Pokemon Go players convinced Niantic could learn big lesson from Runescape updates

Members of the Pokemon Go community have argued that developer Niantic should take cues from how Runescape handles updates.

While Niantic updates Pokemon Go fairly frequently, not all of those updates are received positively by the community. A recent example of this can be seen through the controversial avatar redesign update.

This update fundamentally changed how many players avatars looked, and trainers were not able to roll back the changes after the update went live.

To avoid potential fan backlash in the future, some members of the Pokemon Go community argued that the developer should handle updates like Old School Runescape.

In a post on the Pokemon Go subreddit, one player explained how this method of updating the game could work.

Imagine if Pokemon GO took the Oldschool Runescape -approach to updating the game:
byu/Foulmouth232 inpokemongo

Here’s how their suggestion goes: Niantic would release potential ideas that the team would want to implement into Pokemon Go through the official blog. These blog posts would include a poll where the community could vote on changes, and changes that reached 75% in favor or over would be made official.

The trainer also posited that those participating in polls would need to be level 35 or higher, as they would have more experience with Pokemon Go compared to a newer fan.

For those who may not know, this is a common update method that developer Jagex uses for Old School Runescape. Considering that game has been going strong for decades, they’re certainly on to something.

Many fans in the comments agreed with the OP and said gathering and listening to player feedback would go a long way.

“I think about this a lot. It’s not that difficult to get player feedback,” said one trainer, while another said, “In a perfect world…”

However, this idea did get pushback from some fans, with some arguing the player base doesn’t even know what it wants out of Pokemon Go sometimes.

One player said, “IMO it’s not really applicable to Pokemon Go and I think it’s a slippery slope if we end up in a situation where we expect games to have to run every update past the playerbase, especially as players can often be wrong about what is best for the health of the game.”