Pokémon Go players are tired of one feature ‘holding you hostage’

While Pokémon Go players are hungry for XP all the time, some go the extra mile to farm it by abusing the game’s mechanics, and it’s apparently hurting innocent players who are just looking to complete friendship goals.

A player named 1Lstgermain turned to the Pokémon Go community on Reddit for answers when they ran into multiple players refusing to advance their friendship level for months.  “Why do people consistently open and send gifts until you’re 1 day away from being BF, then stop?” they inquired.

“I have 3 people on my friends list right now like this. I thought they might be waiting for us both to be online to Lucky Egg it, but we’ve been on the same time multiple times now, and nothing,” the post further read. And Pokémon Go players who experienced the same jumped right in to educate the unaware of one of the game’s most annoying XP farming trends.

“They stack multiple friends this way so when they pop their lucky egg, they can do multiple best friends at once,” one player explained. But that’s not just it.

Apparently, these ‘XP farmers’ hold multiple players ‘hostage’ at just one level short of ‘Best Friends’ for a long time. When the time is right, they pop a Lucky Egg to reach best friends with multiple players at the same time, and then they delete those players from their list.

So the farmers get the intended XP, but the players on the other side get nothing despite investing so much time and effort to keep things going. One player explained all this, concluding that it isn’t going to stop until Niantic intervenes.

Some players, however, argued that most of these farmers actually give their ‘hostages’ enough time to get the friendship bonus they deserve before deleting them from their list. A player summarized all the possible outcomes of such a situation, covering the entire discussion perfectly.

Even if it’s a small fraction of people, no Pokémon Go player should have to lose out on friendship bonuses like this after maintaining gift-giving every day for months.

Not that it’s a difficult thing for Niantic to put a stop on; a cooldown on deleting a best friend right after reaching the level should prevent the annoying situation from denying bonuses.