Pokémon Go players are still voicing strong criticism of Routes, and some questionable ones that popped up in the game have strengthened the community’s complaints.
In a Reddit thread from Oct. 8, a player shared what seems to be the worst Route ever approved in the game, with a single question: “Why?”
The thread showed a messy thing that barely resembled a Route, as it doesn’t even follow existing paths. In addition, it’s supposed to take over seven hours to complete, according to its information.
The Route was seemingly submitted as a joke. The user mustn’t have expected to get it approved, as it was named “Noodley Labyrinth.”
The thread garnered immediate attention from the community, as players have been criticizing the approval process of Niantic since the feature was added to the game.
“I live for hilariously bad routes. They’re so inconvenient and so funny at the same time. Like Niantic looked at that and went: yep, looks good,” wrote one of the top-voted comments.
“It just hurts if you had a very normal and simple route that would make your daily life better gets rejected,” wrote another user in reaction.
It follows another thread from Oct. 3 where a player said they “created the stupidest Route” that got approved in a short time. It was a simple loop repeated numerous times and leading to a Gym.
Other players shared numerous other examples of uninteresting or poorly designed Routes that got approved in the game, highlighting questionable approval processes from Niantic.
On Oct. 2, the developer revealed several quality-of-life improvements for Routes. One of them was to widen the pool of players eligible to suggest Routes, which worried players as the approval process can already be quite long for players. On the other side, no changes were revealed on how Routes get approved or not.
These curious Routes won’t likely reassure players, but there’s still one thing to take away from this: players will have more Routes to complete around them. They might not feature the best itineraries, but they offer precious rewards, such as Zygarde cells, upon completion.
The developer has promised fans to bring more changes to Routes in the future, including widening the pool of eligible Pokémon Go players for Route submission. It’s still unclear if it will change the review process and criteria for approval, though.
