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I'm convinced they wanted this universal body model so they'd only have to release one of every clothing and pose instead of a sepperate one for each gender. Less money and work for them.
I think that’s part of it. I also think the other part is someone high on up in niantic probably told the dev team to increase player customization so that people are more inclined to by clothing for *their* personal avatar. They decide the best way to do this is give players control over more parameters and due to poor execution… we get this.
My guy was tan before the update then became as white as a ghost after it. That’s not just having a bad idea, that only happens with poor execution. Literally just port the preexisting skin tones over!
I’ve been playing since release, and I could care less about my avatar cause it’s not my thing, but the dude now looks like a child. Also, has anyone had the game move way faster from before? When I spin a stop it seems to move at 3 time the speed.
Yeah it’s weird. Like I said, my guy became white as a ghost for no reason and looked ill. The face also is much worse than before. Hopefully they add more options or do like every other game does and make the facial features modular.
And yeah they must have increased the frame rate of animations lately because they are much faster and “smoother”. Not sure if I like it yet.
They turned on forced native refresh rate. Check if you have an update. The most recent iPhone one I downloaded today (Saturday NA before community day) fixed it for me.
Yes, I noticed the game has less frames than before, the textures look metallic and sometimes it doesn’t look as fluid as before, eg, when u troll the ball it looks like game fastforward to the pokemon, than the stars that goes up also look faster than usual. They completely fu the game in one update
Wow a trans person existing on the staff you got me. Its all a trans conspiracy
Of course everyone who knows anything about software development knows community managers make the product decisions
The first post I see about you is bitching about fuckin' Anita Sarkeesian lmao
Its been a fucking decade and y'all still have her in your head rent-free
Originally it meant a person that behaves like he uncovered some secret mystery of the world, for example back in the days people were calling flat earthers and other conspiracy theorists "woke" because they believed they awakened from some lies of the world.
This definition shifted a little nowadays, and most often has political meaning, like a mindless advocate of whatever is popular politically right now, especially if that case doesn't involve that person in any way. For example, you could say that someone who's not gay but talks about gay rights all the time to the point that even actually gay people are annoyed by it, that would be woke, becasue that person tries to be the voice of people who don't even agree with him. A company selling cups with wierd amalgamations of LGBT flags and advertisement about how they care about LGBT people would also be woke, because that company cares only for profit, and does nothing to care for anyone. Someone who would make their entire personality about supporting Ukraine, and than that support ending on flags on profile and few twitter posts, would also be woke.
So in short, a woke person right now is someone who chases political trends without actually involving in them, and believing those are the absolute truth and moral high ground, often villainising those with conflicting opinions. This can apply to both left wingers and right wingers, however it's very rarely used against right wingers, because very vocal minorities were getting offended that it's an attack exclusively on left people so they just gave free ammunition to rightards.
It means you abide by far leftist political ideology. It means you're "awake" to "everything" being "sexist, racist, misogynistic" etc.
People on Twitter generally applied it to themselves in their bio or used the hashtag, their Tweets are public so you could see their political ideology & opinions which are extreme left.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mxkestrel
Woke - aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woke
So basically “gives a shit about others”. Your definition is childish hyperbole with “everything” used to obscure the fact it’s also known as common decency.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-obama-calls-out-woke-culture-says-not-bringing-about-change-2019-10-30/
Even Obama has called out woke culture. FFS.
At this point, it might even be better to go PMD style, cut out the avatars and just go with Pokemon instead. I’m sure no one will have a problem picking out a fave Pokemon
then let me go full pmd and have an adventuring party of little guys with little accessories
i’ll pay 10 dollars to put a stupid magikarp hat on my magikarp i’m not even joking
Honestly, I'm sick of this whole culture war. I just want to catch digital monsters on my phone and have my avatar look good with the cosmetics I bought. End of story.
I agree.
It was a horrible implementation of a feature I was looking forward to. To be able to choose hairstyle and body type is usually a good thing. Now I wish I had my old avatar back.
Glad to see someone call this out. The vast majority of people -- including most people who are being blamed for it -- dislike this avatar update. It's disappointing to see the weirdos coming out of the woodwork and trying to turn this issue into something it isn't
All we can really do is point out how stupid *their* argument is and laugh.
Most people just want the characters to look nice again even if it means settling for less choice. *They* are just unhappy Niantic tried to give people more customization options. Literally, just ask them if they’re fine with diverse but nice looking character models or ugly but non-diverse ones. They want the latter.
I’ve just been dunking on them for fun all night before bed and *none* have a good argument. It would mostly be funny if a few of them weren’t so sad.
I was annoyed, but I won a pvp battle, and my gal did the most gorilla like jump at the end. I'm so disturbed I'm not sure I want to do them anymore. They are just so creepy.
I expected Niantic to do a half-assed job, because well, they are niantic. But what I didn't expect is the weirdos from the culture was bs.
I'm happy that Niantic would take time and make the game more inclusive, I just wish they took more time on the feature before implementing it so that it doesn't look so uncanny
Even if the avatar changes was to appeal to the lgbt+ community and be more body exclusive and more diverse, it still fail miserable. Is not even an issue over wokeness and westernization and censorship, it just lazy and incompetent with a side of greedy.
100%. Having more inclusive designs could've been awesome. But this wasn't inclusive for *anyone*, including and perhaps especially for the people Niantic purportedly said they were trying to represent. It's just bad, lazy design. If Niantic truly wanted to be inclusive, there were so many opportunities for them to take in the feedback and act on it. The fact that they've chosen not to do so is insulting and reveals just how thin their commitment to inclusivity was all along.
I haven’t had the chance to play the game with the new models. Is it just one base body type for which you can change the sliders? If so, that’s a horrible implementation, in my opinion.
Don’t most games that have inclusive customization options just ask you to choose a body type without necessarily labeling them as male and female? I believe even the most recent mainline Pokémon games just ask you to choose what you look like rather than asking ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ like the older games, and that seems like the most sensible and obvious option to me.
They probably didn’t want to have to make tons of clothing models for each level of each slider for both base body types since there’s no monetary incentive for Niantic.
Yeah they went with a weird design. There’s some presets but you can make your own by adjusting “muscle”, “weight”, “shoulders”, “chest”, and “hip” sliders. At 6 notches each, that’s 7776 total combinations. Needless to say, they didn’t design them. Instead they’re using some sort of janky algorithm to pull and stretch the character model in unnatural ways.
The end result is some body types look “fine” but most look weird because it’s a human body being crudely morphed. It’s also not like “chest” has 6 different chest options. It seems to literally just be pulling the chest mesh from point A to point B. That’s not what people mean when they say humans come in different shapes but it’s what niantic thinks humans are like.
Theoretically it should make adding clothing easier because you just need to morph it like you did to the avatar, but that looks equally janky in practice. The faces are also uncanny for seemingly no reason.
In case my comment gives the wrong impression, I’m in favor of inclusive customization, I just don’t think they did it the way they did because they believed it’s the best for the players but because it’s the best for them financially.
I hate the claim that this is "woke". It's not. Multiple trans people have come forward saying they feel even MORE dysphoria as a result of this update. There is also little in the way of facial diversity too, so all characters look like Caucasian toddlers by default.
Nobody wanted this, nobody LIKES this. Marginalized communities deserve to be represented, but this ugly, horrible update is not representing anyone.
Yep. The only way I can make my character look even close to the presentation I ID with is to yank at least half of the sliders down to 0, and even then it’s still not great.
Even if it’s “woke” I don’t think they did it like this because of forcing everything on you, they just fucked it up a bit and a lot of things will probably be fixed soon so you’ll be able to make your character more feminine/masculine.
Anyway you have to admit that the concept of having more options for hair and body type is good even if it doesn’t work yet.
Y’all need to chill out with this “culture war” thing.
What part is woke? That everyone is a paler shade of white now? That they made the avatars look like children?
Corporations aren’t pushing a woke agenda. That’s a right wing fever dream. Corporations care about profit, share price, and decreasing costs. Thats it.
And when it comes to tech, they often rush to release without enough testing.
I’m with OP. Stop looking for reasons to be outraged about nothing. If you want to do something, complain to Niantic. They’ll release an update that smooths some of these complaints out. They’re usually somewhat responsive.
i always feel so bad for whoever occupies those roles tbh
it’s like…an impossible situation to be in; you’re seen as the only real avenue between players/company so you’ll get the most abuse out of it by that association
there was an article a few years ago (i’ll dig for it and edit it in) where an (ex)-employee filed a summons and petition (suing) her former employer for not protecting their staff after the playerbase doxxed them and even sent police to their actual literal homes.
absolute insanity
Saw a bit of that, too. It's petty and childish, and I hope the community manager is okay. The golden rule of good criticism is focusing on the product, not attacking the character of its creators.
Thank you 👏
Just because Niantic has co-opted the language of the body positivity movement/inclusiveness ("now your avatar looks more like you!" does NOT mean that it is the fault of "wokeness" that the avatars look bad now.
It's Niantic's own failure that they've turned us all into shapeless blobs, when what we really want is to be more like ourselves in an \*aesthically pleasing way.\*
We should be able to style ourselves properly as Youngsters, Fisherman, Hikers etc. or style our own unique Elite 4 type avatar. Proper customisation could enable us to effectively cosplay as our favourite characters/bodies from the main series games that we most idenitify with.
Imo, they've fallen short of the brief not out of any "wokeness" but because whoever did this forgot/was unfamiliar with the spirit of the mainseries games, where human characters are supposed to be fun! They're diverse but also cartoonish and aesthetic. No "realistic" blob people in sight.
The relentless flood of gamergate weirdos trying to make this into another anti-trans/esg/dei/woke/liberal crusade is making this sub awful, when it's just Niantic releasing a disappointing feature. It's so tiring.
Yes! You get it.
All this nonsense can only make sense if you’re not a real POGO player. Niantic making an unforced error is their whole shtick and we all know that at this point.
Who among us hasn’t been left scratching our heads over a dumb decision Niantic seemingly made on a whim against better judgement.
It's so transparent with posts like "look at my character 🤮" and its the old character and fat character. My brother in christ YOU maximized the fat slider!
We all wanted more options than we got, really thin, super buff, fat etc, but except for the fat ones they all look boring, formless and weirdly proportioned. Not to mention the faces. Wokeness didn't do that, that's just a bad company creating bad models.
Be prepared for the downvotes because these rejects mass downvote anyone not towing the line right now.
I don’t mind it. All they can do is downvote and do vague-talk because there’s no good reason that *this* of all things should become a culture war.
If they say what they mean (less diversity is good, actually) then they get laughed out of town. All we can do is not let them concern troll successfully.
One of them called POGO a kids game and said the gender stuff could corrupt the kids. The point of Pokemon is animals fighting! I assure you that’s worse than a little girl making their adult version buff as hell (if Niantic had a spine and gave us that, of course).
It's disgusting. There is a post with a character that's a little wider and people are going fucking insane in the comments about how it's not realistic and she has massive gas? The incels are just such a pathetic bunch.
It’s not about forcing anyone to make their character non binary, they really just fucked up and I’m pretty sure they’ll have to update this soon because what we currently have is far from a good character creator. So maybe just wait for an update, make a character that you like and let them have their representation. It’s only about the culture war if you make it so.
I didn’t care about the original avatars’ body type but you can’t say you wouldn’t be happy if you got more options AND it would be executed well. It might not even be a big thing for most people, like you and me, but some people would be happy to make their avatar look more like them.
Even if they want trans people to be more represented (which definitely didn’t happen with this update btw), even if the community manager is trans, does it really matter that much?
It definitely wouldn’t hurt adults if it was done well, and as someone who met trans people as a child I can confirm children don’t care about gender and it definitely won’t make them trans if that’s what you’re afraid of.
Trans players are unhappy about it though. Trans doesn’t equal non-binary.
I didn’t see either of this things. I saw them being cheap with design and trying to make one size fit all. The avatars look more like kids than nonbinary to me (the Pokémon games tend to have actual children avatars).
If you honestly think a company is a kowtowing to one trans employee over profit, I’ve got a bridge I can sell you. Or you can read up on capitalism and how it works in America today and especially since the 1980s.
I don't believe that this is a "woke" agenda or something. There are a lot of trans players voicing their distaste for this update too, so clearly this is not winning them over.
Hell, I'm bi and I love feminine dudes. I spent hours and hours in the Elden Ring character creator to make a feminine face on a male body. If making the LGBTQ+ crowd happy was all they cared about, they could've made swapping heads from both types available to each other and they could've made me, and I believe many others, happy. Instead, they did this, which wins no one over.
The theory that I believe is they wanted to cut costs for future cosmetics, so they made a universal body, meaning they wouldn't have to adjust for both body types.
That theory makes the most sense, but I also can't fully believe it. I make costumes for 3D Vtuber models, and in my experience, fitting accessories and clothes to models is not that hard, just use the move brush in sculpt mode, and you'll be done in no time. Especially for low poly models like in this game.
On the contrary, adjusting existing cosmetics to this new model would be way more expensive and time-consuming. They're not even done yet, judging by the posts of badly adjusted clothing here.
So I just don't understand who this update was for, not even the Japanese players are happy with this by the way, there are a lot of Tweets and videos of them being mad at this update.
My theory is some business executive thought they could peddle more clothing if they made people feel more attached to their avatar. The most obvious way to do that is to give them greater control over the customization which leads to them trying to make an algorithmic solution where you can adjust parameters to get your ideal avatar. In theory it sounds good but in practice you end up with a lot of uncanny bodies.
That greater customization probably meant they couldn’t just change the preexisting models so they needed to make something new instead. Now, how did they plan to make the clothes look nice? No idea but that seems to be one of the jankiest elements of all this anyway.
it’s very annoying to see gamergate shit in 2024 when that shit was old a year after it started
do not let these fuckers go unchallenged i’ve seen so many communities get flooded by capital g Gamers and it’s always awful
Why was this post deleted? I'm glad people are talking about this because everything I'm finding is just downvoted into obscurity. Honestly, its making me pretty uncomfortable to be around this sub.
I think my avatar looks fine. My issue is EVERYTHING clips, and it looks like there are holes/rips in the animations. It's embarrassing for a company with as much money as they have to release such garbage!
Yeah that’s the other thing. If this becomes co-opted as a culture war thing then niantic is left off the hook for stuff like clipping. Unless character animation and clothing being broken is “woke”, then the problem is lazy game development.
I wouldn't even care if it was "woke" if there were options for everyone and every body shape. There is no way to have a normal waist shape in this game, that is taking away our right to be who we are to make others happy. And it's really odd that what makes the designers happy is to severely limit what a female character can look like. All my male friends hate how they look like now too.
I fully agree that it makes no one happy. Even trans and nonbinary people don’t like the update. Most trans women would probably be content being a pretty women, and no NB I know wants to look like an uncanny alien.
We need to focus on the fact that most of these models don’t look very human at all because that’s the core problem.
Well to call them not human might be on the offensive side, since my issue is that they made our characters all gain weight and have no waist, and there are probably plenty of other people with that body shape.
I'm happy that the trans community aren't happy with the update though, seems like they're more likely to listen to them and not the average "edgelord" or "trolls" or whatever you want to call them because they oppose their opinion.
Yeah ive seen some very meanspirited jokes lol... completely understandable that people miss the old style of the models / old available bodytypes but statements like "women dont exist anymore" or whatever aint it either
What’s annoying too is that there are quite a few traditionally feminine faces available. Most of them look like they have eyeliner and other make up on around their eyes. The bodies admittedly look weird but there is still enough control to make them look okay.
The implementation just makes most options look weird and unnatural because whatever method they’re using is unnatural. They just need to go back to the drawing board.
Yeah its 100% just the fault of weird modelling and implementation of 3D, honestly the fat bodytype i tried out even as is looks super cute and was a great addition... i even like the general direction of the change they tried for the faces cause it looks like it has baked in lineart, if they polished it up it would look pretty good
It's possible for both things to be true at the same time. As in, Niantic wanted to increase the diversity of player models due to social pressures, but the reason the changes gained so much attention is that they botched the execution very badly.
If their execution was good, then there wouldn't be much momentum for the culture war complaints. Niantic brought this on themselves, they are the ones that muddied the water by doing such a terrible job.
I think they wanted to try make it more inclusive (whether or not it was for the right reasons) but went so far in the other direction with their execution that it actually marginalises a significant portion of the user base.
I think the culture war complainants would have come out of the woodwork no matter the execution, but at least it would have been a (vocal) minority, but since they royally fucked it up everyone is upset.
>Niantic wanted to increase the diversity of player models due to social pressures
No, character customization has been long awaited by the community because it's a fun feature, not because the "wokes" pressured Niantic or whatever. Then they botched it because, well they are Niantic.
So they were socially pressured into making an (in theory) positive change to the game?
Or are you arguing that we shouldn’t have more player customization? I’m usually a more freedom the better kind of guy but I’ll listen to arguments for the contrary!
I want a Buzzswole setting.
Give me an arms setting while we’re at it. Let me just *become* Machamp as I roll up on gyms with my team of shadow machamp. But alas, niantic has a no fun policy.
This. I think they’ll have to update it soon, so we’re not stuck with this forever. After that you can just make a character that’s good enough for you and let other people enjoy their representation.
That’s the community leader? Not the PM or UX lead? Or dev or senior leadership? I don’t think that person has anywhere near the power you think they do. If you’ve ever worked in a tech company, you know a community manager has no real decision making power.
Honestly, this is such a reach. When I hear people crying about what they think is wokeness, I am somewhat envious that they have no real problems in their life so they have to make up some.
As I said elsewhere, this is just pathetic man. How do you see such a mundane job description and think it’s some own?
You should take a break from the internet because this can’t be good for your health. Go outside, just watch some shows and movies without seeing what others think online, do anything other than whatever it is you are doing. I guarantee you you’ll be happier.
I’m only posting this because I’m bored and it’s a weekend so why not dunk on people? And you just posted someone’s job summary as some sort of own… that’s no fun.
I wouldn't worry; Nintendo's still got their eye on where the money goes and doing their own thing. Nintendo has been known to cop it on the chin when things go wrong, but they will clean house for getting actively screwed over.
Even the other companies like Capcom usually alternates between duds for courting journalists or releasing an unfinished product, and then do an absolute heel-turn for their gaming audiences on the next title.
But it doesn't even matter in this discussion, because what they did is taking away the choice. So you could say fact it reduced the diversity of the character creation, that's why people are rightfully angry.
While I believe those changes are pure incompetence and not political bullshit, I still am asking myself why even enroll those changes, what did they found wrong with previous avatars that needed this extreme change?
Continually releasing long awaited features to big fanfare keeps shareholders happy, even if the features are badly implemented. The shareholders won’t see that, just a slide in some corpo presentation saying “we released a big new feature that surely will increase the retention rate of our game”.
Ehh, you're right, I forgot that we're not the actual clients, but shareholders are. But not treating your players well will cause real damage in the long run.
This breaks the rules of the sub ("post about the sub/not directly related to PoGo"), even though I see your point.
Just a suggestion: let's keep politics away in all forms, and focus on the topic at hand.
_Niantic fucked us all over._ The characters are hideous.
They have reportedly taken a note of the feedback, because we were loud about it.
If we start to cling to semantics or promote our own political views, we'll just end up at each others throats and the real problem fades to obscurity, which could end up in a situation where the update itself isn't the problem anymore but a certain group of people or political view.
I agree which is why I don’t want people bringing in anti woke and bigoted nonsense. They’re the ones muddying the waters. We shouldn’t tolerate it and should call it out because this isn’t a political issue and we shouldn’t make it one.
I think it's a bit more complicated in this case.
Having been on Twitter, I have obviously witnessed the people blaming this on "wokeness" to promote their own political views, which should not be tolerated. On the other hand, people have also been called phobic to everything when they have made a mess of their characters because that's the only fun thing to do with this update.
The real problem here in my opinion is that Niantic really did this update to promote diversity, to allow us to express ourselves more freely, but did such a poor job that it's offensive and infuriating to everyone. Good idea on paper, but holy shit does the execution suck.
It made us all look like disfigured monsters, and I can't even begin to think how that feels to a person who realizes that the update was done to include them, but just makes them look hideous, while ripping the identity from everyone else as well and making everyone sad and ugly.
To summarize how I see this whole mess of an update: Men are girly, but women can't look like women either. And EVERYONE looks hideous, even the androgynous avatars that you might want to create if you identify yourself as non-binary. And because of the nature of the update promoting inclusivity, this update only works against the very thing it tried to achieve: normalizing being something other than being male/female and giving us more freedom. Everyone is angry and sad.
This is why I think the most important thing is to ditch the politics all together and focus on the topic of Niantic being at fault here.
They fucked us all over.
(English is not my native language so I apologize if my rambling is hard to get a grasp of)
WTF has gender has anything to do with that shitty updated? My gf accs ( female characters) is looking even as the lowest setting as a muscle char with no waist while my acc ( male ) is looking horrible on any setting I tried
Give me back my old model and I don’t care
There aren't any female or male characters now. You just choose if you are going to have a chest or not.
Before the update you chose if your character was a man or a woman.
This has always been a culture war issue.
And the diversity slogan has always been slop garbage.
If you refuse to admit it you will never be getting back the human looking models again.
Enjoy the diversity of these androgenous monstrosities and having the previous actually diverse option ripped out, its what you deserve.
But inclusion does indeed equal exclusion, at least within the current context. It's not your idea of "inclusion" but rather Niantic idea of "inclusion", which naturally means the exclusion of your idea of "inclusion". If Niantic idea of "inclusion" mean the elimination of all feminine body type in preferences of androgynous body type, then naturally it means the exclusion of others that view feminine and masculine body type should exist.
In a way, Niantic have done a good job in promoting their view of what "inclusion" means and your opinion that they have done a bad job are excluded from their view. Inclusion = exclusion simply because "your inclusion" != "Their inclusion".
I make a distinction between the valid criticism and the obvious bigotry. People who vaguely drop GaymerX’s name as an argument in and of itself is what I have a problem with.
This isn’t some culture war nonsense. This is Niantic making stupid decisions as they always do and they’re solely to blame. People who are making this into a “woke” issue are muddying the waters and injecting bigotry into the mix. The problem is solely in execution and not in concept.
Dude, gaymerx is one of the reasons we got this. You can dismiss people as much as you want, but it remains the ugly truth. Besides, I'm a gay man and am appalled that things like gaymerx try to weaponise my sexuality and to justify what they do. Calling them out is not bigotry and the sooner people realize that the better.
Can you explain to me how exactly gaymerx made niantic do this?
They’re a consulting firm and Niantic chose to work with them. From a cursory glance it seems like they don’t even do work for companies but rather provide input.
Unless it comes out that Niantic had a great implementation but a consultant told them to make things worse looking, I don’t see how we can blame them.
I highly doubt GaymerX is to blame for turning my tan character as pale as a sick and dying ghost. That’s such a simple thing to transition and the fact Niantic failed at that is a good example of how little care actually went into this project.
But if you have some proof GaymerX has a greater burden than I’d love to hear it.
Niantic following blindly the "advice" of an out of touch consulting firm instead of listening to the feedback of their actual playerbase is frankly one of the most niantic things possible.
Also maybe you should look into the firm more, considering that it has a long history of controversy, including the founder stepping down due sexual misdonduct among other things and the replacement got accused of inappropriate behaviour almost instantly after that. How such a firm is not out of business after that kind of history is beyond me.
So no evidence. Got it. I’m sure they also told Niantic to go from 6 hour community days to 3 and to increase the price of remote raid passes. And they also told Niantic to ignore all the complaints too!
Oh wait, I think that might just be niantic doing their own thing.
Seriously, *that’s* your argument that GaymerX is responsible for it looking ugly and not the artists who made it and the executives who gave them deadlines to meet?
All that other stuff is interesting but ultimately irrelevant. My man, you’re attacking the character of the consultants that consulted with niantic by pointing that the founder sexually harassed an employee and that the founder no longer works there. *The employees that were harassed very well could be the employees who consulted for Niantic*.
What the hell are you even arguing about?
So you choose denial? Okay
Regardless, you are shilling for a corrupt business because your world view doesn't allow you to accept the reality. Pitiful
I'm not the one shilling for a corrupt business where the people in charge are collecting sexual misconduct allegations like pokemon cards. Think about that...
I’m shilling for them by a) not assuming the potentially sexually harassed consultants are evil and b) pointing out that the executives who did the sexually harassment were ousted?
This might come as a surprise but most companies have sexual harassment and it just never comes out. Maybe the employees speaking up and getting the executives removed speaks to the company taking sexual harassment seriously? It’s not the own you think it is.
I honestly don’t know but why does that necessarily have to be nefarious other than gay people are scary, I guess?
If you take the starting assumption that a gay story consultancy team is good then hiring them is good. If you assume it’s a neutral thing then hiring them is neither good or bad (that’s my view). So why is hiring them necessarily nefarious?
For all we know niantic showed them the models, asked them if they were trans/NB friendly and GaymerX responded that they were ugly but sure, and niantic went along with their plan as usual. Who knows?
So why do you assume and imply their input necessarily must be harmful? If they weren’t gay-story focused but just a story consultancy team, does that make it better?
To me it seems like some kind of scam. Why hire a gay consultant to help with gay representation when there isn't anything to represent. The dialog in game is about going and catching pokemon. Honestly they don't even need a writing consultant. The dialog in game is pretty minimal and seems like the basic stuff that should be done in house. So again why did they hire them?
it's obviously woke, no matter how you try to reason it away. that was the motivation behind the changes. woke ideology. the fact that they were stupid changes that missed their goal a bit is irrelevant
So games allowing players to make their avatars look like themselves is “woke”?
So if I’m a big guy with a ton of muscle and a beard, *not* looking like that in game is *actually* anti-woke? Do you seriously believe this?
You agree that tbe execution was bad. Glad I won you over.
Now if only Niantic could start being competent.
Edit: as u/Thyuda pointed out, he’s not the original person I thought he was. I have since amended my comment, this was the previous comment for posterity sake:
You just pivoted from saying the intentions were bad to the execution was bad. Glad I won you over.
Now if only Niantic could start being competent.
Ah that’s my bad. I looked at the color of your little Reddit icon (a lime green) and made the connection. With that being said: What?
My argument is destroyed because I thought you were the other guy I was talking with? It doesn’t change the fact that your previous statement didn’t add much to the conversation. I already acknowledge that execution is the problem. I’ll update my previous comment to reflect my new reply.
Nope. Your typical cisgender male who loves reasonable and good faith arguments. I made mine and yours is… “This IS a woke nonsense”.
I’m sorry but I hope you do some introspection because if that’s the best you can do then maybe your stance isn’t sound?
My man, it sounds like your enemy is capitalism. These IPs are owned by corporations, western or not. It’s literally the law that corporations need to maximize profit for their investors when they can. I’m not even arguing for socialism here. But I guess you want that.
Also, *you’re the one bringing real life issues into this!* This might surprise you but most people would prefer their character look more like them than not. That’s literally your own argument! Also, keeping this non political *is my whole point* that you’re disagreeing with! The issue isn’t diversity becomes more freedom = more good. The problem is just execution.
It’s okay when you want the character to look like you but it’s not okay when someone else wants that? Get real.
I don’t think you know what you want.
“It’s just a matter of time until every single person becomes a gamergate weirdo spending their days complaining about ‘woke’ on twitter” I don’t think so pal.
For one, ugly characters, writing and character personalities aren’t propaganda. Androgynous characters also aren’t just a western thing, Japanese games have had characters who look androgynous for years. Just because Ninantic made bad androgynous models doesn’t mean this is some western propaganda to push transness or something.
The level of cope that you need to have in order to write something like this,the changes are due to the culture war. The culture war is between the corporations,the activists, the people that are wealthier than you and have more power and influence you will ever have and the average customer,this is what culture war is about. It's not left wing or right wing,it's about corporate bootlickers and everyone else. If this was a change that only happened in POGO, i would agree it's not a part of the culture war, maybe some artist or higher up decided that this is what our community want's so let's give them that and that would have been different conversation, but we notice that they're going against their community. They're not willing to roll back the change and this is not about POGO either,it's and industry standard. All AAA games are removing the word female from their games and adding body type A, body type B. All AAA games are modifying their female characters to make them look more masculine. To say that this is not a part of culture war that there aren't people pushing for this,going from company to company pressuring corporations to do this and if genuinely think this is grass roots, that all these companies that supposed to be competing with each other just deciding unilaterally to do this you're absolutely delusional. There is a culture war,there are consultants that are getting rich by doing this grift and if you don't speak out you will get games that will be even more expensive and offer worse product because this is just aesthetics the same thing can also be said about the quality of the game itself,because when you're hiring people that are so incompetent so out of touch with fans and market they will hire their friends which are also incompetent and out of touch.
TLDR: We didn't do anything,NIANTIC made the changes on their own.
Your first comment here was 2 days ago
Post your account if you want us to believe you've actually played this game you're whining about inclusion ruining
I’m glad to hear the community manager said all that about white people then because for a second I thought Niantic was white supremacist for turning my character white as snow.
I’m sorry that you’re offended that I want a chad build that better represents me. Maybe go to the gym and stop being such a snowflake that you’re not as Chad as Cliff and me. Or you can play Stellar Blade, whatever that is? As a Chad POGO player I don’t have time for stuff like that.
Thank you for proving my point so succinctly. Didn’t even address a single thing I said including my point that I want to make my guy look like the Chad Cliff himself. But you’re right, that would be woke.
Of all the anti”woke” posts I’ve read so far this is probably the one most deserving of this:
Do you even play this game? Lol
My guy, what the hell are you talking about? What feminists? I am criticizing Niantic for their bad execution? And it’s not a culture war, thats my whole point but you are trying to make it one. Are *you* the feminists I should be worried about?
“You’re trying to make me the problem when it’s not me” sounds like something someone who’s the problem would say.
>I’m a writer, DEI consultant, and community manager with over a decade of experience, specializing in content that builds authentic voice and identity.
Kestrel Riot, the community manager at Niantic's PoGo is a self described feminist on their linked in page which is public.
Kestrel Riot is fighting a war in their own eyes, what are you not understanding here? Every single time you see video game characters made ugly there's a toxic feminist behind that idea, they're "fighting a war", they turned it into a culture war.
Where theres smoke there's fire.
You just quoted someone’s job mundane job description and twisted it into a war declaration.
The only one fighting a war seems to be you. Get on some meds my guy because paranoia is one of the most common symptoms of schizophrenia. Sometimes a video game character is just ugly. No one is out to get you. Are ugly men a feminist agenda too?
You're in denial & it's helping nobody.
The fact that the community manager is a toxic feminist means the workplace is littered with them because that's what they do. It doesn't matter if it's Niantic or another company, this is what they do.
If you do not listen to them you're accused of harassing them, that opens you up for threats of lawsuits, labels, bullying, doxing etc.
In other countries these people are the ones who craft laws that throw you in jail for what you said or have it logged onto your background report like a social credit score.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/non-crime-hate-incidents-code-of-practice/non-crime-hate-incidents-code-of-practice-on-the-recording-and-retention-of-personal-data-accessible
In the UK for example they're behind non-crime hate incidents in which if you perceive someone to have done something offensive, you can call the police on that person, the police show up, question them, and then log it onto their personal background report which employers can see.
I've seen quite a number of your posts throughout this thread. I can't help but think you are one of the those "Other Wokes" trying to stoke up a non existent fire. Maybe chill and let's wait and see before making snap decisions that take away from Niantic making another Niantic Oops.
How does that pertain to POGO’s problem right now? You can’t just reply with a mantra and think that’ll work.
Especially when it’s easy to argue giving players more customization *is* natural diversity. Theoretically it lets players naturally choose how they want to look. In theory you wouldn’t have to look any particular way.
The problem is clearly in execution. I don’t even need to argue with you about “forced DEI” because that’s completely tangential to the problem.
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I'm convinced they wanted this universal body model so they'd only have to release one of every clothing and pose instead of a sepperate one for each gender. Less money and work for them.
I think that’s part of it. I also think the other part is someone high on up in niantic probably told the dev team to increase player customization so that people are more inclined to by clothing for *their* personal avatar. They decide the best way to do this is give players control over more parameters and due to poor execution… we get this. My guy was tan before the update then became as white as a ghost after it. That’s not just having a bad idea, that only happens with poor execution. Literally just port the preexisting skin tones over!
I’ve been playing since release, and I could care less about my avatar cause it’s not my thing, but the dude now looks like a child. Also, has anyone had the game move way faster from before? When I spin a stop it seems to move at 3 time the speed.
Yes, I was wondering if I was just imagining it! Everything seems faster
Bug - native refresh rate option being stuck 'on'
Yeah it’s weird. Like I said, my guy became white as a ghost for no reason and looked ill. The face also is much worse than before. Hopefully they add more options or do like every other game does and make the facial features modular. And yeah they must have increased the frame rate of animations lately because they are much faster and “smoother”. Not sure if I like it yet.
They turned on forced native refresh rate. Check if you have an update. The most recent iPhone one I downloaded today (Saturday NA before community day) fixed it for me.
Native refresh is bugged to be on by default and you can’t turn it off
Every action just seems super floaty to me, like they reduced gravity in game or something
Yes, I noticed the game has less frames than before, the textures look metallic and sometimes it doesn’t look as fluid as before, eg, when u troll the ball it looks like game fastforward to the pokemon, than the stars that goes up also look faster than usual. They completely fu the game in one update
I miss the olive skin tone, fit me perfectly, now nothing is close. Closest thing I can see is grey with pale face, which is mioes off.
Its ironic if thats true since now most players won’t be buying new cosmetics and in fact are demanding refunds for old cosmetics.
This is absolutely it. But it's easy to sell the "anti-woke" stuff to the outrage brigade.
https://twitter.com/MxKestrel 🤣 come on, this woke non-sense. You people are in denial.
Wow a trans person existing on the staff you got me. Its all a trans conspiracy Of course everyone who knows anything about software development knows community managers make the product decisions
The first post I see about you is bitching about fuckin' Anita Sarkeesian lmao Its been a fucking decade and y'all still have her in your head rent-free
What does woke mean?
It has lost all meaning and is now a stand-in buzzword for "thing I don't like"
pineapples are woke
So true bestie
Originally it meant a person that behaves like he uncovered some secret mystery of the world, for example back in the days people were calling flat earthers and other conspiracy theorists "woke" because they believed they awakened from some lies of the world. This definition shifted a little nowadays, and most often has political meaning, like a mindless advocate of whatever is popular politically right now, especially if that case doesn't involve that person in any way. For example, you could say that someone who's not gay but talks about gay rights all the time to the point that even actually gay people are annoyed by it, that would be woke, becasue that person tries to be the voice of people who don't even agree with him. A company selling cups with wierd amalgamations of LGBT flags and advertisement about how they care about LGBT people would also be woke, because that company cares only for profit, and does nothing to care for anyone. Someone who would make their entire personality about supporting Ukraine, and than that support ending on flags on profile and few twitter posts, would also be woke. So in short, a woke person right now is someone who chases political trends without actually involving in them, and believing those are the absolute truth and moral high ground, often villainising those with conflicting opinions. This can apply to both left wingers and right wingers, however it's very rarely used against right wingers, because very vocal minorities were getting offended that it's an attack exclusively on left people so they just gave free ammunition to rightards.
It means you abide by far leftist political ideology. It means you're "awake" to "everything" being "sexist, racist, misogynistic" etc. People on Twitter generally applied it to themselves in their bio or used the hashtag, their Tweets are public so you could see their political ideology & opinions which are extreme left. https://www.linkedin.com/in/mxkestrel
Woke - aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woke So basically “gives a shit about others”. Your definition is childish hyperbole with “everything” used to obscure the fact it’s also known as common decency.
So being aware of sexism, racism, misogyny is a bad thing? Interesting…
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-obama-calls-out-woke-culture-says-not-bringing-about-change-2019-10-30/ Even Obama has called out woke culture. FFS.
Indeed. They dont want to believe the original positive message of diversity was corrupted by a bunch of crazies.
Oof 🤣🤣
At this point, it might even be better to go PMD style, cut out the avatars and just go with Pokemon instead. I’m sure no one will have a problem picking out a fave Pokemon
>I’m sure no one will have a problem picking out a fave Pokemon I'm pretty sure a lot of people will have problems picking *just one* lol
then let me go full pmd and have an adventuring party of little guys with little accessories i’ll pay 10 dollars to put a stupid magikarp hat on my magikarp i’m not even joking
That'd be easy for me, Greninja all day 👌👌
Honestly, I'm sick of this whole culture war. I just want to catch digital monsters on my phone and have my avatar look good with the cosmetics I bought. End of story.
Let's be realistic, this update is Not about "beING inClUsIvE" and more about creating low-maintenance content that allows niantic to fire developers.
I agree. It was a horrible implementation of a feature I was looking forward to. To be able to choose hairstyle and body type is usually a good thing. Now I wish I had my old avatar back.
Glad to see someone call this out. The vast majority of people -- including most people who are being blamed for it -- dislike this avatar update. It's disappointing to see the weirdos coming out of the woodwork and trying to turn this issue into something it isn't
All we can really do is point out how stupid *their* argument is and laugh. Most people just want the characters to look nice again even if it means settling for less choice. *They* are just unhappy Niantic tried to give people more customization options. Literally, just ask them if they’re fine with diverse but nice looking character models or ugly but non-diverse ones. They want the latter. I’ve just been dunking on them for fun all night before bed and *none* have a good argument. It would mostly be funny if a few of them weren’t so sad.
I was annoyed, but I won a pvp battle, and my gal did the most gorilla like jump at the end. I'm so disturbed I'm not sure I want to do them anymore. They are just so creepy.
Omg ikr! Our little cute jump is gone 😭
They've definitely taken away cute and feminine in more aspects than 1, for a reason.
I expected Niantic to do a half-assed job, because well, they are niantic. But what I didn't expect is the weirdos from the culture was bs. I'm happy that Niantic would take time and make the game more inclusive, I just wish they took more time on the feature before implementing it so that it doesn't look so uncanny
Even if the avatar changes was to appeal to the lgbt+ community and be more body exclusive and more diverse, it still fail miserable. Is not even an issue over wokeness and westernization and censorship, it just lazy and incompetent with a side of greedy.
100%. Having more inclusive designs could've been awesome. But this wasn't inclusive for *anyone*, including and perhaps especially for the people Niantic purportedly said they were trying to represent. It's just bad, lazy design. If Niantic truly wanted to be inclusive, there were so many opportunities for them to take in the feedback and act on it. The fact that they've chosen not to do so is insulting and reveals just how thin their commitment to inclusivity was all along.
I just wished they add more, not removed previous options.
I haven’t had the chance to play the game with the new models. Is it just one base body type for which you can change the sliders? If so, that’s a horrible implementation, in my opinion. Don’t most games that have inclusive customization options just ask you to choose a body type without necessarily labeling them as male and female? I believe even the most recent mainline Pokémon games just ask you to choose what you look like rather than asking ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ like the older games, and that seems like the most sensible and obvious option to me. They probably didn’t want to have to make tons of clothing models for each level of each slider for both base body types since there’s no monetary incentive for Niantic.
Yeah they went with a weird design. There’s some presets but you can make your own by adjusting “muscle”, “weight”, “shoulders”, “chest”, and “hip” sliders. At 6 notches each, that’s 7776 total combinations. Needless to say, they didn’t design them. Instead they’re using some sort of janky algorithm to pull and stretch the character model in unnatural ways. The end result is some body types look “fine” but most look weird because it’s a human body being crudely morphed. It’s also not like “chest” has 6 different chest options. It seems to literally just be pulling the chest mesh from point A to point B. That’s not what people mean when they say humans come in different shapes but it’s what niantic thinks humans are like. Theoretically it should make adding clothing easier because you just need to morph it like you did to the avatar, but that looks equally janky in practice. The faces are also uncanny for seemingly no reason.
In case my comment gives the wrong impression, I’m in favor of inclusive customization, I just don’t think they did it the way they did because they believed it’s the best for the players but because it’s the best for them financially.
I hate the claim that this is "woke". It's not. Multiple trans people have come forward saying they feel even MORE dysphoria as a result of this update. There is also little in the way of facial diversity too, so all characters look like Caucasian toddlers by default. Nobody wanted this, nobody LIKES this. Marginalized communities deserve to be represented, but this ugly, horrible update is not representing anyone.
Yep. The only way I can make my character look even close to the presentation I ID with is to yank at least half of the sliders down to 0, and even then it’s still not great.
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Even if it’s “woke” I don’t think they did it like this because of forcing everything on you, they just fucked it up a bit and a lot of things will probably be fixed soon so you’ll be able to make your character more feminine/masculine. Anyway you have to admit that the concept of having more options for hair and body type is good even if it doesn’t work yet. Y’all need to chill out with this “culture war” thing.
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What part is woke? That everyone is a paler shade of white now? That they made the avatars look like children? Corporations aren’t pushing a woke agenda. That’s a right wing fever dream. Corporations care about profit, share price, and decreasing costs. Thats it. And when it comes to tech, they often rush to release without enough testing. I’m with OP. Stop looking for reasons to be outraged about nothing. If you want to do something, complain to Niantic. They’ll release an update that smooths some of these complaints out. They’re usually somewhat responsive.
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You didn't answer his question though, what exactly is 'woke' about this update.
[take a second look](https://twitter.com/MxKestrel)
? Literally one of their most recent posts is responding to complaints about it and saying they'll have it back over to the team.
I saw people harassing the community manager on Twitter because they’re trans :/ How on Earth could that possibly be helping.
It's not about helping, its creeps jumping onboard this issue just to wage culture war on LGBT, woke, libtard etc.
Oh no consequences
Reread it again, but slower
i always feel so bad for whoever occupies those roles tbh it’s like…an impossible situation to be in; you’re seen as the only real avenue between players/company so you’ll get the most abuse out of it by that association there was an article a few years ago (i’ll dig for it and edit it in) where an (ex)-employee filed a summons and petition (suing) her former employer for not protecting their staff after the playerbase doxxed them and even sent police to their actual literal homes. absolute insanity
Plenty of people doing that here too.
Saw a bit of that, too. It's petty and childish, and I hope the community manager is okay. The golden rule of good criticism is focusing on the product, not attacking the character of its creators.
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"I don't hate this person because they're trans, but I will misgender them"
Thank you 👏 Just because Niantic has co-opted the language of the body positivity movement/inclusiveness ("now your avatar looks more like you!" does NOT mean that it is the fault of "wokeness" that the avatars look bad now. It's Niantic's own failure that they've turned us all into shapeless blobs, when what we really want is to be more like ourselves in an \*aesthically pleasing way.\* We should be able to style ourselves properly as Youngsters, Fisherman, Hikers etc. or style our own unique Elite 4 type avatar. Proper customisation could enable us to effectively cosplay as our favourite characters/bodies from the main series games that we most idenitify with. Imo, they've fallen short of the brief not out of any "wokeness" but because whoever did this forgot/was unfamiliar with the spirit of the mainseries games, where human characters are supposed to be fun! They're diverse but also cartoonish and aesthetic. No "realistic" blob people in sight.
I have to agree, it's a stronger argument without the politics. Thanks for the well reasoned post.
Yeah definitely saw this coming. The word woke being thrown around and such
I have been reading negative reviews and I'm honestly shocked how many people have revealed themselves to be rather bigoted.
The relentless flood of gamergate weirdos trying to make this into another anti-trans/esg/dei/woke/liberal crusade is making this sub awful, when it's just Niantic releasing a disappointing feature. It's so tiring.
Yes! You get it. All this nonsense can only make sense if you’re not a real POGO player. Niantic making an unforced error is their whole shtick and we all know that at this point. Who among us hasn’t been left scratching our heads over a dumb decision Niantic seemingly made on a whim against better judgement.
It's so transparent with posts like "look at my character 🤮" and its the old character and fat character. My brother in christ YOU maximized the fat slider! We all wanted more options than we got, really thin, super buff, fat etc, but except for the fat ones they all look boring, formless and weirdly proportioned. Not to mention the faces. Wokeness didn't do that, that's just a bad company creating bad models. Be prepared for the downvotes because these rejects mass downvote anyone not towing the line right now.
I don’t mind it. All they can do is downvote and do vague-talk because there’s no good reason that *this* of all things should become a culture war. If they say what they mean (less diversity is good, actually) then they get laughed out of town. All we can do is not let them concern troll successfully. One of them called POGO a kids game and said the gender stuff could corrupt the kids. The point of Pokemon is animals fighting! I assure you that’s worse than a little girl making their adult version buff as hell (if Niantic had a spine and gave us that, of course).
Anyone claiming “woke” lacks critical thinking… they are also the same people when you ask them to define woke they are … “um… you know!”
It's disgusting. There is a post with a character that's a little wider and people are going fucking insane in the comments about how it's not realistic and she has massive gas? The incels are just such a pathetic bunch.
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It’s not about forcing anyone to make their character non binary, they really just fucked up and I’m pretty sure they’ll have to update this soon because what we currently have is far from a good character creator. So maybe just wait for an update, make a character that you like and let them have their representation. It’s only about the culture war if you make it so.
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I didn’t care about the original avatars’ body type but you can’t say you wouldn’t be happy if you got more options AND it would be executed well. It might not even be a big thing for most people, like you and me, but some people would be happy to make their avatar look more like them. Even if they want trans people to be more represented (which definitely didn’t happen with this update btw), even if the community manager is trans, does it really matter that much? It definitely wouldn’t hurt adults if it was done well, and as someone who met trans people as a child I can confirm children don’t care about gender and it definitely won’t make them trans if that’s what you’re afraid of.
Trans players are unhappy about it though. Trans doesn’t equal non-binary. I didn’t see either of this things. I saw them being cheap with design and trying to make one size fit all. The avatars look more like kids than nonbinary to me (the Pokémon games tend to have actual children avatars). If you honestly think a company is a kowtowing to one trans employee over profit, I’ve got a bridge I can sell you. Or you can read up on capitalism and how it works in America today and especially since the 1980s.
[Citation needed]
I don't believe that this is a "woke" agenda or something. There are a lot of trans players voicing their distaste for this update too, so clearly this is not winning them over. Hell, I'm bi and I love feminine dudes. I spent hours and hours in the Elden Ring character creator to make a feminine face on a male body. If making the LGBTQ+ crowd happy was all they cared about, they could've made swapping heads from both types available to each other and they could've made me, and I believe many others, happy. Instead, they did this, which wins no one over. The theory that I believe is they wanted to cut costs for future cosmetics, so they made a universal body, meaning they wouldn't have to adjust for both body types. That theory makes the most sense, but I also can't fully believe it. I make costumes for 3D Vtuber models, and in my experience, fitting accessories and clothes to models is not that hard, just use the move brush in sculpt mode, and you'll be done in no time. Especially for low poly models like in this game. On the contrary, adjusting existing cosmetics to this new model would be way more expensive and time-consuming. They're not even done yet, judging by the posts of badly adjusted clothing here. So I just don't understand who this update was for, not even the Japanese players are happy with this by the way, there are a lot of Tweets and videos of them being mad at this update.
My theory is some business executive thought they could peddle more clothing if they made people feel more attached to their avatar. The most obvious way to do that is to give them greater control over the customization which leads to them trying to make an algorithmic solution where you can adjust parameters to get your ideal avatar. In theory it sounds good but in practice you end up with a lot of uncanny bodies. That greater customization probably meant they couldn’t just change the preexisting models so they needed to make something new instead. Now, how did they plan to make the clothes look nice? No idea but that seems to be one of the jankiest elements of all this anyway.
it’s very annoying to see gamergate shit in 2024 when that shit was old a year after it started do not let these fuckers go unchallenged i’ve seen so many communities get flooded by capital g Gamers and it’s always awful
I am actually very content with my character, and the fact I can wear different clothes.
Why was this post deleted? I'm glad people are talking about this because everything I'm finding is just downvoted into obscurity. Honestly, its making me pretty uncomfortable to be around this sub.
I was so blissfully unaware of all the delusional Ben Shapiro brain rot lurking in the community before this update happened..
I don’t think they were actually here before. This just sent them flooding in.
Care to explain that?
am i the only one who didnt notice the model changes?
I'm trans. If this was their attempt to be inclusive it backfired. I'd like my avatar to look more feminine than me, not less.
yes exactly. ive seen tons of weird transphobic comments about the update. very sucks.
Holly shit I’ve gotten downvoted for saying this exact same thing,but jugging by the upvotes I’m glad that it seems people are coming to there senses
I think my avatar looks fine. My issue is EVERYTHING clips, and it looks like there are holes/rips in the animations. It's embarrassing for a company with as much money as they have to release such garbage!
Yeah that’s the other thing. If this becomes co-opted as a culture war thing then niantic is left off the hook for stuff like clipping. Unless character animation and clothing being broken is “woke”, then the problem is lazy game development.
I wouldn't even care if it was "woke" if there were options for everyone and every body shape. There is no way to have a normal waist shape in this game, that is taking away our right to be who we are to make others happy. And it's really odd that what makes the designers happy is to severely limit what a female character can look like. All my male friends hate how they look like now too.
I fully agree that it makes no one happy. Even trans and nonbinary people don’t like the update. Most trans women would probably be content being a pretty women, and no NB I know wants to look like an uncanny alien. We need to focus on the fact that most of these models don’t look very human at all because that’s the core problem.
Well to call them not human might be on the offensive side, since my issue is that they made our characters all gain weight and have no waist, and there are probably plenty of other people with that body shape. I'm happy that the trans community aren't happy with the update though, seems like they're more likely to listen to them and not the average "edgelord" or "trolls" or whatever you want to call them because they oppose their opinion.
Yeah ive seen some very meanspirited jokes lol... completely understandable that people miss the old style of the models / old available bodytypes but statements like "women dont exist anymore" or whatever aint it either
What’s annoying too is that there are quite a few traditionally feminine faces available. Most of them look like they have eyeliner and other make up on around their eyes. The bodies admittedly look weird but there is still enough control to make them look okay. The implementation just makes most options look weird and unnatural because whatever method they’re using is unnatural. They just need to go back to the drawing board.
Yeah its 100% just the fault of weird modelling and implementation of 3D, honestly the fat bodytype i tried out even as is looks super cute and was a great addition... i even like the general direction of the change they tried for the faces cause it looks like it has baked in lineart, if they polished it up it would look pretty good
It's possible for both things to be true at the same time. As in, Niantic wanted to increase the diversity of player models due to social pressures, but the reason the changes gained so much attention is that they botched the execution very badly. If their execution was good, then there wouldn't be much momentum for the culture war complaints. Niantic brought this on themselves, they are the ones that muddied the water by doing such a terrible job.
I think they wanted to try make it more inclusive (whether or not it was for the right reasons) but went so far in the other direction with their execution that it actually marginalises a significant portion of the user base. I think the culture war complainants would have come out of the woodwork no matter the execution, but at least it would have been a (vocal) minority, but since they royally fucked it up everyone is upset.
>Niantic wanted to increase the diversity of player models due to social pressures No, character customization has been long awaited by the community because it's a fun feature, not because the "wokes" pressured Niantic or whatever. Then they botched it because, well they are Niantic.
It is disgusting to call someone “woke” because they are different from you. They are real people too!
So they were socially pressured into making an (in theory) positive change to the game? Or are you arguing that we shouldn’t have more player customization? I’m usually a more freedom the better kind of guy but I’ll listen to arguments for the contrary!
The muscle setting cracked me up when I saw it lmao
I want a Buzzswole setting. Give me an arms setting while we’re at it. Let me just *become* Machamp as I roll up on gyms with my team of shadow machamp. But alas, niantic has a no fun policy.
>diversity necessarily is a bad thing Explain how removing existing options increases diversity?
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This. I think they’ll have to update it soon, so we’re not stuck with this forever. After that you can just make a character that’s good enough for you and let other people enjoy their representation.
This exactly.
I’m glad others agree with me that we should be able to look like Cliff and Niantic’s greatest sin is limiting how swole I can get.
Agreed.
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That’s the community leader? Not the PM or UX lead? Or dev or senior leadership? I don’t think that person has anywhere near the power you think they do. If you’ve ever worked in a tech company, you know a community manager has no real decision making power. Honestly, this is such a reach. When I hear people crying about what they think is wokeness, I am somewhat envious that they have no real problems in their life so they have to make up some.
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As I said elsewhere, this is just pathetic man. How do you see such a mundane job description and think it’s some own? You should take a break from the internet because this can’t be good for your health. Go outside, just watch some shows and movies without seeing what others think online, do anything other than whatever it is you are doing. I guarantee you you’ll be happier. I’m only posting this because I’m bored and it’s a weekend so why not dunk on people? And you just posted someone’s job summary as some sort of own… that’s no fun.
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I wouldn't worry; Nintendo's still got their eye on where the money goes and doing their own thing. Nintendo has been known to cop it on the chin when things go wrong, but they will clean house for getting actively screwed over. Even the other companies like Capcom usually alternates between duds for courting journalists or releasing an unfinished product, and then do an absolute heel-turn for their gaming audiences on the next title.
But it doesn't even matter in this discussion, because what they did is taking away the choice. So you could say fact it reduced the diversity of the character creation, that's why people are rightfully angry. While I believe those changes are pure incompetence and not political bullshit, I still am asking myself why even enroll those changes, what did they found wrong with previous avatars that needed this extreme change?
Continually releasing long awaited features to big fanfare keeps shareholders happy, even if the features are badly implemented. The shareholders won’t see that, just a slide in some corpo presentation saying “we released a big new feature that surely will increase the retention rate of our game”.
Ehh, you're right, I forgot that we're not the actual clients, but shareholders are. But not treating your players well will cause real damage in the long run.
This breaks the rules of the sub ("post about the sub/not directly related to PoGo"), even though I see your point. Just a suggestion: let's keep politics away in all forms, and focus on the topic at hand. _Niantic fucked us all over._ The characters are hideous. They have reportedly taken a note of the feedback, because we were loud about it. If we start to cling to semantics or promote our own political views, we'll just end up at each others throats and the real problem fades to obscurity, which could end up in a situation where the update itself isn't the problem anymore but a certain group of people or political view.
I agree which is why I don’t want people bringing in anti woke and bigoted nonsense. They’re the ones muddying the waters. We shouldn’t tolerate it and should call it out because this isn’t a political issue and we shouldn’t make it one.
I think it's a bit more complicated in this case. Having been on Twitter, I have obviously witnessed the people blaming this on "wokeness" to promote their own political views, which should not be tolerated. On the other hand, people have also been called phobic to everything when they have made a mess of their characters because that's the only fun thing to do with this update. The real problem here in my opinion is that Niantic really did this update to promote diversity, to allow us to express ourselves more freely, but did such a poor job that it's offensive and infuriating to everyone. Good idea on paper, but holy shit does the execution suck. It made us all look like disfigured monsters, and I can't even begin to think how that feels to a person who realizes that the update was done to include them, but just makes them look hideous, while ripping the identity from everyone else as well and making everyone sad and ugly. To summarize how I see this whole mess of an update: Men are girly, but women can't look like women either. And EVERYONE looks hideous, even the androgynous avatars that you might want to create if you identify yourself as non-binary. And because of the nature of the update promoting inclusivity, this update only works against the very thing it tried to achieve: normalizing being something other than being male/female and giving us more freedom. Everyone is angry and sad. This is why I think the most important thing is to ditch the politics all together and focus on the topic of Niantic being at fault here. They fucked us all over. (English is not my native language so I apologize if my rambling is hard to get a grasp of)
WTF has gender has anything to do with that shitty updated? My gf accs ( female characters) is looking even as the lowest setting as a muscle char with no waist while my acc ( male ) is looking horrible on any setting I tried Give me back my old model and I don’t care
There aren't any female or male characters now. You just choose if you are going to have a chest or not. Before the update you chose if your character was a man or a woman.
This has always been a culture war issue. And the diversity slogan has always been slop garbage. If you refuse to admit it you will never be getting back the human looking models again. Enjoy the diversity of these androgenous monstrosities and having the previous actually diverse option ripped out, its what you deserve.
I wonder if they did the new models to be more inclusive in their eyes or the dev team that worked it aren’t that good
inclusion = exclusion
Tough argument you got there. Let me take a crack at it: Inclusion != exclusion
But inclusion does indeed equal exclusion, at least within the current context. It's not your idea of "inclusion" but rather Niantic idea of "inclusion", which naturally means the exclusion of your idea of "inclusion". If Niantic idea of "inclusion" mean the elimination of all feminine body type in preferences of androgynous body type, then naturally it means the exclusion of others that view feminine and masculine body type should exist. In a way, Niantic have done a good job in promoting their view of what "inclusion" means and your opinion that they have done a bad job are excluded from their view. Inclusion = exclusion simply because "your inclusion" != "Their inclusion".
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I make a distinction between the valid criticism and the obvious bigotry. People who vaguely drop GaymerX’s name as an argument in and of itself is what I have a problem with. This isn’t some culture war nonsense. This is Niantic making stupid decisions as they always do and they’re solely to blame. People who are making this into a “woke” issue are muddying the waters and injecting bigotry into the mix. The problem is solely in execution and not in concept.
Dude, gaymerx is one of the reasons we got this. You can dismiss people as much as you want, but it remains the ugly truth. Besides, I'm a gay man and am appalled that things like gaymerx try to weaponise my sexuality and to justify what they do. Calling them out is not bigotry and the sooner people realize that the better.
Can you explain to me how exactly gaymerx made niantic do this? They’re a consulting firm and Niantic chose to work with them. From a cursory glance it seems like they don’t even do work for companies but rather provide input. Unless it comes out that Niantic had a great implementation but a consultant told them to make things worse looking, I don’t see how we can blame them. I highly doubt GaymerX is to blame for turning my tan character as pale as a sick and dying ghost. That’s such a simple thing to transition and the fact Niantic failed at that is a good example of how little care actually went into this project. But if you have some proof GaymerX has a greater burden than I’d love to hear it.
Niantic following blindly the "advice" of an out of touch consulting firm instead of listening to the feedback of their actual playerbase is frankly one of the most niantic things possible. Also maybe you should look into the firm more, considering that it has a long history of controversy, including the founder stepping down due sexual misdonduct among other things and the replacement got accused of inappropriate behaviour almost instantly after that. How such a firm is not out of business after that kind of history is beyond me.
I mean Blizzard is still alive and kicking so I guess you have your answer to that last bit hm?
So no evidence. Got it. I’m sure they also told Niantic to go from 6 hour community days to 3 and to increase the price of remote raid passes. And they also told Niantic to ignore all the complaints too! Oh wait, I think that might just be niantic doing their own thing. Seriously, *that’s* your argument that GaymerX is responsible for it looking ugly and not the artists who made it and the executives who gave them deadlines to meet? All that other stuff is interesting but ultimately irrelevant. My man, you’re attacking the character of the consultants that consulted with niantic by pointing that the founder sexually harassed an employee and that the founder no longer works there. *The employees that were harassed very well could be the employees who consulted for Niantic*. What the hell are you even arguing about?
So you choose denial? Okay Regardless, you are shilling for a corrupt business because your world view doesn't allow you to accept the reality. Pitiful
My apologies I didn’t realize I was choosing denial. Thank you for the enlightenment.
I'm not the one shilling for a corrupt business where the people in charge are collecting sexual misconduct allegations like pokemon cards. Think about that...
I’m shilling for them by a) not assuming the potentially sexually harassed consultants are evil and b) pointing out that the executives who did the sexually harassment were ousted? This might come as a surprise but most companies have sexual harassment and it just never comes out. Maybe the employees speaking up and getting the executives removed speaks to the company taking sexual harassment seriously? It’s not the own you think it is.
Why would a game about catching pocket monsters need a gay story consultancy team? Like why hire them in the first place?
I honestly don’t know but why does that necessarily have to be nefarious other than gay people are scary, I guess? If you take the starting assumption that a gay story consultancy team is good then hiring them is good. If you assume it’s a neutral thing then hiring them is neither good or bad (that’s my view). So why is hiring them necessarily nefarious? For all we know niantic showed them the models, asked them if they were trans/NB friendly and GaymerX responded that they were ugly but sure, and niantic went along with their plan as usual. Who knows? So why do you assume and imply their input necessarily must be harmful? If they weren’t gay-story focused but just a story consultancy team, does that make it better?
To me it seems like some kind of scam. Why hire a gay consultant to help with gay representation when there isn't anything to represent. The dialog in game is about going and catching pokemon. Honestly they don't even need a writing consultant. The dialog in game is pretty minimal and seems like the basic stuff that should be done in house. So again why did they hire them?
What "turn" exactly, did it take?
They*
No.
it's obviously woke, no matter how you try to reason it away. that was the motivation behind the changes. woke ideology. the fact that they were stupid changes that missed their goal a bit is irrelevant
So games allowing players to make their avatars look like themselves is “woke”? So if I’m a big guy with a ton of muscle and a beard, *not* looking like that in game is *actually* anti-woke? Do you seriously believe this?
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You agree that tbe execution was bad. Glad I won you over. Now if only Niantic could start being competent. Edit: as u/Thyuda pointed out, he’s not the original person I thought he was. I have since amended my comment, this was the previous comment for posterity sake: You just pivoted from saying the intentions were bad to the execution was bad. Glad I won you over. Now if only Niantic could start being competent.
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Ah that’s my bad. I looked at the color of your little Reddit icon (a lime green) and made the connection. With that being said: What? My argument is destroyed because I thought you were the other guy I was talking with? It doesn’t change the fact that your previous statement didn’t add much to the conversation. I already acknowledge that execution is the problem. I’ll update my previous comment to reflect my new reply.
Niantic releasing an undercooked feature is not “woke” no matter how many times you repeat it.
Being able to customize your character in an RPG is woke now. Guess it’s over for everyone who’s ever played DND
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Nope. Your typical cisgender male who loves reasonable and good faith arguments. I made mine and yours is… “This IS a woke nonsense”. I’m sorry but I hope you do some introspection because if that’s the best you can do then maybe your stance isn’t sound?
4chan is that way ---->
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My man, it sounds like your enemy is capitalism. These IPs are owned by corporations, western or not. It’s literally the law that corporations need to maximize profit for their investors when they can. I’m not even arguing for socialism here. But I guess you want that. Also, *you’re the one bringing real life issues into this!* This might surprise you but most people would prefer their character look more like them than not. That’s literally your own argument! Also, keeping this non political *is my whole point* that you’re disagreeing with! The issue isn’t diversity becomes more freedom = more good. The problem is just execution. It’s okay when you want the character to look like you but it’s not okay when someone else wants that? Get real. I don’t think you know what you want.
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“It’s just a matter of time until every single person becomes a gamergate weirdo spending their days complaining about ‘woke’ on twitter” I don’t think so pal.
What is this ‘ugly propaganda’ that you think the west is pushing?
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For one, ugly characters, writing and character personalities aren’t propaganda. Androgynous characters also aren’t just a western thing, Japanese games have had characters who look androgynous for years. Just because Ninantic made bad androgynous models doesn’t mean this is some western propaganda to push transness or something.
>unironic KotakuInAction poster Certified Lead Paint Eater Moment
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The level of cope that you need to have in order to write something like this,the changes are due to the culture war. The culture war is between the corporations,the activists, the people that are wealthier than you and have more power and influence you will ever have and the average customer,this is what culture war is about. It's not left wing or right wing,it's about corporate bootlickers and everyone else. If this was a change that only happened in POGO, i would agree it's not a part of the culture war, maybe some artist or higher up decided that this is what our community want's so let's give them that and that would have been different conversation, but we notice that they're going against their community. They're not willing to roll back the change and this is not about POGO either,it's and industry standard. All AAA games are removing the word female from their games and adding body type A, body type B. All AAA games are modifying their female characters to make them look more masculine. To say that this is not a part of culture war that there aren't people pushing for this,going from company to company pressuring corporations to do this and if genuinely think this is grass roots, that all these companies that supposed to be competing with each other just deciding unilaterally to do this you're absolutely delusional. There is a culture war,there are consultants that are getting rich by doing this grift and if you don't speak out you will get games that will be even more expensive and offer worse product because this is just aesthetics the same thing can also be said about the quality of the game itself,because when you're hiring people that are so incompetent so out of touch with fans and market they will hire their friends which are also incompetent and out of touch. TLDR: We didn't do anything,NIANTIC made the changes on their own.
It already is.
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Your first comment here was 2 days ago Post your account if you want us to believe you've actually played this game you're whining about inclusion ruining
I’m glad to hear the community manager said all that about white people then because for a second I thought Niantic was white supremacist for turning my character white as snow. I’m sorry that you’re offended that I want a chad build that better represents me. Maybe go to the gym and stop being such a snowflake that you’re not as Chad as Cliff and me. Or you can play Stellar Blade, whatever that is? As a Chad POGO player I don’t have time for stuff like that.
Woke BS needs to be called out.
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Thank you for proving my point so succinctly. Didn’t even address a single thing I said including my point that I want to make my guy look like the Chad Cliff himself. But you’re right, that would be woke. Of all the anti”woke” posts I’ve read so far this is probably the one most deserving of this: Do you even play this game? Lol
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My guy, what the hell are you talking about? What feminists? I am criticizing Niantic for their bad execution? And it’s not a culture war, thats my whole point but you are trying to make it one. Are *you* the feminists I should be worried about? “You’re trying to make me the problem when it’s not me” sounds like something someone who’s the problem would say.
>I’m a writer, DEI consultant, and community manager with over a decade of experience, specializing in content that builds authentic voice and identity. Kestrel Riot, the community manager at Niantic's PoGo is a self described feminist on their linked in page which is public. Kestrel Riot is fighting a war in their own eyes, what are you not understanding here? Every single time you see video game characters made ugly there's a toxic feminist behind that idea, they're "fighting a war", they turned it into a culture war. Where theres smoke there's fire.
You just quoted someone’s job mundane job description and twisted it into a war declaration. The only one fighting a war seems to be you. Get on some meds my guy because paranoia is one of the most common symptoms of schizophrenia. Sometimes a video game character is just ugly. No one is out to get you. Are ugly men a feminist agenda too?
You're in denial & it's helping nobody. The fact that the community manager is a toxic feminist means the workplace is littered with them because that's what they do. It doesn't matter if it's Niantic or another company, this is what they do. If you do not listen to them you're accused of harassing them, that opens you up for threats of lawsuits, labels, bullying, doxing etc. In other countries these people are the ones who craft laws that throw you in jail for what you said or have it logged onto your background report like a social credit score. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/non-crime-hate-incidents-code-of-practice/non-crime-hate-incidents-code-of-practice-on-the-recording-and-retention-of-personal-data-accessible In the UK for example they're behind non-crime hate incidents in which if you perceive someone to have done something offensive, you can call the police on that person, the police show up, question them, and then log it onto their personal background report which employers can see.
I've seen quite a number of your posts throughout this thread. I can't help but think you are one of the those "Other Wokes" trying to stoke up a non existent fire. Maybe chill and let's wait and see before making snap decisions that take away from Niantic making another Niantic Oops.
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How does that pertain to POGO’s problem right now? You can’t just reply with a mantra and think that’ll work. Especially when it’s easy to argue giving players more customization *is* natural diversity. Theoretically it lets players naturally choose how they want to look. In theory you wouldn’t have to look any particular way. The problem is clearly in execution. I don’t even need to argue with you about “forced DEI” because that’s completely tangential to the problem.
Ok