Pokemon Masters – full letter from the producer on player concerns, future plans, improvements

The Pokemon Company and DeNA have shared the full letter from Pokemon Masters producer Yu Sasaki in English. Throughout the post, Sasaki and new producer Tetsuya Iguchi share their thoughts on the current state of the game and their plans moving forward.

Here’s the letter in its entirety:

I’m Yu Sasaki, the producer of Pokémon Masters.

I’d like to sincerely thank you for downloading and playing Pokémon Masters. We’d also like to thank you for the feedback you’ve provided across both the game’s social media channels and the fan communities. We’ve taken your feedback to heart. At this time, we’d like to look back at the game’s activity since launch and update you all about its future direction.

I’ll also be joined by a new producer, Tetsuya Iguchi. He will provide the Pokémon Masters team with the benefits of his years of experience managing and operating mobile games.

Together, we will work toward improving the game experience for everyone.

The following is from Mr. Iguchi and myself, discussing both current concerns and the future direction of the game.

Addressing Primary Issues We would like to address what we believe to be the three biggest areas of concern since the game’s launch.

First, as you know, there have been bugs and other issues that have impaired your enjoyment of this game.

Some of the feedback we received was regarding which bugs we prioritized fixing first and how quickly we were able to fix them. We fully understand and appreciate these concerns as it’s not our intention to provide a poor user experience. Rather, our focus was on fixing any bug that affected game mechanics or progression first. Moving forward, we will carefully prioritize critical issues and their potential solutions. We will also redouble our efforts to address issues in a timely fashion as our team continues to streamline its operational processes.

In the past, we acknowledged issues such as the Dire Hit description and the sync move power issue. For those and other matters, we provided gems as compensation. Player satisfaction remains our top priority, and we understand how these kinds of issues may compromise it.

Second, we acknowledge the two most common concerns from the community:

· There is not enough content for players to enjoy.
· The overall battle difficulty and design are not satisfactory.

Our original plan was to have players progressing through the main story while at the same time tackling co-op battles and EX Challenges throughout September and October. That said, we understand players have quickly progressed through all available content and feel dissatisfied with the current offerings.

As fans ourselves, we also feel a great sense of urgency to provide more quality content for players to enjoy. We’re working hard to address this as soon as possible.

Our community has shared a great deal of feedback regarding battle design, user interface and experience, and the battle-centric nature of the game. We understand that the EX Challenge design has proven unpopular among many fans.

We recognize the importance of adjusting these elements. We will address our plans to improve in these areas in greater detail in the next producer letter.

Ideally, we would have been able to provide a message like this much sooner, but it was crucial for us to carefully consider your feedback and the best long-term solutions to the complex challenges involved with addressing these concerns. We also prioritized severe bug fixes and future content updates.

Now that our team has grown, we feel we are better equipped to handle the unique concerns of our global operations and will ensure that future communication with our players is more consistent.

We’d also like to assure our community that the feedback we’ve received, whether it was through our official community/support channels or through player communities (like Reddit), has been carefully considered and discussed with the development team. In the future, we hope to improve both the speed and transparency of our messaging to players.

Plans to Address Current Issues We would like to again thank you for the feedback you’ve provided. Both positive and negative comments help decide future content and operations, and they improve the game for everyone. The current areas of focus are as follows:

1. Lack of content
2. Lack of appealing rewards
3. Difficulty/design
4. Poor usability

Regarding #2, this is feedback that we can address relatively quickly. Please look forward to updates in the near future. For #1, #3, and #4, these issues will take time to fully address, but we will be sure to keep players updated about our progress.

Future Direction Our goal is to provide users with an enjoyable experience that’s unique to the world of Pokémon Masters. In the near future, we will provide a more detailed road map, but for now we can share the following short-term plans:

· More story events
· Revised reward system

Final Message from the Producers We’re disappointed we did not meet the expectations of our community, and for this, we sincerely apologize. It’s our intention that this does not happen again. Hearing these opinions from fellow Trainers has deepened our sense of commitment to deliver a game we can all be proud of. We are very appreciative of all the feedback—both critical and positive.

Our goal is to create an experience like the fans witnessed in that first animated trailer:
Gathering iconic sync pairs and tackling tough challenges as you grow and strengthen bonds with your team.

We believe that by needing to focus too much on specific skills, players felt forced into a situation where all team compositions looked identical, and there was an overall sense that there was only one correct approach for each challenge. What we hope to create is an environment where fans can partner with their favorite sync pairs and find unique solutions to entertaining challenges.

Both the development and operations teams are fully committed to improving this game and creating a memorable experience for all fans to enjoy. We thank you for all of the time you’ve shared with us already—and for the generous feedback you’ve provided that has helped us determine how the game’s future will unfold.

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