It seems like the team behind Pokémon UNITE is finally ready to acknowledge some of the most glaring issues with the game, giving an actual update on the game for the first time in almost a year regarding community concerns, matchmaking issues, and more.
The blog, which was posted earlier today, was not written by any single part of the UNITE team and is instead generally credited—likely because one announcement is the appointment of a new lead producer for the game.
Starting now, Masaaki Hoshino will no longer lead the game’s development, with Yuki Gabe stepping into the role. This is something that actually has some fans excited, as Gabe is best known as the assistant producer of Pokémon Masters, a mobile title that is generally considered as being handled well by its community.
Related: Pokémon Go isn’t pay to win, but players are tired of Niantic’s pay to play ticketed content
As for UNITE itself, we finally have confirmation that the team has heard complaints about the monetization model in the game and is going to work on it—though only to a certain extent.
Pokémon UNITE will change its approach to paid content in the future
While they do acknowledge that the release of Zoroark in October was a mess, they only mention that locking it behind Aeos Gems—the game’s premium paid currency—was an issue because it was tied to the Costume Party Style Holowear too, which jacked the price up more than usual. So while the team does say that it has heard “these restrictions were not a good experience” from the community and that the release practice will not return, it does not mean that the ongoing one-week Aeos Gem lock for new Pokémon will be scrapped entirely.
This is the first comment of any kind we have received in full since Jan. 12 regarding the state of the game, so all we can really do is hope additional consideration will be put into how the game’s wider monetization model is negatively impacting the community.
“We intend to create a better paid experience for Pokémon UNITE players in the coming months, and we welcome your feedback across our social channels,” the UNITE team said. “We look forward to collaborating with the community in the future, so please continue sharing your valuable feedback with us and one another.”
Matchmaking improvements are coming to Pokémon UNITE
In addition to the paid experience, additional changes are coming to how matchmaking, fair play points, and ranked systems work in UNITE.
For the most part, the UNITE team just explains how its matchmaking rating (MMR) system works and few of the light changes it has made to improve how the “game attempts to optimize the balance” within teams and player skill level. According to internal data, 96 percent of matches have teams with similar composition outside of select instances. But that isn’t how the matching experience has been reported through the community.
As a result, the team is going to continue tweaking things to improve UNITE’s matchmaking in ranked modes specifically, with the following changes set to be made in the near future:
- Fair play points
- A change is already live that will deduct fair-play points if a player stops playing during a match, which will also drop their a player’s matching priority
- Testing on passive play detection is also ongoing, which will help improve how the game detects things like moving around or using abilities to remain active while still avoiding objectives and battles
- Rank Range
- Starting with the next Ranked Season of content, new ranges will be used to determine which player solos, duos, and trios can match together
- Additional changes are also being made to how the end-of-season rank resets work “in hopes of mitigating the differences in skill at the start of a new season”
Hopefully, with the change in leadership, this type of communication with the community will become normalized rather than a meme about being once per year.
