After the recent Pokemon GO update, it is an understatement to say that the Pokemon GO community has lost track of their minds. As meteoric as the rise of Pokemon GO has been, the backlash after the recent update is equally cataclysmic.
Here are some of the best memes, images and videos showing the community reaction. Many of these are from Reddit /r/pokemongo and Imgur, as both are hotbeds of player reactions — but taken out of the context of upvoting, there is a narrative created by all the memes, images, and video.
Leading off with the obvious observation:
If you were not familiar with gamers, or are more cynical about them than I, you might think: “Wow, it’s just the removal of the visible side of a bug.” However, there is more to it. They also banned the trackers that were, for some, allowing players to still track Pokemon. As one of the developers of Pokevision put it:
The issue underlying all of this, that has gone relatively unmentioned, is that Niantic has been communicating with their players through very limited means. Essentially, the line of communications is a few PR pieces on sites like Forbes and their release notes. The Forbes piece was dismissive of a large part of the community, which Terms of Service compliant or not was acting as a release valve for the players — and the release notes at times have been inconsequential. On top of that there has been no direct to the player base communication addressing anything at all. Which leads to things like this:
So, with the patch notes and PR pieces Niantic seems to be saying:
And players feel like they are saying:
Whether that is true or not remains to be seen, but the rage is real and Niantic needs to get their community managers and communications in gear. Players are OK with bugs, they are OK with missing features, they are OK with waiting. They are not OK with being treated like they are an afterthought of the game development process. They don’t like being treated as a goal of that process, instead of a stakeholder in it. When they feel like that, you get this in the heads of players:
And the players feel like this guy is running the show:
And as that rage builds you get an overflow of memes and videos, like these:
And this:
Regardless there seems to be some pretty tone deaf news out there:
While the rage continues on:
The players feel like Niantic is being a bit of a bully and the game has lost some purpose:
The controversy has led to Google updating their help info for the play store:
After all that, hope is not lost:
The fans are still looking to the future:
Have anything to add about the Pokemon GO server controversy? Put it in the comments below!
