Pokémon Go's Battle League Quirks Are Getting Fixed in 2026

Why It Matters

A more reliable PvP experience restores competitive integrity, likely boosting player retention and the game’s esports ecosystem. Consistent outcomes also enhance Niantic’s reputation for delivering polished live‑service updates.

Key Takeaways

• Damage resolves at turn’s end
• Swaps occur before damage
• Network lag less likely to affect outcomes
• Replay tools enable faster bug fixes
• Phased rollout begins with QR and friend battles

Pulse Analysis

Since its 2020 launch, Pokémon Go’s Go Battle League has attracted a dedicated competitive community, but players have long complained about damage registration errors and outcomes that seemed to hinge on network latency. These quirks, often termed DRE (damage registration error), allowed fast moves to be overwritten by charge moves, undermining skill‑based play and discouraging high‑stakes tournaments. The inconsistency not only frustrated seasoned trainers but also limited the game’s potential as a viable esports platform.

Niantic’s engineering team has rebuilt the battle engine from the ground up, anchoring each turn to a fixed timeline rather than a dynamic server calculation. By moving damage calculation to the end of the turn and enforcing swap actions before damage, the system neutralizes timing disparities caused by varying device performance or internet conditions. Additionally, the introduction of granular replay logs gives developers timestamped battle snapshots, dramatically accelerating issue identification and resolution. Early internal testing reports a “miles more stable” experience, promising that casual players will see results that align with expectations while competitive users regain confidence in skill‑based outcomes.

The broader market impact could be significant. A stable PvP environment may reignite interest in organized Pokémon Go tournaments, attracting sponsorships and expanding the game’s esports footprint. Moreover, the phased rollout—starting with QR and friend battles—allows Niantic to fine‑tune the system before a full GBL launch, minimizing disruption. As live‑service games increasingly compete on competitive integrity, Niantic’s proactive overhaul positions Pokémon Go to retain its massive user base and capture new revenue streams from tournament entry fees, merchandise, and in‑game purchases tied to the Battle League.

Pokémon Go's Battle League quirks are getting fixed in 2026

By Michael McWhertor · Published Feb 17, 2026, 4:00 PM EST

Image: Niantic

While many Pokémon fans may think of Pokémon Go as a means to be physically active and explore new places, collecting rare Pokémon along the way, there’s a passionate portion of the player base that’s in it to fight. Since early 2020, Pokémon Go players have been able to battle each other in the Go Battle League, where competitive online Trainer Battles take place.

But even by Pokémon Go developer Niantic’s admission, GBL battles haven’t always worked perfectly, or at least worked as players have expected. PvP battles can be inconsistent, and players have discovered ways to exploit GBL’s online play mechanics to their advantage.

In 2026, Niantic is doing something about it. The company says it’s “rebuilding the core battle system” of Pokémon Go to “harden the foundations of all battle modes, including PvP, so that battles consistently reflect player skill while maintaining the fast, responsive feel players expect.”

“In the past, some interactions could be influenced by when inputs arrived within those turns,” Niantic explained in a blog post. Differences in network conditions or device performance could affect how actions were resolved, the company said, but “the updated battle system reinforces turn‑based resolution at a foundational level, better mitigating the impact of network hiccups and device performance differences. While connectivity will always play a role in online play, normal variations within turn and network tolerances should no longer change the outcome of identical decisions for a given game state.”

Image: Niantic / The Pokémon Company

There are a few major changes coming to Pokémon Go’s Battle League as part of Niantic’s updates. These include damage resolving at the end of a turn in PvP, rather than resolving at different points within a turn, depending on network conditions. Swapping Pokémon during PvP will also resolve before damage is applied, and swapping will be more consistent across quick swaps (voluntary swaps) and forced swaps (when a Pokémon faints and is replaced). A full explanation of what’s changing is detailed on the Pokémon Go website.

At the most basic level, though, “we rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up to eliminate a lot of the inconsistencies,” said Ben Li, staff server engineer at Niantic, in an interview with Polygon.

“From our testing so far, it's miles more stable and way more consistent,” Li said. “For more casual players, this should just mean that your play experience should basically line up with what you would expect it to do.”

Li said that Niantic has been reworking its battle systems for the past “two‑ish years” and that PvP specifically has been updated for the past nine to ten months. For Li, overhauling how PvP and the Go Battle League functions consistently has been something of a personal crusade.

“Before joining the company, I was deep, deep, deep into PvP,” Li said. “I would play three to four tournaments a week, at in‑person tournaments, and I actually was very high up on the grassroots tournament scene. That led me to see all the issues that the layperson would've seen, and on top of that, the inconsistencies that a competitor would see. Eventually, I joined the company, and one of the first things I did was say, ‘Hey, can I please work on PvP and the battle systems? Because I think I can make it better.’ It's been a thing that has been building up throughout my time here at Niantic. It's been a long con, if you will [laughs].”

Image: Niantic

Since Li is a veteran PvP player, he’s keenly aware of what the hardcore Go Battle League cares about. “One of the things that's very painful in the community right now is something called DRE (damage registration error), where fast moves might not register before a charge move actually fires on the same turn, which causes you to potentially miss out on a fast move, or just not hit at all because you'll faint,” he said. That type of situation is basically eliminated by Niantic’s new system of putting everything against an actual timeline and actual turns.

“The fact that things are now lined up with what players understand the game to be like — in terms of ‘turns are segments of time, instead of this dynamically calculated thing on the server somehow’ — lines up a lot closer to how I and a bunch of other people in the community would've imagined the game to be like,” Li said.

Niantic plans to roll out changes to Pokémon Go’s battle systems in waves, starting with QR and friend battles — not actual Go Battle League battles. That wouldn’t be fair to competitive players, Li said. The team wants to “make sure our systems are healthy” before rolling them out to GBL, at which point it will roll out across the globe over time.

“We have the ability to adjust exactly who's on the new system, who's on the old system, when and where,” Li said. “So there's a very involved activation plan that we've laid out to make sure that we don't impact our competitors.”

Despite his pride in the changes coming to Pokémon Go PvP, Li acknowledged that there’s still room for improvement. Niantic has built new tools to monitor and replay player battles, so it can identify issues with the new system.

“I'm also a big StarCraft fan, and there are a lot of other games out there that have a system where you can actually replay exactly what happened,” Li said. “That's actually, in my opinion, the technical crowning jewel of this new system is that we are able to see exactly what's going on when given a timestamp from a player. So that's huge. In terms of engineering efforts, that made it so we can debug things much faster. We can isolate problems a magnitude faster and easier. That's the thing I'm personally most excited about as an engineer.”