Noobenheim News for Nerds 
John Hanke, CEO of Niantic which is of course the company behind the 2016 lifestyle Pokémon GO, confirmed a few bits of information about future updates of this latest phenomenon.
Rainer: Vaporeon
Sparky: Jolteon
Pyro: Flareon
At the San Diego Comic-Con, Hanke details that Niantic put in a few Easter Eggs in the game. While he stated most of the Easter Eggs haven’t been discovered by the millions playing, one has been discovered by users: if you want your Eevee to evolve in a specific way, you can nickname it to pay homage to the battling Eevee brothers from the anime. Makes you want to rewatch the entire series again to try different names. Maybe Ri(t)chie’s Pokémon nicknames mean something.
Also described were customizations to PokéStops. Probably much like Niantic’s first game Ingress, you’ll be able to place mods on a PokéStop for certain benefits such as healing your Pokémon and other such capabilities. He also went into describing bug fixes like the ever annoying three-step bug and a fix to stop people from gym poaching.
Other enhancements he described include actual training for your Pokémon (“at the top of our priority list”), integrating the legendary birds with their respective teams (“Yeah, they’re kinda aligned with the teams, and we might have something to announce about the teams soon.”), and of course trading once server stability is increased (“Don’t get too excited – we need to make sure we can keep the servers up first!”). Niantic was not expecting such a large audience to play the game so rapidly (“we weren’t provisioned for what happened”), but the team works around the clock to keep the servers as stable as possible. Hanke mentioned breeding as a possibility, but Niantic has yet to start working on it.
Finally, Hanke announced the Team Leaders for each faction. (Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook!)
Hanke said the leaders will be in the game soon, and we will hear from them in a variety of ways. Maybe these Team Leaders will act like Gym Leaders in the games, having your Pokémon serve as the trainer battles leading up to the final battle.
Hanke also discussed the health benefits that were completely unplanned but very welcome. He described how a children’s hospital at the University of Michigan is using this app to get kids into physical therapy.
I can’t wait to see what the future holds! Stay tuned!
