Niantic, where are your community managers?

Where to begin really?

It's been about 3 years since the app launched, and many many times Niantic has made decisions and changes that significant portions of the playerbase has disagreed with. Granted, some of them where justified, taking away certain options that made the game too easy with too little effort spent. But others could've been better implemented through dialogue with players. To me, it seems Niantic are a bit out of touch.

An example could be Dragonite appearing in raids right now. Why did it take so long for it to do so? Dragonite is far less relevant now in the meta than it could've been when raids were first released. Sure, some people perhaps didn't have a Dragonite up until now, so it's not all bad, but the timing to someone who's been at Pokemon Go from the start seems misplaced. Again, just an example, I could go on but that's not the main topic of this complaint (which may come off as an angry rant, but for me it's more of a mix of passion and disappointment really).

So, what's the cause? There are probably many, but the one I'd like to focus on is the lack of communication between Niantic and the players. It's by no means a groundbreaking conclusion, but as nothing big have happened so far it deserves to keep being mentioned. Communication is vital for things to work both on a macro and micro-scale in so many things we do, so why isn't Niantic attempting to do it more?

Some of you may argue that it's not entirely true - that Niantic are in fact communicating with us. And to an extent, that's true. They likely have a word or two on occasion with the big influencers that they sponsor to appear at events, and when a sufficient level of noise is raised through certain channels about the game experiencing errors Niantic listens. But clearly this system isn't perfect. While influencers may know more about the game than most casual players, they don't represent the playerbase as a whole and don't have a monopoly on doing observations and getting ideas on how to improve the game.

This is why I believe a link between us and Niantic -namely community managers etc- is vital for the continued longevity for Pokemon Go. Even Ingress, the other game Niantic developed and which has but a fraction of Pokemon Go's numbers in terms of players, has a dedicated CM. And it works! Several suggestions brought up by the Ingress community during AMAs has (at the very least) been taken into consideration or been introduced into the system - like reasons for portal rejections being stated and upgrades to incentivize players to review more portal submissions. And this is just with ONE person.

There has been at least 2 Niantic employees present in this subreddit and TSR. Disappearing them was a very regrettable decision. Granted this subreddit has in the past been quite vitriolic towards Niantic, but just because a portion of the community steps out of line should not equal pulling the plug on communication altogether. Take some inspiration from Krug and change your methods of communication or something until you find something that works. In the end, this is one of the bigger hubs for Pokemon go I know of on the internet. Surely there must be some beneficial knowledge for you to harvest from here? Things that will make people stick around with the app for longer and probably pay a bit of money every now and then. It's all here for the taking Niantic, unless you'd rather prefer only hearing from us whenever we get angry enough with you over your mistakes and flaws.

If you took the time to read this I salute you.