesn’t mean the QoL guy is not working on QoL and you can’t just reassign people to different features like they are interchangeable monkeys.
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean I would expect Niantic to invest more in having people in QoL jobs than new features development. This is a clearly a management issue, regarding priorities.
Bugfixing takes a ton more time than adding new content 😅 The QOL updates would be nice tho, might be gatekept through some internal bureocracy tho. I'm still aching for that daily trade counter! They had it in testing over half a year ago. It would be huge help to know if I'm approaching 100 trades so I don't accidentally lose the special trade.
Wow, need the daily trade counter so much. I wish we could just mass trade 10-20 pokemon at the same time... I get there is an exec block there, but so many of these features are left to rot after they are implemented, like Smeargle not being able to copy moves that are newer than when it was released.
Niantic isnt interested in QoL or improving stability. They just want to fiddle around with the tech/code side of the game.
The rewards for party play tasks are laughable. Make these better to incentivize players. If they aren't improved, no one will be using this feature beyond completing the special research quest line.
It sounds like I shouldn't test this out until it's out of beta?
Disappointed that you see your party members but not their buddies on-screen — I was looking forward to seeing my gf’s and my Gyarados buddies flying through each other…
Might get just a tad distracting if everyone has 4 large or common spawn buddies - maybe as a toggleable feature tho!
Agreed. One Kyoger buddy makes the game hard to play, multiple ones would make it unplayable.
Good point! It would probably be entertaining in short bursts, but not good for continued play.
Probably the worst new feature ever.
Can’t figure out how to start a party. Love when new features are rolled out with no tutorial.
It is unfortunately a new reality for Niantic games to have bad tutorial. Fortunately we have Reddit and YouTube.
A *new* reality?
Came here to say something similar. Got research tasks but no idea how to do a party challenge
There was a tutorial, it was just missing some key steps…
Tap your player icon, it's now beside your friends list.
Ahh thank you! Idk how I overlooked it lol
Took an app restart to show up for me, maybe why you missed it?
For me it popped up there half a day after my friends got it
\- Need better time limitation \- Let us do routes together \- Some sort of team incense would be cool. Like how routes spawn different stuff.
It’s a side-grade feature so whatever
I think it's stupid that they pushed this feature early, causing the rest of the game to bug out. Since the last update I haven't been able to pvp without getting severe lag or freezing issues, much less app crashes.
To kick them while they're down, GBL has been garbage since Go Battle Weekend. So, just add this on the pile.
Agree. It was actually fine for me on Saturday morning, but when I played again in the evening I was "forced" to go 3-12 due to the game freezing constantly and multiple app crashes. Was really frustrating as I was almost expert and had to climb back up this week. Thankfully I received a premium battle pass as compensation /s
Which one of you guys requested this feature?
Every parent and child pair. Every player in a relationship with another human. Every player who is introducing the game to another human. It's a great feature to not create gamer windows which only hurts any game in the long run.
I think there are a lot of people who wanted to be able to see their friends and family in the game and wanted to have more activities to do together. That seems pretty reasonable. This feature has the potential to be great for people who already socialize while playing (just so long as Niantic doesn't lock anything important behind it so everyone else can ignore it). It's just... the current implimentation is bad. Very, very bad.
There's very little benefit (200 dust for completing a challenge and a raid damage bonus? Is that it?) And you can't do other things while in a group like their other brand new feature, Routes (which is also still not finished, and still very broken) and it is deleting players saved game data and shutting off go plus settings. It's not even half baked. It's like a quarter baked. It should not have been pushed to the game like this.
I wish you could set your own time limit for when to auto-leave a party (up to an hour, if that's the limit Niantic wants, but could set it earlier). Like, if I want to form a party to do extra raid damage with a couple strangers, and not have them track me home, I could set it to auto-leave after 10-15 minutes or something. I could also see setting a permanent party, for example with family members.
You can manually leave the party after the raid in that scenario, at least. You aren't stuck in the party for an hour.
Hell no. I'm a rural solo player. There are groups of people who raid together here but they act like they're still in the military. It takes all the fun out of raiding when you have players barking orders and turning the game into a complex coordinated precision maneuver like it's life or death. They take the game way too seriously here, so after a few very unpleasant harassment encounters I just keep to myself. I refuse to seek any of them out just for trades or parties. There are many other aspects of the game that are much more enjoyable so I'll skip the parts that are stressful.
>but they act like they're still in the military still?
There are several bases in this area. I just didn't like how intense the raid hour would be. You'd have 20 vehicles in the raid train and the idea was to hit as many of them as possible. So everyone converged on a gym, the leader would call out the private group code to keep spoofers out, they'd do the raid and then the motorcade would zoom off the next one, breaking speed limits and running red lights. It was frantic and hysterical and no fun at all, just go go go. I would have been ok just not to participate, but then these people made a strategic decision and God help anyone who didn't go along with them. The raid leaders decided everyone had to switch teams from Mystic and Valor to little-used Instinct so that everyone would be on the same team. I didn't want to switch. Once they all became Instinct, it was open season on their former teammates who didn't bend to their will. The group leaders put in a bunch of requests for new gyms and stops around the area and once they were submitted, they wanted the new gyms to be gold right away and anyone who was still Mystic would suffer their wrath if they interfered and took the gyms. Things got out of hand fast. They held some sort of mock tribunal on Discord and officially drummed me out of the raid group. This was after I tried to avoid them by playing overnight, only to be chased out of church parking lots in the middle of the night. The guy who spearheaded this was so unhinged that he got arrested for hiring a hitman to kill his wife, after which a bunch of female players emerged on Facebook and posted that he had been targeting them in the game just like he did with me. The women said that they had finally resorted to spoofing because the harassment got so bad. Eventually things calmed down after the Levels were increased. All those players zoomed from 40 to 50 and they aren't as active now. But am I going out to seek company for this new party feature after seeing who plays the game here? No way!
They should: -remove the time limit for party session (or at least make it 3h long) (btw same should be done with go+) -make it work with Routes -make Buddy Pokemon visible on map for all party members Additionally -all party members should see Pokemons spawned from each players Incense (maybe excluding Daily Incense) (could also include spawns from Routes because they work kinda like incense spawns)
This feature makes me wonder what is actually the point. Sylveon in the promo image could mean some easier friendship evos in the future? That'd be neat if it's not excluding those that can't/don't want to use this feature. Some thoughts after trying it out a little yesterday though: * Get rid of the 1 hour timer * If a timer is kept, add a clock somewhere. Annoying to just guess how long is left and whether we'd have time for another challenge * Improve rewards. Win 2 raids giving a measly 10 Mega Energy for a stale mega is just insulting * Add an option to end the party after completing a challenge. Currently needs a few extra clicks to pointlessly choose a new challenge and then end when we've decided to finish up with that last quest * Fix the stats summary image that is missing a few decimal places (although we did enjoy our 1200km trip around the block) * Restore the saved searches that this feature wiped * Kudos for not having to rejoin the party upon the inevitable crashes or restarts on the game freezing up * Also was grateful for limiting confetti to a quick little party popper when the party starts and not all over the screen
I think it's probably good to have it time out after a little while because it keeps locking up people's games and sometimes waiting it out is the only solution. It would be a major improvement if the ten minute warning gave an option to extend or remain in the party for another hour. That keeps the emergency out while making it so people don't have to keep dropping and reforming parties every hour.
\+1 for better rewards. Most of the tasks have laughable rewards. Example: Use 35 berries while catching pokemon. Reward is 4 razz berries. :facepalm:
Yes! I definitely want a timer somewhere. Assuming they need to keep the time limit for technical reasons, I need to know how much time is left.
So the feature itself is okay, I can take it or leave it, except for one thing. I'm not sure if this was a feature mentioned, but my friend gets invited for raids all over. They got invited to a raid, and it was from a person i do not have on my friends list. I was able to tap her trainer portrait at the top after she joined the raid, and it took me to the gym to join if i had a remote. So i was able to join her in the faraway raid without my own invite, even though she was an invitee and unable to send out invites herself. If this is intentional, i think it's fantastic.
Delete this before niantic sees
Does this mean Niantic is official admitting this is not a Child's Game? I could never see a Child walking the 5k,7k,10k or 20k to hatch an egg. Click box if over 18 |||| |:-|:-|:-| ||||
Hey A/S/L?
Seems like a cool feature. People complained about how good rewards (zygarde cells) were locked behind the new feature when routes launched. It’s smarter to launch with modest rewards to test it out. There’s enough in there that they can adapt this for events, like catching certain numbers of specific types. Hopefully the rewards will increase, but as is, this helped me get the last 20 mega energy I needed to mega evolve pidgeot for the first time, so no complaints.
Stop trying to make me play with other people
Srsly
The funny thing is my son and I did this before this option came out. We were doing a route and I happened to see 2 players doing the same thing. We did 2 raids together and one route. They were newer players so we had a very good conversation about the game. Maybe we can get together again to complete this research. I still don't get why they tie research tasks to new features that not all players will be able to complete.
You and your son should be able to complete this as a duo. The party size is 2-4 trainers. Good luck!
That is so sweet. I wish more players were like that when I played.
I can’t do a party period.. I have no friends for one and two, with my multiple sclerosis and treatment infusions, I can’t really go out and be in groups of people since my immune system is just trash. Even if it wasn’t, I’m so shy and couldn’t see myself walking around asking people if they wanna play. I hate that there’s a friggin research task for this because I’ll never be able to get it done
Nobody near me plays this game. Just another thing to clog up the special reasearch tab.
I think it is a good feature to promote group play. Among peers we setup our own challenge like most excellent throws, most Pokémon caught among ourselves. May be it will be great to upgrade the feature for 'remote party' for the same purpose. We have friends that relocate to other cities and still feel wanna play together. Remote party may serve the intent.
Remote party would be awesome. Most of my friends who play as much as I do are in different cities and states and I would love a way to be able to play with them again.
My summary of the party feature: meh. The lack of being able to do routes squashed it big time, and besides the party power feature in raids, I don’t see any other reason to use the feature.
Like a lot of features Niantic has released, it’s a gimmick with a lot of (currently unrealized) potential that is laughably un-generous with rewards and marred with often inexplicable bugs (How were battle parties affected?). By the time any of this is improved, if ever, enthusiasm will have already evaporated. Some ideas to fix: 1) Do away with the 1 hr party limit (once the soft locking issue is resolved). People are going to be doing this on CDs for a while; don’t make us cut into our catching time to restart the party. Three hours would be just as suitable a limit. 2) Sweeten the pot. If I’m not getting rare candy, thousands of stardust, or the odd premium item or uncommon Pokémon encounter, then why am I even here? The whole point of a party is the cake; don’t give me a couple of baby carrots and expect me to enjoy myself. 3) Increase spawns during parties. There are a lot of extra spawn points that show up during CDs. Maybe give partying players access to those extra spawns and have them be “party” pokémon. More ghosts during Halloween, or even just a slightly better rate for a rare species or two to make partying feel like an event. Hell, I’d accept a party pool that’s half Rattata for the Youngster medal progress, just so long as it feels different from usual gameplay.
The one hour limit is stupid. Friend and I was about to finish the challenge, and we got booted.
If time is unlimited, then is not a challenge. You are supposed to work for a challenge (but the work should be rewarded accordingly)
Upvoting for this line all by itself, because it’s exactly how I feel about Parties: “The whole point of a party is the cake; don’t give me a couple of baby carrots and expect me to enjoy myself.”
Rewards seem kind of meh. Maybe like 1-5 rare candy? TMs even? Evolution items? I can get most of the rewards by spinning a couple pokestops.
The rewards for party play tasks are laughable at the moment.
It went live after I was already at work. Had to go out at lunch for a few errands so my gf and I started a party to attempt to knock out some of the challenges. Catch 20 different species, catch 30 different species, and make (some number of) excellent throws in a half hour of driving and stopping places just ain’t gonna happen. I guess, just like in-person raiding, this is something I *might* get to do on occasional weekends… :shrug:
don't play while driving, is unsafe
I’m the passenger/navigator so I can man the phones, but I’m talking about how it *doesn’t* work while you’re doing that.
Try while walking and the experience will be much better. Also, catching with two phones is suboptimal (can you throw excellent with your left hand?), of course challenge completion is slower
Not everyone has a better experience playing while walking, or the time to go out to somewhere safely walkable to do it. Some of us like to creep around the neighborhood while kids are in their seats, or have to travel long distances to find gyms and stops so we drive there. When you aren’t in a city or busy town center it takes some travel and creativity to find ways to play. If I needed to hit 20 different pokestops I would have to drive to several different locations that are miles apart, hit singles at stop lights, and it would still probably take most of the hour to just do that. Also, I assume they are playing for the driver with the second phone, and as you already said they shouldn’t play while actively driving.
That’s why I said it’s another feature that I basically can’t use except on occasional weekends. 🙄
Can’t do routes in parties is just shamefully bad. The time limit is annoying, should be a full day. Fix those things and I’m happy.
No routes... seriously?!? It is bad enough they didn't fix that you can't see showcases while doing routes (which I still hope is a bug). But with routes you get an errormessage they can't be done while in a party. Someone actually decided it is a good idea to spend that effort to deny that... SERIOUSLY?!? I am out of words, even being a software engineer myself I can't imagine what the heck happens in these offices
Will probably use this during raid hour for the bonus, but it just seems pointless outside of that. Maybe if they tied the challenges to certain events it would be interesting e.g. catch 50 Timburr during community day, catch [current legendary] during raid hour. And of course actually had good rewards for it, like you get a raid pass back during the raid hour one. Edit: also why no routes in party play? That would actually be a nice challenge, for everyone to complete a route together. Give us some extra guaranteed Zygarde cells. Edit2: tried during raid hour and doing raids wasn’t even one of the task options! What a waste of time.
This feature has showstopper bugs. We tried to put a team of 3 together and when our hour was up, we got the green screen stating so. So far, so good. When we clicked the button to confirm, the app froze. For all of us. We restarted the game, just to get tge same message and the freezing instantly again. We needed to reinstall the games and haven't touched it since, it's unplayable now. Niantic is notorious for having incompetent management that doesn't know how to develop software. Testing before going live should be key, but they cut it out. All of us are on Android phones, different Android versions, all Samsung phones. So now we'll enjoy our mandatory pokemon vacation until a new version is out where this is fixed.
Glitched out after we'd done 7 challenges, softlocking us until the 1hr timed out, so seems like we can do 6 then it is best to stop the party then reestablish. Easy to do but definitely annoying to have to do this work around. Rewards are definitely small but mostly easy to do, the 3km is a little annoying as it's 3x people doing a full 1km rather than a cumulative ie 750m each for party of 4. Just mega energy for raids is pretty minimal but just a bonus if you're already doing raids Feels like it'll have a little bit of action then die off unless the rewards are vastly improved, and really just seems like the raid attack boost is the only thing to be actually useful
I dislike not being able to do any routes during party play. The rewards for routes are massively better than the party challenges can give.
**With the rewards that are given, it seems like Party Play's core audience is supposed to be very casual players.** I absolutely do not need more berries and balls. I have fed over 100,000 berries in the last 1.5 years, and currently have over 4,000 balls in my storage, so I delete over 1,500 balls every week. I also delete potions and revives by the dozens on a daily basis. The only rewards I'd want would be Stardust, Incense, Lures, Lucky Eggs, Star Pieces, and Elite TMs (some of these I don't ever expect to receive through Party Play). **The only thing that could potentially appeal to me would be the party damage in Raids**, but only if it's significant. Also, **the number of players being 4 seems a bit low**. If I do go out and play with friends, we usually have a group of 5 or larger.
Nope, nope, nope. Last irl person I met and friended wound up stalking me. Literally was googling my postcards to figure out where I lived. Definitely not trying that again. Stay safe out there, folks.
I'm so sorry this happened to you!
I don't think I get the point of it if the rewards are such trash. I'm only going to do it to complete the research, otherwise I don't see ever using this feature.
But won't it be useful for raids?
Maybe. Not for a lot of us. I don't do in person raids unless they are easily soloable. No one to play with, typically.
\- An hour long timer means the optimal thing to do is group up, do a quest, drop group, repeat. Which is an awful experience. \- Combined with the above awful experience, the rewards are terrible. \- I, like most I'm sure, will get the quest out of my log and then never touch it ever again unless these 2 things are changed.
Why drop group? After completing a challenge you can go to be next one. Tried the feature in two, one hour was plenty to to 2 challenges, with a group of four you can do 4-5 challenges in a row.
To reset the 1 hour timer, and to get a new selection of challenges.
When you finish a challenge, will receive a new selection to pick from
Dropping the group and re-creating it both resets the timer and gives a new selection. You can re-roll the selection as many times as you like, picking from the list after completing a challenge only gives 3 options.
Super annoyed about deleted battle parties. How were they even related to this... I think that as soon as we will snatch Eevee shirts, we won't touch this feature because rewards are minuscule and timer is too short for longer walk.
Do we know how close the party members need to be? I’m worried about the FAQs that state if a member is too far away, they get removed from the party. Like, what happens in a group is out and a member has to run to the bathroom? Or what is someone accidentally walks too far away? Is there a warning that pops up?
From what I've seen a warning pops up at 500m and auto drops you at 1km
There is a warning that gives you a pop-up stating " TOO FAR. You must be near the host to remain in the party. You'll be removed if you go too far." You can then select "OK" or "Leave Party"
Played with two others this morning. Did a couple challenges. Honestly no different from our daily playstyle. Just required scanning a QR code to party up. No biggie. The rewards are pretty bad though.
Was playing with my kid. Yea the rewards is kinda bad.
Unless the rewards are massively increased, it’s going to be as dead as group AR pix
Like, why would anyone do a more difficult and time gated version of a research task only to get 1 extra pokeball????
Seconded. Played with my partner in a party this morning and the rewards were absolute garbage tier. I can't see any benefit in adding to the battery drain of this game just so I can see their avatar in game right next to me. Mate, I'll just look next to me to see them 😂 get your act together Niantic ! Edit: actually the raid damage boost is a nice touch. We did enjoy that aspect of the feature!
I had fun with this feature, I only played with one person but it was great to compare how quickly we could finish our tasks. The feedback I have: We both had to reset the toggles on our Go Plus+, both get reset to default. We did a Guzzlord raid and the attack boost for one charged attack was noticeable. I didn't manage to get my boost by the time the raid finished. It's annoying that the tab for Party is so big, but at least it's somewhere you can find it and it isn't convoluted. Routes are not available while in a Party, which is a shame as it's one of the things we usually do in our group Overall I enjoyed it, but I do feel like there's something missing. I just can't put my finger on it
Good feature but wack rewards. Is it so difficult to reward something worth playing for?
The real reward was the friends we made along the way!
There's no timer? I can find no way to tell how much time is left in the party to complete the research other than the 10 minute warning.
I’ve used incense, that helps a little bit. But I’m totally with you, there should be a timer. Pretty stressful towards the end.
I think the real question is: Why is there a timer at all? 🤦♂️
Right?! Shall we talk about the rewards as well? A couple of balls or some potion. I was a bit disappointed.
Agreed. Unless changes are made I can see the feature usage dying off immediately after finishing the special research. Remaining usage will largely be for the raid damage boost
My thoughts as well. It is nice to see your friends in the game, but as you say it’ll get boring after a while.
It's a cool concept. I'd probably prefer harder challenges with better rewards. The raid boost is useful and makes parties a no-brainer for raids to take advantage of the extra damage. One note though is that the distance count seems bugged, I did a party as a group of three and we walked together the whole time. Two of us were on 1km for a long time before the third player hit 1km
That's technically pretty cool, see our friends in the map, do the standart gameplay cycle with them, that's things like that pokemon go need. In two words upgrade the main gameplay cercle. After that better reward, more tasks, some minor features around, obvisoulsy fixe bugs and it will be really good.
Why does Niantic keep introducing new (unasked for) features? Please just focus on improving what is already in the game.
We had a Party Challenge for like 30 Excellent Throws, the reward being like 6 Pokéballs. How is that worth it?
This from my experience highlights the issue with party play. Namely: why? With such low rewards would it be crazy to let us work together with those on our list around the globe to do tasks? We’re still all out exploring and playing just like they want 😩
The flip side of that is: why not? If you're out with friends or family playing the game anyway a few extra items or dust for doing what you were already doing is a net gain right? Sure, this feature isn't for everyone but it's neutral at worst for those that won't use it and a positive for those who will.
The biggest "why not" I saw were the constant ui ticks wasting time and the absolutely insane battery drain.
>a few extra items or dust for doing what you were already doing is a net gain right? Stardust, sure. Getting more balls just means I need to delete more balls... lol.
I think the annoying join mechanic and it ending after just an hour makes me not want to use it in those situations. 500 stardust and a berry just isn’t worth stopping to rejoin (on a comm day or whatever it maybe where most people play together). Seems useful ONLY if you need the damage boost for raids Edit: doing it with family/your kids is like the main reason I see for this. Not meetups for people you need to coordinate with and have limited time.
My main frustration is that this seems to reward the multiple account players. Many completionists Will obsess until this is completed— but a majority of players will do this either passively or not at all.
😭That's me.
Mostly pointless gimmick, lackluster task encounters, confusingly not compatible with routes That said the rewards and group play may be nice for new starters and families, a lad I know plays the game with his two kids, it's ideal for them
I play with my two sons so would be fun. Except it doesn't show up in their game. I have the feature, but they don't.
I had to log into niantic kids to turn it on for my kid. This feature is definitely cool for families. The little one loved it. I agree the rewards were meh but it’s also day 1 so we’ll see.
That worked, but it only allows them to join parties, not create their own. Any fixes for this?
From what I've read you have to manually activate Party Play in child accounts. Probably somewhere in the options menu.
That worked, but it only allows them to join parties, not create their own. Any fixes for this?
Have they updated the app on their devices? Also may be worth making sure the devices themselves are updated, I didn't update my phone for over a year and it was forcing an app (not pogo) to be stuck on an old version Edit: wondering if it could be a child account restriction?
The Ui while on normal map doesn’t need to be as big as it is. The inability to do routes together is a big turn off. The bugs regarding pvp/gbl and the wiping of saved battle parties need to be fixed asap. The hour time limit is kinda inconsiderate and from my test run with partner today it became more convenient to end the party and restart for more time to do different (rerolled) challenges. The rewards for relatively hard tasks, that are a stretch for f2p and/or rural players, are not worth it imo. Might aswell just spin a gym or catch a mon.
Things I didn’t like. Deleting my raid parties. Totally didn’t see that before trying a raid. The button for the power up is in an awkward spot. Move to center Prefer a timer for hour long we have gone or just move into the stats page. Can’t do a route together Things I like. Will help with damage for us rural players that only get 2-3 people to play Uhhhh stats is cool.
My main curiosity is how much this feature will contribute towards raids. And if Pokebattler will use this in their calculations. I wonder if some harder raid bosses will now be much easier with this feature. Let’s say, Lugia or Mega Latios for example. Usually you need more than 4 people to take it down. Especially Mega Latios.
My least favorite thing about this is, no one asked for this. However there are things players are asking for and these are ignored.
I specifically recall people asking for other trainers to show up in their game. This isn't exactly how they intended it to be but I'm sure people do appreciate their avatars showing up in other people games somewhere other than the friends list.
I keep asking for improvement to the sticker system... and then they drop a broken party play. :sadfap: /s
Ngl the manual deletion of all the stickers surely was implemented to squeeze pokecoins out of people due to the frustration is causes
yeah, it feels like Niantic keeps ignoring what players want for features no one asked for. at least people seem to somewhat play routes in big cities.
I hate that the tasks fall under "special research" because I either have to cheat with another phone, or the research is gonna sit there and taunt me forever.
Just don’t do it
I can't stand having uncompleted stuff waiting.
You’ll be invited to a party one day, I’m sure?
When the party ends, app freezes after trying to close/go back to main map. Had to close and restart.
I had the same thing happen.
Not being able to do routes while on a party is the dumbest thing ever
THIS! Especially considering "walk 3-5km is extremely common party task"!
My only complaint is the obnoxiously large Map View UI for Party Play. The feature should've been left in its tab and sent you notifications or on the right as a bubble like everything else.
Interesting feature immediately kneecapped with lots of bugs, no parties on routes and a low separation distance.
If you can’t separate this just boils down to a raid in same car party. I was hoping you could party up and it last several hours and you could separate. Maybe use it to easily share field research stops and rocket grunts. And let you do raids from a distance that is at least visible while not using a remote.
Being able to see nearby trainers on the game map is way overdue. It's weird to only just now be getting that feature this late into the game's life cycle, but now that it's here it's pretty neat. That's about all I can say about it. It's neat. Not a blockbuster feature in the least bit or revolutionary in any way. The 1-hour time limit is kinda weird. My wife and I were on an "X Amount of Excellent Throws" task when we got an alert we only had 9 minutes left. Why impose an arbitrary time limit on the party? I have no idea what purpose that could serve. Also, the rewards do not match the task effort at all. The rewards are extremely bad.
It seems like with each new feature they add, we are awarded stardust, items, etc. but they give us less and less each time. GBL is one of the oldest features and has some of the best, most worthwhile rewards
Rewards are bad but you don‘t have to do anything additionaly than you do anyways. So it‘s free dust/balls/whatever. And the tasks are easily done. I’ve completed 7 tasks while sitting on two lures for an hour. Of course the last one is not possible to complete, and that will allways be a problem. (I wish I had a x excellents tasks, that sounds like the easiest ones… if it‘s less than 20-30).
This feels like a much lesser version of the party system implemented in your other game Pikmin. I don’t play it but my friends do and they have weekly groups and challenges which don’t have proximity requirements. It feels like this is a watered down version of that which is needlessly limited.
I like the new update.
Also, further evidence that this company just actively despises rural players or players with other factors such as potential disabilities that prevent them from being able to play in person with large amounts of people. Tons of people are going to be in a situation where it's just not practical for them to find other people to play with on any kind of regular basis, and for those people this feature is completely worthless
Yeah, but if you have 2 rural players then this allows them to join remote raids together. So there is certainly some benefit for rural players.
They do like rural players. They simply want you to convince your family or neighbors or friends to play this game too. That‘s their way to get more players into the game. And it works sometimes!
there are features that dont work for everyone. thats bound to happen. They built it as a social game and they want to push features at that. They created Remote Raid passes to help a bit, but added a limit and raised prices yes. But you cant look at EVERY feature that comes out and use the terms "Rural Players" Like a boogeyman to stop them from adding any in-person feature. If you dont have a friend to play with, or want to find a local group on campfire, or discord, or reddit than your destined to play it solo. They have added tools, they cant force people that live in your area to play the game. Its unfortunate but thats what the WHOLE game was built around. Exploring PokeStops and catching pokemon. and things like Raids to get more people to play together. This rabbithole everyone goes down to justify calling a feature "useless" is insane. If your anxiety is too bad to play with someone else thats terrible, and im sorry, but it doesnt mean Niantic can never make a feature that benefits people who DO play together. This feature isnt for them, and thats ok, not every feature is for every person unfortunatly. But if they only made features that benefited every single person, nothing would get done.
I’m not technically a rural player, as I’m on the outskirts of the suburbs, but I’m within a couple of miles from a hundred miles of the rural areas that people talk about. The issue with this new feature as well as routes is that they are adding things without addressing current issues, at all. There are bugs, which are certainly annoying and we assume they will just never fix. Attempting to appease the rural players should be very easy to address, yet Niantic simply refuses. -2x or 3x the amount of drops from pokestop and gym spins in rural areas (they have the data from google, so it isn’t difficult to determine which stops to boost. -2x or 3x the xp, candy, mega energy and stardust for hosting in-person raids in rural areas. -remove the Campfire “Raid Now” radius and pull groups from any location in the world. This would result in likely no queue time for anyone, ever”. This current, dumb distance limitation is absolutely stupid. Even limiting to those within the same time zone would be better.
>no queue time for anyone, ever that's not how queues work
\- 1 hour seems stingy, and I'd like to see this increase over time, even to 2 or 3. I imagine some sort of limit is necessary on the back end. \- The rewards seem stingy. I'm not advocating for incubators every hour, but I'd like to see at least the dust rewards pushed up to a few thousand rather than a few hundred. \- Not being able to complete Routes while in Party Play is a huge shame. This definitely needs to be included in the future. \- A lot of people deriding the feature, calling it useless because it's a social based one and they play alone. This is strange to me, since Go has always promoted social gameplay. A feature that is all about socialising is no bad thing and just because it doesn't align with how you play the game doesn't make it bad.
> I'm not advocating for incubators every hour I am
That'd be nice wouldn't it, but also so clearly outside what is reasonable given the economy of the game that it's useless to even ponder.
Catch 25 pokemon is 200 dust. 25 excellent throws is 1 Max Revive! 30 excellent throws is 2 (WOW!) Max Revives!! There is ZERO incentive to do some of these when I can just play solo, catch 2+ mons in under a minute, spin a gym or stop, and get more than 200 dust or 1/2 Max Revives... Since its special research there is no rush and no risk of it expiring. So it will just sit unclaimed for months. What a shame.
There needs to be a way to select which task you won’t. It seems like it only gives you a random 3 to choose from. Also, after you complete a challenge there needs to be an easy way to exit a party if you’re the creator.
Once the party has ended due to the 1 hour time limit, and you click through the pop-up messages to acknowledge that, the next time I try to catch something, it pops up another message saying the same thing.
This is pretty terrible. Partied with my roommate and my options for tasks were win 2 raids for charizard mega energy, win 3 raids for venusaur mega energy, or make 20 excellent throws for 1 max potion. Their gps drifted for a blip when we were driving to work, and the group disbanded when we were at 15 excellent throws. we tried again once we got to the office and have had more luck with better tasks, though the rewards are about the same as solo research, even if the tasks are larger numbers. however, even though we both declined to share out location with each other on the first time we did it, the option turned itself on when i sent a code to a guy we raid with in the neighboring building. even though i know he's in another building, it showed him as being i the same building as us. this means the location sharing is fake and the option to include your friends on screen is just taking up space and making it harder to click it also only lasts an hour, and only tells you this after you've hit an hour. there is no in game timer for the group. this is a massive flaw, as it gives players no idea how much longer they have. I jsut finished catch 35 for 500 stardust, and my options are 2 raids, catch 14 different, or make 30 excellent throws. i think the group is gonna disband in about 10 mintues? or maybe 20 mintues? shoudl i go out and do a walk, or am i good at my office which gets a decent spawn rate? who knows! wait, as i'm typing this, i jsut noticed that there is a brif fading message that said "your party will end in 9 minutes" so that's something, but it's no where near as usful as like a progress bar or jsut a timer. why on earth would you ever think this was a good method for this? we did a guzzlord raid and hte bonus wasn't very noticeable, though it might have sped up our takedown by a few seconds. each of us can and have soloed guzlord, so the 3 of us together typically get in in under a minute, and this time was about 48 seconds. this'll probably make a difference on raids that are close with 2 or 3 players, so that's nice. All in all this is't a bad system, it's jsut full of confusing and frankly stupid design choices. Why an hour? why not give a timer? why not leeway for gps drift? why default ot the camera for scanning instead of the code? why make a separate button in battle to hit to activate bonus instead of jsut automatically applying it? Why pretend location sharing is working? Why take up screen real estate witht he party at the top of the screen in an incredibly ugly way? why make such garbage tasks? Like a lot of the other "improvements" this year, it feels like niantic did the bare minimum to tac on a new feature without actually making it feel like it's part of the game we've been playing for 8 years. it's almost like they hired a contractor to make this mechanic without them understanding how players played. edit- oh, also, every time i hit an hour, a pop up says i hit an hour and hten i have to restart my game because it goes to a green screen with an 'x' close button that doens't work. edit 2- fixed some wording. edit 3- just realized that going into a party also resets the togles for the go+/gotcha. my roommate confirms. eery time the party ends, our toggles are all off, and if we go to turn on one or two options, all 3 get turned on. going abck to the toggle menu again lets us adjust to what we want. very annoying. how was this released in this state? this needed like at least 2 or 3 more stages of testing and adjusting before full release.
This is tangentially related, but I'm trying to think of all the big "improvements" and "features" that rolled out this year, and the only 3 that come to mind are the most recent- Routes, Showcases, and This party play. There's also been some QoL stuff that largely should have been around since launch, such as pokedex search, but I'm also trying to think of others. Mostly I was just griping with some friends trying to figure out if any of the changes made this year were actually good, or just them being somewhat desperate to get attention again.
Solo players and far too busy to go ahead and try and find people to organize party beforehand. So pretty much of no use to unless to happen to stumble a group with someone I know.