5 things that can go wrong with Pokemon GO Party Play

Niantic has just revealed a new feature coming to Pokemon GO. This is the long-awaited Party Play feature, aiming to bring players together in a way never seen before. This new feature will allow four friends to meet up and explore the world of Pokemon together as a team. It will also bring a celebratory event along with it.

While many are trying to remain hopeful about the feature, many players are expecting something to go horribly wrong. Given Niantic's track record with bugs and glitches in their games, it is very likely that the Party Play will see its fair share of issues once it goes live.

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5 glitches to prepare for once Pokemon GO's Party Play goes live

1) Visual bugs

Pokemon GO is known for its share of bugs and graphical issues. Since the mobile game uses the franchise's models from the 3DS era, issues with the visuals are an unfortunate consequence of the upscaling process. With more visuals to render and more avatar animations to keep track of, this could lead to an overwhelming amount of graphical mishaps during party gameplay.

While most of these bugs will be limited to the many player avatars that will start appearing on the screen, the increased pressure on the game will almost certainly result in more of these bugs appearing in every aspect of the mobile title.

Even now, Niantic has yet to figure out how to fix the visual bugs already present, so it will be incredibly unlikely for them to ever fix the issues present when Party Play goes live.

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2) Raid Min-Maxing

Official artwork for Pokemon GO (Image via Niantic)

It is difficult enough to find raids to participate in these days. While Campfire did provide some fixes to the issue, it ultimately went underused by many players thanks to the inconvenience and the real-world risk it posed to players' safety. With Party Play coming to the game, it will be even harder to find groups to raid with as a single player.

Thanks to Party Play introducing a new Party Power, used to increase the charge rate of Charged Attacks, players may now only do raids in these exclusive parties. This could result in many groups refusing to do raids with these single players as they will be unable to use the Party Power, thus being deemed "suboptimal."

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3) Server Issues

Construction workers as seen in the anime (Image via The Pokemon Company)

It seems that any time a big multiplayer change or event takes place in GO, something always goes wrong with the servers. The in-person GO Tour that took place in Las Vegas was a shining example of this issue, as many players reported the game to be in an unplayable state during the event, pushing Niantic to issue an official apology.

Although at a much smaller scale, this Party Play change will come with its fair share of server and connection issues when it is released. This may include a few minor annoyances like being disconnected from friends or seeing a little bit of lag. However, these issues could also be severe enough to result in game crashes or data corruption.

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4) Nerfing Party Challenges

Official artwork for Pokemon GO (Image via Niantic)

As of writing, Niantic is incentivizing this new Party Play feature through the introduction of Party Challenges. Party Challenges are tasks that will be assigned to the group once a party is established. So far, these challenges seem worth the effort, rewarding players with upwards of 15 Ultra Balls upon completion.

Much like the Research Breakthrough packages in Pokemon GO, Niantic may soon feel that these rewards are too good of a deal for players, resulting in them spending less money on Pokecoins when they can get such high quantities of good items for free. Niantic will most likely reduce these rewards to once again get players to spend more money on items.

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5) Not a lot of players will use it

Official artwork for Pokemon GO (Image via Niantic)

Finally, a lot of players could simply just choose not to use the new feature. Many only enjoy playing the title every now and then as a way to just collect monsters. Part of the reason why remote raiding exists in the first place is because a lot of players do not have others to play with, meaning this issue does very little to fix that particular problem.

Many trainers may just choose to skip the headache of having to enter or scan a code. Since raids in Pokemon GO can still be done outside of parties, these players may choose to stick to these more easily accessible facets of multiplayer gameplay.