Pokémon GO players who have been relying on Niantic’s changes allowing them to play during lockdown, beware. On Monday, June 1, 2020, Pokémon GO’s servers will be down for seven hours between 11 am and 6 pm PDT, as was revealed by its developer last week. What Niantic didn’t reveal is why the servers need to be shut off completely for so long right in the middle of the day. The lack of clarity could be because the reason is boring and technical, or it could be because Niantic doesn’t want us to know what’s coming.
Here Comes Pokémon Home
Earlier this year, Nintendo launched Pokémon Home. This gave players a handy storage system that allowed owners of multiple Pokémon games to store all their monsters in one place, and even trade them between titles. The trouble is, although Pokémon GO is listed as one of the games Home is compatible with, it has not yet been integrated. Due to how different Pokémon GO is from all other Pokémon games, it might take a while to get the job done. Seven straight hours on a Monday afternoon, perhaps.
Time To Level Up!
It takes a while, but play enough Pokémon GO and trainers can reach the highest level possible, Level 40. Maxing out the game’s XP not only results in a whole heap of coveted rewards, but players at Level 40 are also given new features before anyone else. For trainers who reached Level 40 a long time ago, the ceiling might be getting a little frustrating. It’s possible that after the downtime, there will be ten new levels available.
Uhh, What Are Gym Tags?
Pokémon GO’s original gyms were very different from the ones we know today. It only took Niantic a year to update them, but here we are three years later and they’ve not been changed since. Gym tags found in a recent data mine would suggest that is about to change. Various tags were found that appear to split gyms into categories. Great/Ultra/Master suggests gyms will soon have the same CP caps as the Battle League. Easy/Medium/Hard/Ace hints that gyms might soon come with pre-assigned Pokémon of varying strengths. That would be an update that requires downtime.
The Boring (And Most Likely) Option
We did warn you that there would be a boring possibility, and this is it. Niantic might simply be migrating to a new database, something that would certainly require downtime to prevent anything from getting damaged or lost. Spanner is a new database developed by Google which would be the most logical move for Pokémon GO’s database if this is what’s happening. As boring an option as that might be, it would make the game more stable and reduce the chance of players suffering from lag.
Even though that final option is the most likely, there’s nothing to say the downtime might not be put into place to make more than one of the above happen, if not all of them. Niantic does prefer to roll new features out over time though, so update as big as that seems unlikely.
