Pokemon GO Trading System Details Explained
Trainers worldwide are expecting the new trading feature to go live for Pokemon GO. However, this hasn’t yet come to pass, and it’s nowhere on the horizon. However, we do have some details that the people behind the wheel have dropped. Based on this, we can speculate how the trading system in Pokemon GO might work once it does come out.
As was reported by Polygon, Tatsuo Nomura, senior product manager, revealed some details about Pokemon GO trading at the Game Developers Conference. What he said might come as a bit of a disappointment to some. Namely, he said that we won’t be able to trade Pokemon over the Internet. Instead, the person you want to trade with will have to be close by. In his own words:
“Trading won’t be through the internet. You shouldn’t be able to exchange your Pokémon with someone who is 100 miles away from you. … The person needs to be in your proximity.”
This might come as somewhat of a surprise to trainers. What most people expected was that we’d be able to trade Pokemon with players all over the world. Unfortunately, this won;t be the case, it seems. At best, we can hope to trade Pokemon with travelers visiting our respective countries. It’s understandable that Niantic wants player interaction to be paramount. Not to mention that trading over the Internet could easily break the game, since everybody could theoretically fill their Pokedexes in a very small time span.
However, this does leave people who live in more rural settings, as well as in countries that aren’t popular travel destinations, a little bit in the dust. To be fair, Niantic has taken care to increase spawn rates in areas away from urban centers, but still. Nomura addressed this point as well.
“I wasn’t really thinking of trading as a way to solve the local area spawn issue. That was more, we have a couple Pokémon that only spawn in a couple regions, and that was the hope, that some Pokémon you have to know someone or find someone who lives in certain regions and meet and exchange. We don’t want to just have that be an online game that you can just exchange virtually.”
Of course, as always, there’s the ever-present issue of spoofers and other cheaters. We don’t have any specific information as to how Niantic will combat this problem, but we do know that they have it in mind.
“We’re still trying to come up with an answer [to trading] that makes sense so it doesn’t kill the game. If we fail this, we can easily kill the game.”
The bottom line is, we know that two trainers who want to trade will have to be in proximity of each other. Maybe even right next to each other. Then, they’ll probably have to access a menu and select which Pokemon to trade. In short, it all sounds pretty evocative of the earliest days of Pokemon, when we had to physically connect two Game Boys. There’s no hint of when this feature will finally be up, but when it does, we’ll see if any of these predictions are right.
What are your thoughts on the trading system in Pokemon GO? How do you think it will work? Tell us in the comments!
