I was surprised by the hate for the new avatar system when it came out, but I suspect the issue is a mismatch between goals.
It looks to me like niantic have tried to make it so you can make your avatar look (by degrees) like a stylised version of you. Sure there's a few wonky edge cases, but it's got sliders, it's got range, you can mostly make it look like you.
The trick is most players don't want it to look like them; they want an anime avatar. They want skinny waists and bold hair colours, despite that not being what they look like. Niantic expected people to make themselves, and took away tools that wouldn't achieve that.
Of course there's some grounds for incompetency - the way the clothes have adapted is non-ideal, and the sliders don't have enough range as the art direction (and the old avatar models) implies. I suspect that, over time, more colours/styles and more slider range will be added back in; possibly yes, for a cost.
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I was surprised by the hate for the new avatar system when it came out, but I suspect the issue is a mismatch between goals.
It looks to me like niantic have tried to make it so you can make your avatar look (by degrees) like a stylised version of you. Sure there's a few wonky edge cases, but it's got sliders, it's got range, you can mostly make it look like you.
The trick is most players don't want it to look like them; they want an anime avatar. They want skinny waists and bold hair colours, despite that not being what they look like. Niantic expected people to make themselves, and took away tools that wouldn't achieve that.
Of course there's some grounds for incompetency - the way the clothes have adapted is non-ideal, and the sliders don't have enough range as the art direction (and the old avatar models) implies. I suspect that, over time, more colours/styles and more slider range will be added back in; possibly yes, for a cost.
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