Pokémon Go’s Battle League feature has been on the receiving end of several severe issues over the summer that have impacted gameplay and hindered the player experience. At one point, the entire feature was removed from the game for a week while Niantic worked on some of the biggest issues in the competitive mode.
The developers never pointed out exactly what was being abused within Battle League, but now, they’re updating everyone on several known issues within the mode and how they’re approaching it “in pursuit of improved transparency.”
In the update, Niantic said the Battle League is one of the most difficult parts of the game to fix because fixing one part of the “battle logic” can lead to several, smaller bugs popping up as a result. This happened in June when a fix during June’s Battle League outage caused many of the current Charged Attack, desync, and switch bugs.
As of now, the developers are increasing the quality-assurance testing of the Battle League to try to resolve issues within the complicated systems before they’re pushed out. This will be done by bringing in more QA testers and automating tests for the more simple and routine tasks to free up more time for in-depth testing.
The Known Issues page that Niantic also uses for feedback was brought up. The developers said they’re actively looking into which issues appear on the general Known Issues page and how it’ll be updated in the future. A separate page will also be created for the Battle League to separate general issues from the more specified ones.
Niantic closed the update with a promise to continue listening to feedback while also improving how it takes in and communicates information about future issues.
“We are dedicated to continuously improving the Pokémon Go gameplay experience and will do so by making changes to our internal processes (such as testing) and communication (such as the Known Issues page,” Niantic said. “We hope that these next steps will help address those issues.”
