Pokemon GO Finally Adds Its Most Requested Feature, But There is a Huge Catch

After years of players asking developer Niantic, Pokemon GO is finally adding remote trading. The feature was included as part of a new update this week, but players won’t be able to take advantage of remote trading just yet. In fact, the remote trading feature in Pokemon GO has quite a few caveats, which many players will find frustrating.

Pokemon GO offered a long-distance trading option during the Pandemic, but this is something different. Remote Trading is exactly as the name implies: trading with anyone in any part of the world. But if you want to make your first remote trade, there are some steps to complete first.

Pokemon GO Adds New Forever Friends Status

Remote Trading in Pokemon GO first requires reaching a new friendship status called “Forever Friends.” Before this week’s Pokemon GO update, the highest tier of Friendship in Pokemon GO, Best Friends, required 90 friendship points. Forever Friends bumps that tally up to 180 friendship points. So, if you were to start with a brand-new friend, it would take a total of 180 days to reach Forever Friend status.

The good news is that Pokemon GO just added weekly challenges where groups of four can gain 7 additional friendship points upon completion of a task. My first weekly challenge asked our group to catch 500 total Pokemon, without any maximum or minimum per person. One person could conceivably have completed the weekly challenge all by themselves, and still earned the 7 friendship points with the other members of their group.

How Remote Trading Works in Pokemon GO

Once you have hit Forever Friends with a friend in Pokemon GO, most of the heavy lifting is done, but there are still other restrictions in place. To coordinate a potential trade, you will mark any Pokemon you are willing to trade with the Remote Trade tag. This tells any Forever Friends that these are the Pokemon you are willing to part with, if they have a compelling offer. You would then look at the Forever Friend’s tagged Pokemon and decide which one you would be interested in.

At any point in this process, either party can decide they don’t want to continue with the Remote Trade, and the whole thing can start all over again. Obviously, if you have an outside way of contacting your Pokemon GO friend, then you can coordinate the remote trade to ensure it completes, but other friends might simply look at each other’s selection and decide to make a swap.

It does seem like unnecessary hoops to jump through in order to take advantage of Remote Trading, but things are rarely simple in Pokemon GO. While getting to Forever Friend status is going to take players some time, perhaps the biggest frustration with the feature is that you can’t trade a Pokemon until 30 days after you caught it. This means you can’t simply catch a Pokemon and offer it up to a Forever Friend immediately.

Pokemon GO Trading Restrictions

The usual trading requirements will also apply to Remote Trading, including the Stadust cost for different types of Pokemon (Legendary or Shiny) and whether or not they are registered in both players’ Pokedexes. For those who are not familiar, you cannot trade:

Even if you don’t plan on taking advantage of Remote Trading, the new Forever Friends status is still a welcome addition to Pokemon GO. As you earn Friendship Points with a Forever Friend, you will earn XP and unlock additional Remote Trades. The Pokemon GO blog post doesn’t clarify, but it sounds like Remote Trades will be bound by a new currency/item. It’s unclear if both players need to have the item to complete a Remote Trade, or how frequently you will earn them, but we should start to learn more about that as players reach Forever Friend status.

My Take on Pokemon GO Remote Trading

While it is great to finally see Pokemon GO add a remote trading feature, it’s hard to imagine this is what players had in mind when they first started asking Niantic for a way to swap Pokemon with friends in different locations. There are already quite a few guardrails in place to prevent exploitative Pokemon GO trades, but this feels like too many hoops to jump through. It’s a first step for a feature that many thought might never come, though.