‘Pokemon Go’ August 23rd Update: What’s Different in the New Patch?

Pokemon Go is now available on iOS and Android devices. (Nintendo)

Pokemon Go is now available on iOS and Android devices. (Nintendo)

Two weeks after the last update, a brand new patch has been released for Pokemon Go. So what’s different?

The main thing that has been added is a feature called “appraisal.” Players can now learn more about their Pokemon’s stats by speaking to the leader of their team, i.e. Candela, Blanche or Spark. Once the update is added, simply go to a Pokemon, click the button on the bottom right and hit “appraisal.” Now, your team leader will pop up and give you a bit more information about the creature at hand.

The following screenshots were posted on Reddit illustrating how the appraisal will work once the patch has been installed. Click through the gallery to see more. Specific data about the Pokemon’s stats isn’t provided, but the game just gives players a general idea of if the Pokemon is stronger or weaker than others.

This is a nice way of giving users more information about their Pokemon, which prior to this was a bit difficult to figure out without using online IV calculators. It also gives the team leaders more of a role in the game. When Candela, Blanche and Spark were initially introduced, players didn’t even know what they looked like, but at Comic Con, Niantic Labs finally revealed them and said that the characters would be more involved in the game going forward.

As well, the new update also makes it so that Pokemon that faint during training require a revive rather than being kept at 1HP.

The patch notes also say that there have been “minor bot fixes,” but at the moment it’s not entirely clear what that means; it could be referring to changes made in an attempt to crack down on players cheating by using bots. The notes also promise that there is more to come, with Niantic writing, “We are still working hard on several new and exciting features to come in the future of Pokémon GO.”

Notably, this update does not feature an update to the tracker. In the previous patch, released two weeks ago, the old tracker feature was replaced with something new called “sightings.” For many players, this has worked as a nice temporary solution while the nearby tracker is broken, but gamers are still hoping that the original tracker that was present when the game initially launched will eventually make a return.

Also expected to be added in an update at some point is a trading feature.

Still, Niantic has made a fair amount of changes over the past few weeks that have made the game run much more smoothly than it was towards the end of July, with the servers in particular being pretty consistently stable.