Niantic made their usual announcement regarding the most recent update to Pokémon Go, but it looks like they left a few things out. Most of these new things are really great for users, especially casual users, but you'll want to take note if you're a power player looking for the next best strategy.
Let's break this down.
No more gym sniping
I know, right?! Gym sniping is a thing of the past, which is either really good news or really bad news depending on how you play. From now on, when you take a gym there's a brief period of time where you are the only one who can claim a gym.
This means you're going to need to communicate a little better if you're taking a gym as part of a group if you want to avoid some arguments, but for the most part all this does is stop people from slipping their creature into your hard-fought gym while the animations finish out on the screen. While hilarious, it was kind of a jerky thing to do.
Daily bonuses!
Niantic will now reward you with some extra XP for logging into the game every day and doing things. The biggest place you'll see this matter is the First Catch of the Day. If you're up and catching Pokemon every day, you'll get a small bonus with your first catch. Do that for a week straight and you'll see even more bonus XP show up.
This is a small, fairly standard gesture to keep people from forgetting they have the game installed on their phone, but so few people only open the app to catch a single creature so this is a good way for Niantic to keep people playing for extended periods of time.
No playing while driving
When this game first launched, people playing while driving was a real problem. This hasn't been as big an issue since Niantic started popping up a warning in-game when you were going too fast to be running, but that clearly wasn't enough for someone.
Now when you exceed that magical 8mph threshold you'll notice everything disappears from your Nearby menu and it'll be much more difficult to check in to PokéStops while cruising. If you were still playing the game in some small way while driving before, it just got a lot harder. That's a good thing: you shouldn't be playing in your car anyway. On the other hand, winter is coming and people generally play outdoor games less when the weather is bad.
Ditto and Generation 2 Pokemon
The Silph Road found references to 100 new Pokémon that are not part of the game right now, and one of them is Ditto. That means a couple of things, all of which are fairly exciting.
For starters, we're getting second generation Pokémon sooner than expected. Right now that means more things to catch, but the inclusion of Ditto and its Transform ability in this batch means either Pokémon breeding is about to be a thing in the game or individual battles are about to be a thing in the game. There's not enough to speculate too far yet, but either will be very interesting.
What do you think?
Will these changes affect the way you play Pokémon Go? Do you even still play?
