The deeper I get into Pe💃ridot’s breeding system, the more I find myself scratching my head, wondering how it ended up this abtruse. What should be a simple process of selecting mates to breed with each other is bogged down by awkward interfaces, microtransactions, and the forced use of N♑iantic Discord knockoff, Campfire. The friction created by Peridot’s bizarre Hatch-a-Dot process is putting me off the game barely a week after I started playing it.
Every step of the way is a headache. It starts with finding a suitable mate, which is more laborious than any other task in the game, including actually raising your dots. There's four different sources of potential mates, and you'll need to look at all of them frequently to find what you're looking for. Random dots will appear in the Visiting Dots menu and the Habitat menu when you're near one, but you can also navigate to your friends list to see what kind of dots they have. If you're looking for something specific, you'll need to trawl the message boards in Campfire for potential mates like it's some kind of Bumble for Pokemon.
The deeper you get into the breeding loop, the harder this process becomes. The fun of breeding is targeting specific traits so you can discover new archetypes. Unlocking an archetype requires you to breed a collection of traits into your dot, which can take multiple generations to accomplish, due to the random nature of breeding. Some players may just want to breed cool dots and not wor🃏ry about selective breeding, but if you want to engage with Peridot’s progression system, you’re going to have to put in some leg work.
Finding a dot with all the traits you’re interested in might not be enough, since traits are all locked behind your Keeper Society level. This is particularly frustrating early on because it is clear that Niantic has buried all of the ꦚcool, exotic, flashy traits deep in the unlock track, so for the first few weeks (or months depending on how actively you play) you’ll only be able to get the simple, unimpressive one-star trait🌄s. Unless you’re willing to pay, of course. If you throw down some gems, you can temporarily unlock all of the traits on your target dot when you breed with it. This is the definition of designing a problem and selling a solution.
Once you’ve picked the dot you want to breed with, you still have to deal with Campfire, which poses its own set of frustrations. You can’t breed with a dot unless their owner gives you permission, so the first thing you need to do is DM the owner their own dot’s Dot Card - a unique ID card that all dots have that lists their traits - to the owner. Peridot has a built-in button for this, but it will still open the Campfire app as an overlay to show you the message request you sent. You then need to press two obscure buttons to navigate back to the game, which gets extra tricky when your phone slows down to crawl because it's trying to run two extremely demanding apps at the same time.
There is no incen🦂tive for anyone to open Campfire, go to their message requests, and approve your request to breed. They don’t get anything for doing it, other than perhaps the satisfaction of helping you get a new dot, so it’s understandable that people choose to ignore these requests. You can be left waiting indefinitely for a rꦚesponse from a dot owner, and you may never get permission to breed with the dot you want - not because the other player said no, but because they just never even bothered to look at the request.
I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve spent time seeking out dots I really want to borrow traits from, only for the dot’s owner to ignore my request completely. I’ve also been flooded with breeding requests ever since Peridot launched globally. My dot Shoosh, I’m proud to say, has some very desirable traits. Unfortunately that means my phone is buzzing with Hatch-a-Dot requests 30 times a day, and I’m startin🔴g to ignore some of them out of respect for my own time and mental health. I wish I could just turn on some kind of auto-accept all, but there’s no option for that.
The entire interface needs a major overhaul. Shoving breeding requests into Campfire DMs makes it impossible to sort or keep track of your interactions and requests, especially if you’ve sent out a lot of them. When I look at my Campfire DMs, I just see a list of a hundred names with no other context. Some of those are Hatch-a-Dot requests people sent me, and some of them are requests that I sent out. I have no idea which threads will lead to the button I need to press to start the breeding process, and I can’t see anyone else’s dot unless I tap into each individual conversation. I know that a bunch of people have accepted my request, but I can’t remember the names of everyone I sent requests too, and♑ it takes so much time to scroll through all my DMs and look at everyone to find them - especially when the app runs so slowly while Peridot is going in the background.
When you make your way through all of that misery and finally get to the point where you can actually hatch a new dot, you’re still on the hook for a $5 nest, every single time. Then you have the option to pay the gem fee to unlock the traits you don’t have access to. Even if you do all of that, there’s still no guarantee you’ll g✨et the dot you want, thanks to R🍌NG. I don’t understand why Niantic decided to make breeding so difficult, but it is the most maddening process in the game. It’s also a pretty essential component of the gameplay loop, so I hope it gets some attention sooner rather than later, because I’ve only been playing a week and I’m completely over it.