As we told you a few days ago, Niantic made a controversial decision regarding its Pokémon GO game, increasing the price of remote raid passes, which thus allow players to participate in a battle against a raid boss pokémon and defeat it. for its capture, without the need to be in the physical vicinity of a Gym.
Mechanics that was introduced during the COVID-19 quarantines to prevent children and young people from going out into the street, which was also well received by those players who reside in areas outside of large cities, making Pokemon Go partly accessible to people with disabilities, who could enjoy it from the comfort of their homes. However, in this attempt to return to supposed normality, Niantic has taken steps to make the game much more difficult to play remotely, increasing the cost and adding new daily restrictions on remote raids.
You can read: Pokémon GO team receives death threat for announcing price increase for passes that players use to play at home and not walk
As well as making the Pokémon Go community raise its voice again against it, launching an online campaign represented by el hashtag #HearUsNiantic, has had a fairly significant rejection of players who have mobility problems. One of them is Erica “smollock” Chamblee, a Pokémon Go gamer who tells Kotaku that it takes 20 minutes to get to the nearest grocery store and that the city has around five PokéStops. The more populated area has three gyms, but cell service is patchy so even the gyms in the area go unused.
As he told this medium: “the inclusion of remote raids changed the whole game for me and my family. Suddenly we were able to participate in these raids that were completely out of our reach. Even if we had a raid before, there was no one in our play area, so there would be no way to beat the raids.”
“Suddenly we had access to friends and family who would help us complete raids and even invited us to theirs. It was such a huge improvement to the game that we were doing raids on a daily basis, coordinating groups and who needed what Pokémon, whether it was for their dex, a completion challenge, or just trying to get a shiny or a hundo,” Chamblee says.
An experience similar to that of Becca Beckery, a rural Pokémon Go player who is a disabled person with hyper Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which affects her blood pressure when she moves or changes position. And according to Kotaku, this is why it has problems interacting with some of Pokémon Go, such as hatching eggs, which require the player to walk, so these remote raids were a great help, so the new Niantic measure made his immediate reaction one of anger, “it’s hard enough to get Pokémon due to the fact that they spawn more when you move,” adding that “it’s not something a lot of us can do, not even as disabled people, but also for women or people who present themselves as women”.
“It can be very dangerous for us to be constantly looking at our phones when we are alone. With even more restrictions, he seems incredibly skilled. It is taking away any opportunity for disabled people, especially to enjoy it like everyone else,” Beckery says.
And while these Pokémon Go remote raids were born as a temporary measure, they broadened the accessibility of the game to people who had long been excluded. Something that with the new daily restrictions and the increase in the cost of these, will be much more difficult and that, as indicated Kenneth Shepard on Kotaku, while surely the game can survive this blow without issue, it will make the community around it no longer the same if Niantic chooses to ignore the pleas of its supporters and keep able-bodied players spending their money without restraint.
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