Niantic and The Pokemon Company have announced an update for Pokemon Go that boosts remote playing with friends, and also adds weekly challenges.
The update revolves around a new social tab which is featured on the “Trainer Profile” section. Here you can get to the weekly challenges as well as the “Party Play!” feature. You can create a group, join, or review a group’s progress to see how you’re progressing against the newest weekly challenge. It’s worth noting you can only be part of one weekly challenge group at a time, so pick wisely, but you can also only complete one weekly challenge per week.
These challenges will be dropped every Sunday at 5pm Pacific time (1am UK time) and will end the same time the following week. This all kicks off starting this Sunday (October 12th) at 6am Pacific time (2am UK time), and overall you can join up with three other trainers from anywhere you like, making for a total of four in a group.
If you don’t manage to complete the weekly challenge, you will get Stardust, but if you do complete it, you’ll get:
- Extra Friendship level progress
- 20,000 XP
- 6,000 Stardust
Developer Niantic says: “By the end of year, we plan to offer matchmaking for weekly challenges. This will enable Trainers to form groups with other Trainers in the community that they may not be friends with yet.”
So that does mean you’ll have to be existing friends with at least one person in your group, but you can add others you aren’t friends with as well. As a bonus, the developer explains “If the weekly challenge is completed successfully, the extra Friendship level progress from completing the challenge will be applied to this new Friend.”
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Pokemon Go is available now on iOS and Android devices, and is free to play.
