The Pokémon World Championships is the biggest stage for everything competitive in Pokémon, and Pokémon GO is taking part for the first time in London in 2022 – but unfortunately, it’s embarrassing itself in front of everyone.
Ever since the GO Battle League was added as a feature to Pokémon GO about two years ago, bugs and connection issues have plagued the PvP mode. Competitive fans keep trying to force a response from developer Niantic, who keeps communicating a willingness to work on the mode, but in reality, it seems the California-based company just can’t get a handle on the plague of errors.
After Pokémon GO already attracted the wrong kind of attention at the Pokémon 2022 European Championships in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, which took place in April, due to a host of technical glitches harrying the competition, Niantic paused the ranking of the GO Battle League for a season to work intensively on the PvP mode. They probably wanted to polish and stabilize it primarily to get it esport-ready for the big show in London.
We can now safely call that an utter failure. The very first day of the World Championships brought the next wave of embarrassment: the first games of the Last Chance Qualifiers got delayed for two hours because the competitors had to deal with so much lag at the venue, that they couldn’t start playing. The nine games scheduled for the first day took players up to seven hours to complete – usually, a trainer battle lasts only a few minutes, but people had to re-connect again and again to even get started. This has been a known issue for big Pokémon GO events for years at this point, so how it could take the organizers by surprise is quite unfathomable. And if they didn’t care, well, that’s even worse.
In addition, the participants had to throw virtually all competitive integrity overboard once they actually got into their matches: the connection problems meant that some of the players’ inputs were simply not registered. Attack commands didn’t go off at all or were delayed, which is disastrous – in Pokémon GO’s battles, victory or defeat often depends on executing attacks at the perfect time in order to make effective use of the monsters’ energy budget. Strategies are planned with razor-thin energy margins in mind. You can forget about all that when half your moves aren’t even registered by the game. Imagine you’re a player and you’re close to making it into the World Championships – and then you’re facing problems like this, tanking your chances.
If Niantic and The Pokémon Company really want to push Pokémon GO as a serious competitive game with esports potential, why are they not holding all of the World Championships on a separate server and with wired connections, as is the standard with offline events for many competitive titles? They even used a separate network for the games shown on stream, so why not give everyone competing there an equal chance to have optimal playing conditions?
For the community, it’s a big mystery. If Niantic and TPC want Pokémon GO to be a staple in the esport space for mobile games instead of the farce it is now, they need to take it seriously – or just leave it be entirely. This half-baked approach certainly is not working out and can only lead to further embarrassment down the line.
The Pokémon GO community and the competitors deserve better.
Let’s concentrate on some positive news to end this: while the World Championships aren’t going well, the in-game event accompanying the competition is going as planned, with Research Tasks and raid battles against the Legendary Pokémon Zacian and Zamazenta being available to tackle.
Written by Marco Wutz on behalf of GLHF.