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Niantic rolled back some of the pandemic era changes to Pokémon Go in the US and New Zealand on Sunday, including reducing the distance you need to be from actual physical locations of Pokéstops and Gyms to interact with them. The company announced the changes in June and decided to move forward with its plans, despite the backlash from the changes.
The distance you’ll need to find yourself from actual locations is effectively halved as part of the new update, from a maximum of 80 meters (around 262 feet) for interacting with a Pokéstop, to 40 meters from origin of play (approx. 131 feet), depending on Sport point. There were several reasons for Niantic to originally double the distance, from reducing overcrowding during a pandemic, to simply making it a bit easier to collect items without theoretically having to leave your house. The change didn’t reinvent the game, but gamers saw the increased interaction distance as a valuable accessibility improvement that is now gone.
Niantic has also changed the effectiveness of Incense and the number of gifts you can receive in-game from your Pokémon Buddy. As part of its changes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Niantic has made the Incense item attracting pokemon more effective across the board, but now that will only be while you move around. Buddy Pokémon gifts have also been increased up to five gifts at a time up to three times per day as part of the Niantic changes, but now the company says “the frequency of these Buddy Pokémon gifts will be reduced” afterwards. the latest update.
Adjustments like these start to make Pokémon Go return to its pre-pandemic state, although Niantic plans to keep other changes in the process, such as an increase in inventory size. Ranged raids, the ability to participate in great battles with legendary pokemon without having to be there physically, also persist. However, Niantic plans to tweak the pop feature slightly to $ 0.99: according to Niantic, “in the future, trainers joining the raid remotely will do less damage than trainers joining in person.”
Collectively, it looks like the changes are aimed at pushing players back into the world and playing more in person, which makes sense given Niantic’s bread and butter. is collection of location data. The timing is just a little unfortunate. COVID-19 cases are on the rise again in the United States due to the delta variant, and finding reasons to congregate in large groups to collect pocket monsters probably shouldn’t be at the top of the list.
You can see the full list of changes for Pokémon Go on the Niantic website.
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