Pokémon Go players are perplexed why Party Play has one big limitation

Pokémon Go finally has the Party Play feature, allowing friends to join exciting shared in-game experiences, but each of those fun-filled sessions apparently comes with a ridiculous time limitation.

Sharing a screenshot in a Reddit post on Oct. 16, a player named u/JesusUnlimited shed light on parties being limited to one hour, and it only begs the question, why Niantic?

In fact, Pokémon Go players can immediately start a new Party Play session after one ends, so it doesn’t make sense to many in the community. 

“Man, Niantic, I hate to break this to you buddy, but parties routinely last much longer. I just don’t think that people like your parties,” one player wrote, and as much as such jokes sound hilarious, we probably have to adjust to the time limitation anyway.

While most were busy pulling Niantic’s legs over its decision to limit Party Play sessions, a few players found slight logic behind the decision. 

“One thing (probably not intentional due to Niantic’s history in all their games) would be to help prevent accidental broadcasting of your location to strangers,” one player wrote, indicating that players might forget to switch off or leave their Party Play sessions and accidentally leak sensitive information in the process.

Another user stressed the importance of putting a time limitation on parties for performance optimization. 

“If there’s no limit, then you run into a situation where, if you stopped playing with your party, but you forgot to leave party play, the game would need to allocate memory to store all the party information until you physically click on the leave button,” they explained. 

Well, performance should definitely be a focus, for no one likes a lagging game of Pokémon Go. But players also highlighted a blaring issue with the time limitation.

“If you complete one task (such as 2 raids) in 50 minutes (for example) you get a ‘Select the next task,’ but AFAICT, you only have 10 minutes to complete it before the party ends,” one player pointed out. 

When a party ends, it resets the progress you make on a task. Say you were to collect 100 berries, and the party ends at a point where you have managed to collect 95. Unfortunately, you’ll be back to where you started. 

While the design problem with the time limitation to Pokémon Go’s Party Play is quite apparent, it’s unlikely Niantic will consider revising it anytime soon.