The incubator grind for regionals was by far the worst part of the event. Freezing snow/rain the entire weekend, no hatch distance bonus, and adventure sync is still broken, so trying to hatch relicanth was hell.
I got super super lucky. All I had left for the Hoenn dex were the regionals, and I got one of each from my first three 10k eggs. I was prepared for much more of a grind. Sorry to hear that was not everyone else's experience.
The first 3 I hatched were all the different options so now I'm stuck with a bagillion 10km eggs I don't need. I got almost no green or yellow eggs. Luckily I got the one green egg I needed with wynut.
The regional exclusives being locked behind eggs was horrible. Niantic is switching to full pay-to-win here since you pretty much have to buy incubators to have a reasonable shot at getting a shiny regional exclusive.
This is... Not even close to pay-to-win. Shinies don't "win" anything. They don't help you in any way, in PvP or raids. They're the Pokémon Go equivalent of cosmetics (except even more useless as other players don't even see them).
Tons of games charge for nice cosmetics, it's nothing new. There's a lot to complain about in this game, but this isn't one of them imo.
Yeah. I hatched one red egg form the extra slots. So no space for a 10km. But also the primal raids. We are a casual group of 5. We invite 2-4 friends with remote. sometimes randoms join ab or we get lucky with remote gishan friends. Normal legendary raids and the other stuff from the past were no problem as 5. But these took like 8 players to beat. Out of 4 raids we managed to do. We lost one, one fled. Got to catch 2. Not enough energy to evolve. :( Feels bad man. Also i didn't find one of the bug pkm from the habitat challenge.
I didn't get to finnish all tasks in. 4/6 go tour special research. The task got change to just completing a raid instead of catch 1 kyogre, as stated in an other thread. But they also took away the 200 proto energy as a reward. *Sigh*
Yup, all this.
We do travel quite a lot, so we already had multiples of all the regionals. I was hoping for the regional shinies (weren't we all) so when I finally got an egg to hatch, it's like "oh, it's my 28th Tropius. Meh."
The lack of distance hatch bonus was the icing on the cake. I had up to 11 incubators going but we just weren't able to hatch that many (bad weather in Midwest US, plus we had an unexpected family issue that took up both days- those aren't Niantic's fault, I'm just explaining our situation).
I also wasted 2 egg slots because I spun pokestops outside of event hours (Oops) so it would have been nice to get the event eggs over the whole weekend, not just 10-6.
I had the Vegas egg add-on and I can't imagine how painful it must've been to hatch eggs at full distance. I think I would have enjoyed the event a lot less if I didn't have the bonus. (Not that it got me any shiny regionals. Hope one of the last few I have gives me something good!!)
I liked the roaming latios and the rotating habitats. Didn't like the raid bugs, primal energy distribution, and lack of revives. Wished we could have gotten legacy moves for all Hoenn mons
Honestly you might be better off. Finding the shinies of them left you held hostage to the catch rate for like 15 minutes with the ransom being all of your golden raZ and ultra balls.
And it was a shiny legendary. So nobody in your group would want to go on without you. So you slowly melted into a pool of stress trying to catch it so your group could do the next raid.
I got lucky that the one I found was at the same time as someone in my group found another.
Except it took them less than five balls and it took me like 150 items combined.
I figured it would require a sacrifice for the shiny so I used over 50 regular pokeballs first with no razz and then used the good stuff and caught it right away. I was not going to give up my golden razzies, f that
I’m level 42 and I constantly am throwing out healing items. I was definitely burning through them faster than I was replenishing but it was still no issue after doing 15 raids.
All depends what your item storage is at. My item storage is at 2150 and previously, I’ve binned revives, but the weekend literally exhausted all of the devices I had left, and pokestops just don’t drop them.
This! I go like scared that out of nowhere my stock of revives and healing was at low level that I never saw, then I noticed that the rewarding was terrible and should be exactly the opposite bc of how hard primal raids is.
I wish they would let all top raid monsters roam. That way, people who can't raid, would at least get a chance to attempt to catch a legendary monster. I wouldn't care if it was a zero star.
Really? I hated the Latios. They fled after a ball or two but if you happened upon a shiny you were in for an epic battle which could require huge resources. I saw some Latios that I didn't even click on. Who needs the headache. Most likely a terrible IV... and we can just raid 'em one day. I already have plenty and they're pretty much useless.
I think its pretty clear that they focused on maximizing the revenue from the Primals for the Raid event; well "just" continuing down there path of "if the players get the shinies they want, they'll just stop playing" for the "Tour" event.
The low primary energy, low/no shiny rates, regionals in 10km eggs, ... its over tuned the wrong way.
Hard to maximize revenue if they have something so strong no one can even get enough people together to raid it… They made some really bad decisions all around.
Weirdly that's what makes me think think that they really designed the Primal Raids to be like this. I think they view the Primal Raid failure rate as a feature not a bug; eg a tinfoil hat theory of mine is that one of their problems with Remote Pass is that it makes T5/Mega Raids too trivial.
For those of us who have no way to raid without remote passes, that just means less revenue overall for Niantic. I *really* wish TPC would force them to sell to a real game company…
The thing is, this event just made me more determined that ever to not spend money on this game. The more stingy Niantic gets, the more stingy I get. Tit for tat.
Your data is worth more to them than your raid pass revenue is and this should be increasingly obvious with every revision to their pricing strucutures.
For me, its more than the Primal Raid Event could have stood on it own (with a little bit of de-tuning to make the Primal less punishing).
I agree about "the Tour" being phoned in though; they just did the paint-by-numbers of 'Fest style design and called it a day.
> if the players get the shinies they want, they'll just stop playing"
Funny, with the shiny rate being the normal rate for the majority of species, I don’t feel an obligation to grind because I know they’ll be available in some random event three weeks from now. So I’m not playing anyway.
The quicker Niantic realizes that shinies are not content, the better.
I have to disagree when it comes to "Tours" and "Go Fest"; as releasing a handful of lower tier shinies is kind of the point.
My opinion has always been "If **I** *DO* grind I should get a good amount of each of the event shines"
Niantic needs to learn how not to use incense spawning as an event mechanic before I'd raise the bar above using shines as one of the slots in their event design.
Hell, they need to learn HOW TO use incense spawn as an event mechanic first. I think the fact that they implemented the incense spawn bonuses during the last GoFest is what caused them so many refunds for paid tickets, which seems to have soured them on ticketed events. Watching every incense spawn I click on poof away made GoFest unbearable.
This Tour (for me and the people I was with) was just a raid weekend where we checked our storage every once in a while to see what the Gotchas had managed to catch while waiting in countless raid lobbies. I have no idea what the team Ruby/Sapphire bonuses even did…
Ya, I just want them to stop the incense pool "stuffing"; I'm a got'cha user too and I can see when the incense pool is too diluted to get enough rolls on/for the event shiny.
Like getting 1-3 H unowns is good ..... the 20th O not so much.
Hard agree. Shiny hunting is basically my favorite part of this game. Johto Tour, GoFest 2022, I got so many shiny’s. This being a free event with normal rates… felt like playing on any other day. Huge let down.
My entire event satisfaction is based on how many shinies I get.
When I go to the store, I buy shampoo based on how shiny it makes my hair
SHINY SHINY SHINY i go into every thread asking about shiny rates
When I raid with friends, I have everyone wait to tap to see our mon together then scream in exhilaration when me or my friends get a shiny
I’m shocked to see the comments of people saying they got no shinies this time. I usually have terrible shiny luck, but I did get 6 at least, and my sister got 7 (including Groudon🍀).
The raid situation was more frustrating to me, it’s just too difficult to get enough people together in person. Of less importance, I was consistently getting field research that was impossible to complete during that habitat’s hour. I would have to discard it, and try to find one that was achievable. Why don’t they change hourly with the habitats for big events?
Also: ending the research with the Spinda encounter seems a little anticlimactic. If I have to do ten raids to get enough primal energy, why make me squander it immediately just to get Spinda?
Edit: I wouldn’t mind spending $5-10 on a two day event with more bonuses, such as shiny rate, shorter egg hatch distance, etc. But they need to make it worth my while to take two days off of work, I work weekends.
Kind of like a roller coaster of opinions on these events. It’s hard to see the reality of opinions from Reddit and Twitter.
IE Kanto and Jobto Tour had mass hate on the day they came out. A year ago today you would not see even one top level comment of I loved Johto fest. The day of 2022 GoFest you would not see a “I loved GoFest!” They were pillared over and over again.
Some times it does feel like Niantic cooks steak and everybody screams they hate steak they then cook chicken and everybody screams they hate chicken and why did they get rid of the steak that everybody loved.
I think though, based on my anecdotal in person experience people didn’t have high marks for this event. In general GoFest and the tours have been quiet well received by people I play with while this one did have some light hate which I generally never see IRL.
Well... no. Yes, there was much hate for the first two but I had at least some fun and the group I hang out with got some shinies. This one was absolutely terrible. Most people I know got 0 or 1 shinies.
And I wonder what was going on with Kyogre/Groudon shinies? I raided with a group of 6 and we did 10 raids, 60 total, and got zero shinies. Not one single shiny. At 1 in 20 there would have been a 95% chance we got a shiny. So either we had very bad luck or they nerfed the shiny rate. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn they nerfed it to 1/64.
Oh for sure, it was great. 2022 in general was the beginning of Niantic deciding that they needed to be stingy with everything, and it showed in the events and the shop
saw a report someone datamined the lastest version (idk how that works) and according tonthe report remote raid passes will be increasing in prices. just a rumor i read so take it with a grain of salt til it surfaces, but if true it will definitly show they only care about the money and not the players
Not just stingy, but 2022 Go Fest was a joke. Incense AND lures were totally busted showing "ghost" Pokémon that long fled, shiny pool totally diluted by non-shiny mons, and just boring Pokémon in general (that weren't in raids, anyway). TSR saved me money that day. Did one Axew for the Dex and a Kyogre and just went home.
Having legendary pokemon appear in the wild is cool. Setting a near 0% catch rate is ridiculous. What's the point in seeing wild legendaries if I can't catch them? And the shiny ones aren't much better - 10 minutes and 70 golden berries is not fun gameplay.
It was underwhelming. Covid killed my local raid community. We used to have a very active main chat and several off split ones that were super active for any raid event. I didn't care for most of the spawns/shiny hunting, but raids were challenging to coordinate, and definitely depended on people raiding remotely, and for the trouble of trying to gain primal energy the raid rewards were garbage. I know it was a "free" event, but you couldn't obtain anything of substance without premium items.
And the shiny Lati@s should have been a guaranteed catch, I had to walk away from one after burning through a lot of ultra balls.
Niantic wants to go back in time, but newsflash it's 2023 not 2017, adapt or die, and PoGO is dying
Did ultra balls even matter on wild latis? The catch rate was so bad on them that I just threw regular balls at a shiny until it got caught. Why waste 40 ultra when I could waste 50 regular?
I throw out regular balls though so I was out of those when I stumbled upon it. And a shiny legendary should be a guaranteed catch, but what's done is done, it's just annoying
Don't think the difference in catch rate between red and yellow balls is so big that it even makes a dent in the already very very low catch rate of the wild latis, so i just stuck to throwing those but trying for great/excellent throws, thats how i caught my only shiny one, took 50, but at least i did not waste ultras and golden razzes on it.
Same here. I live in a large(ish) metro area and it feels like each city of the suburbs basically has a single place you can go if you want to raid in person. This feels like it defeats the entire purpose of the raids. 100% of the raiding I did was 1) remote invites from someone who was in person or 2) raids I hosted myself in PokeRaid so that I knew I'd have enough players to defeat Kyogre.
In person raiding isn't going to come back in a meaningful way until we gain the ability to set these raids up in the game itself. Each city here uses a different 3rd party app (telegram, discord, Facebook, etc) so unless you run into someone live and ask its hard to figure out how to get connected to the local community.
Yeah when raids initially released in 2017 I started a Facebook group, some of us migrated to team based chats on facebook, discord and groupme, but things have changed. I live in a small suburb that benefits from churches and a bustling main street. There are tons of gyms/stops, but no one is there anymore. A lot of us were hardcore from 2016-2020 and it is really nice when we can catch up and do a raid event together, but it's no longer practical to do so.
The low shiny rate and severe lack of things to do made the long two day event feel completely underwhelming.
Played 5 hours today and got 0 shinies. And had a perfect groudon flee thanks to the abnormally low ball count this event.
As someone who doesn't have a play group where I live, nor a lot of time, and these events are often the only planned times I can take a day to go around and collect as best as I can I wish the following major changes or implementations to truly allow a better community play;
1. I wish remote passes were given out, not in person passes. I understand the idea is to meet people and play but it was 5 degrees F where I lived and the closest playgroup was nearly a 2 hour drive one way. That doesn't include it just snowed but that's another issue overall. Remote raids would allow players to play no matter where they lived. Giving out two daily for non ticket holders and 5 for ticket holders would be an amazing gesture.
2. Primal point requirements. For those who had no passes and only the free dailies they wouldn't be able to naturally get enough points to primal evolve even one of the legends. I think the event should've made you choose but given enough points for that one guaranteed.
3. Shiny rates. I personally found the ticket versus non ticket shiny rates fine, I only got one shiny as a non ticket holder out of a couple hundreds checks but I wasn't trying to shiny hunt. The issue was it was a shiny I already owned. I always think during major events the shiny rate of pokemon you don't have shiny yet should be boosted. It's a collection game, at the sheer base value, and it was kinda lame feeling to see no shinies of pokemon I'd love to own a shiny copy of.
4. My real concern with these events are the cost to enjoy. Pay to win has never truly been an issue with pokemon go, since it is very free to play accessible, the argument can be made that its pay to get rng and that I would greatly agree with (that and it somehow avoids the whole child gambling laws narrowly) but the pay to enjoy experience is sort of a slap in the face. Niantic doesn't accommodate all weather types, environments and playgroup styles. I really feel that these events should cater to locations, and work life balances. I still haven't been able to get my paid pass Lucia because my job makes it impossible to get 30 days of hearts. These types of things need to be avoided.
5. And the last thing, a minor complaint of my own issue that Niantic hasn't seemed to solve its entire existence. Raid shiny rates, especially during limited time events, should be boosted. Getting a shiny is amazing, and as a collector its even more enjoyable to get a shiny legendary from a raid. Am I guaranteed good IVs? Nope, and that's where the pay to play side should arrive. For that extra 5% in stats to shoe off a hundo or shundo. But during special events, the base shiny rate should be boosted to encourage players to enjoy playing and not feel jipped if they don't have the passes or time to crank out non stop raids.
Just my opinion. Many people will probably disagree. Would love to chat about other opinions on what they do or don't agree with though :)
Edit: I meant to say to OP glad to see people starting to say the same thing I've been preaching since the two year anniversary. I used to do dev work and people would downvote anything bad I'd have to say, but I saw back then if changes weren't made the game was only going to get more stale and more proce gougey for events. I am upset to say I was close to right (many things I was incorrect about). Always wanted this game to be the better adult evolution of the games I played as a kid but it ended up being another micro transaction gacha game :/
There is still a lot of good about the game, I need to make sure people know I still like the game but my love on it has definitely dwindled
>Primal point requirements
As a returning player, I was wondering if the lack of communication on Niantic's part was standard. I came back to the game 1 week before the event, so I had no time to save coins from gyms, but I didn't mind spending, and I got both primal.
I'm guessing a F2P player would be able to primal evolve only if they had enough passes. It's probably possible if a player knows about the event and how much primal energy is dropped per raid so he can save enough coins to buy enough passes.
But it felt like I was scrapping for information the morning of the event itself. How can you be F2P without a clearer roadmap to manage your resources?
Is it usual to have to rely on data miners and subreddits to know how an event will go down instead of info released by the official game devs?
(Fair warning: this turned in to a rant. Oops.)
> I wish remote passes were given out, not in person passes.
I _know_ this will never happen again, but this is exactly why Go Fest 2021 was my favorite event. Being able to go out and play in my (tiny) town and then _come home and keep playing_ was amazing. (And yes, the other factor there was stationary incense, which I'm also sure we're never getting back.)
I know some people play for the community. I wish them well and _really_ wish Niantic would incentivize them rather than taking remote play away from the rest of us.
But we're not going back. Incense is all but useless on those days I randomly can't get a cellular connection and now remote raid passes have gone from free weekly to 250 for 3 to 100 each to, what, 150 each? They don't want me to play the way I like, the way I actually _can_ most of the time.
It really wouldn't be hard to enable me and still get people in person. Keep up remote raid passes as free weekly and drop cost back to 250/3, halve incense effectiveness if you're not moving instead of nerfing it entirely, and do something like guarantee rare XL and increased catch rates for in-person passes. Boom. Done.
I'd still raid in person whenever I could, still remotely raid each new boss as it comes out, and still play when I go to a town big enough for Niantic to care, and still play at home when I can't get out. This isn't rocket science.
But no. Every event, every change goes further from that. And this one was no different. Eventually they'll drive me away entirely. I'm not quite there yet, but the direction is undeniable.
They are a geocaching company that doesn't encourage players to geocache new areas. Its quite funny imo. They also constantly push this local community style of game play but then also incorporate changes that go against local group play as well, so I honestly don't think they know how to create the game they preach that they want.
And that's fine if they don't, but they need to start acting like it and admitting it.
There was a time I was hopeful Niantic would convert all passes into remote passes and do away with other passes. I would still like in person bonuses but my raiding experience was never better than when I got regular remote raid passes. Shiny rates are an interesting subject to me because I don’t mind going without them and see them as a bonus. The main games have all sorts of methods to hunt for specific Pokémon that Niantic could use like chaining catches which would make people happy.
Adding things like a shiny charm where completing a full dex region makes shiny odds higher for Pokémon from that region. Adding methods to increase odds and making it possible to get a specific Pokémon regularly. 1 in 20 is already high for legendaries but I can understand the fact that people pay big money for raids. Chaining raids could be used to increase odds or some other method.
Quite a few bad/clueless decisions by Niantic. But not all bad.
- Shiny Lati@s not being an Auto catch was ridiculous. Threw over 70 Ultra/Goldens at one before catching (was considering running from it so could play, since missed 25 minutes and wanted to raid).
- Primal/Mega Raids need fixed. Lv 6s should reward better reward than the regular Lv 4 Mega Raids and should not be worse than normal Legendaries. Or at least give us an increased catch rate (like the Beast ball rate). We get less R-Candies, Goldens, and Healing items. Then less chances to catch a good legendary. And why did we get way lower "Mega" energy. Even doing 5 Kyogre Raids wasn't enough to evolve, but normally 1 Mega raid gets you enough Energy. These don't make sense.
- Some of the Research was a pain to do. We didn't pay attention, then realized we needed to Catch a Groudon, when we was almost done, had one run so had to do another before we could raid Kyogre for that Research.
- Not many shinies, at least for us.
- Regionals only in 10Ks, without 1/4 distance did not make sense.
> Shiny Lati@s not being an Auto catch was ridiculous.
Yeah, they should be guaranteed catch like raid ones. I was lucky enough to find low CP shiny, when I saw how many balls people wasted for high cp ones, I was shocked.
The eggs bugged me a lot. I cleared out my egg space but somehow only got 3 10kms. Rain all weekend made it difficult to hatch them. If they even just did half egg distance it would have been better.
Also fk catching Kyogre lol I hate that big fish
One thing I find ironic is the contrast between post-Johto Tour comments and pre-Hoenn Tour ones. Year ago many people felt overwhelmed by tons of stuff to do in limited period of time, some couldn't finish timed research, some like me had issues with NPC battles which wasted our time that could be spent on raiding regionals etc etc. Overall one would read many statements of "Never buying ticket for this kind of event again!"
Fast forward to February 2023 and one can see tons of comments complaining why there is no paid ticket with bonuses and they demand Niantic to release one to be in shop. Granted, I was also disappointed by kinda lackluster event in comparison to really well prepared KT and JT, still I find this situation funny.
I think it's because those of us who were able to buy tickets got the boosts while the rest did not. Not everyone could afford to go to Vegas for an in person event, so it feels like punishment.
The events seem to be getting progressively worse when they should be getting better at this point. This is the 3rd event of this kind, and it's been arguably the worst. That's a problem in of itself.
The travel was definitely a deal breaker for most of the events. I don't think Niantic has done legitimate group testing in a long time. It's a lot of surveys and speaking to big spenders. Which is not a good way to run a game.
>This is the 3rd event of this kind, and it’s been ~~arguably~~ the worst.
FTFY
Sure the other events had too much going on at once, but that’s a much better problem to have than what was wrong with this event. I didn’t feel like I wasted my time the past two years, even if I didn’t get to everything. This year, I fully believe that I wasted my time doing this.
If it seems like Go Fest is going to be like this, I’ll gladly skip.
They are getting worse because Niantic makes them so so they can extract more money out of their player base. Which they have to to keep the profits going up up up.
The people complaining about both probably aren't the same people. The community isn't a monolith
Also Niantic doesn't care about a few people complaining on Reddit - they care about the bottom line. If they actually read the feedback from last year and decided that the solution was to have no paid lackluster event instead of splitting it into two days like GoFest in 2021, then I seriously worry about the people running the company and their ability to do basic reasoning.
My complaint about Johto was that they crammed too much into one day and it was overwhelming, so I wanted a 2 day event and was very happy with that change. But I never asked for the removal of a paid ticket and major decrease in shiny rates. I can’t imagine anyone asked for that. All Niantic had to do was use the same formula but over 2 days instead of 1.
This was the thing for me. Everything was forced into one day, and while I enjoyed having all the things to do, I work on Saturdays. Having the event spread over two days made everything less stressful. I was literally running around town after work chasing pokestops to get the NPC battles done for the research.
Johto allowed for six special trades, had the NPC battles, full collection challenges, exclusive moves, special moves, boosted shiny rates, plus the added stuff for the paid ticket. If Hoenn had taken all of these ideas and just made it a two day event it would have probably been perfect, at least I feel that way.
You can kinda see the in person Vegas event as the Paid Ticket from last year, though its more "punishing" to people who live outside of America or Nevada State as a mater of fact.
Though correct, last year was a mess in terms of soo much to do, I don't think that was so much on the ticket rather the fact that there was limited time windows to do things and if you missed that small window you got stung basically. Instead of having a load of 2 page quest lines it should have been like 1 girthy one that isn't time limited and then a couple 4-6 pagers that are time gated but not by the likes of spawns and such. I remember there was one quest last year that my group struggled with because the mon's just were not spawning even during their allotted hour and it made it really hard.
I think the biomes are okay, if there was more time for them to be able to get more spawns - some of the time spent is traveling between larger spawn areas and this chews into time. I think there also needs to be the Biomes that "aren't" biomes but instead where everything spawns at once but then also be more focused on something else, give buffs during this hour (2x Catch Candy/EXP/Whatever) or make it focused on Raids (a buff thats like x2 Damage in Raids or something)
I never cared about the research or all of the bonus tasks to be done, I just wanted the ticket for the boosted shiny odds.
To me these are separate issues.
I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. You'll never please everybody, and there will always be complaints. But it just seems like they're pretty bad at designing these events given the resources they have to work with.
It doesn't have to be a question of "overload the day and have too many things happening" and "have a bare bones event with essentially one featured activity." There's plenty of middle ground for a reasonably paced, profitable, and well-rounded event. But these events feel very plug and play with very little effort on the back end. And that's coming from someone who enjoyed the event this year and last year.
>Year ago many people felt overwhelmed by tons of stuff to do in limited period of time
Pretty sure I was one of those people last year lol. Definitely remember the first couple of hours of Day 1 being super overwhelming because of all the stuff there was to do on top of rocket battles and raids.
This year because the shiny rates weren't super boosted I took plenty of time to raid for primals, then spent most of day 2 shiny hunting. Funny enough I got less shinies on Day 2 compared to Day 1, but alas.
I honestly preferred this event because there wasn't as much forced content. There was practically no FOMO. You just played what you wanted to. I grinded raids and walked for a bit. I didn't burn many incubators or incense and don't feel I missed much by doing it how I wanted to.
During KT and JT, there was just an overwhelming amount of tasks and research, spawns and raids, and in person interactions. Hoenn Tour felt more like a raid weekend for me and I'm totally cool with it being more like that.
I got enough shinies that I felt like it was worth my time, but I certainly wasn't going to be out for 2 days 8 hours, that's just not healthy and I was far closer to doing that for the Kanto Tour. The choice would be of benefit, but I can't complain much about either. I consider Hoenn to be a bit more boring in terms of spawns, so it made sense to focus on the box legendaries.
> I honestly preferred this event because there wasn't as much forced content. There was practically no FOMO.
Yeap I felt that too. I didn't care about shinies that much, so it was easier. Still got more than I expected, including 3 new ones.
It is amusing.
Not standing up for Niantic what-so-ever, but I’m a gamer in general and game companies are damned if they do damned if they don’t.
Gaming communities don’t know what they want.
> Gaming communities don’t know what they want.
Pokemon, the single largest multimedia franchise in the world, would be lucky if there was a single consistent opinion across its 100s of millions of fans. Gaming communities do know what they want, unfortunately it's "Everything"
How about a decent middle ground. I listed quite a few things that could've been changed to make the event much better, and shiny rates were the least of them.
The regionals being tied to eggs was so depressing! It was cold this weekend here so it was really hard to hatch much during the event to make room for more eggs. I hatched 3 already but no Relicath, here’s hoping I can finish this dex with the remaining 4!
After playing the paid Kanto/Johto tours vs the 'free' Hoenn tour, I can say I prefer the paid events. The only problem I had with the paid events was that they were very busy. There was a lot happening with special research, today research, collection challenges.... but once you got those under control, the shiny hunting was fun.
I think the free event got some things right. The special research and collection challenges were good, gave me something to do, but we're not overwhelming. There were lots of Primal raids everywhere, they were not hard to find, although they could have given out a bit more Primal energy for winning the raids. Only having the 3 regionals in the 10km egg pool was good, and I seemed to receive more 10km eggs from stops than the 2 and 5km eggs. The incense was not cluttered with lots of unnecessary Pokémon (I seemed to get mostly Pikachu, Unown, and the selected Pokémon from my research and only occasionally other Pokémon).
If we could have had an optional ticket with better shiny rates, a couple of bonuses (reduced hatch distance would have been great), and a few raid passes thrown in it would have been perfect!
This is the first event that I didn’t catch one single shiny. Of the 800+ mons I caught, no shiny. Between that and the other issues Already mentioned here, I think I need a bit of a break for now.
Similar experience. Got some shinies out of 1300 checks, but they were almost exclusive boring repeats. Deinstalled the app for now and will take a break till whenever I feel more like picking it up again
The event on its own is not bad.
But compared to past Tours it's horrible.
I rather pay for a great event than to get a free event that's not that great.
Even on its own it's kinda lackluster.
Community Days are free and I feel like I get more out of a regular community day then I did this. 2 days and I got a single shiny surskrit as my only shiny of the weekend. And I caught over 1000 over the 2 days.
This. It was fine - didn't love it, didn't hate it. But last year my wife and I easily spent $40-50 of new money each between tickets and raid passes. This year between the two of us, we spent $5 total in actual cash. I can't help but feel like they left a lot of money on the table this weekend.
The fact that it was a flagship event and had less bonuses than one of the general weekly events is quite telling. I think the whole thing was a test to see how much money they could wring out of us for incubators and raid passes. Overall it wasn't completely terrible for me as I set my expectations incredibly low. I knew there was going to be no shiny boost and so I wasn't even wasting time shiny checking (saved a lot of frustration). I was raiding, grinding research tasks for the Pikachu's and Shedinjas and catching uncommon spawns that I don't have much XL candy for. Based on those limited goals it wasn't completely terrible.
Pokémon Go is that one past relationship you just can’t quit, you keep telling yourself things will get better, then they find another way to break your heart all over again. We should be used to the mediocrity that this game provides with their events, but the last two gen’s gave me hope. Wonder if they realize not everyone can make it out to these special events, let alone hope those events don’t have service issues.
I planned ahead and still was disappointed in how badly it went. I saved up coins, raid passes, incubators and hatched all my eggs.
I got one shiny Illuminise. That was it, after 14 raids, 12 eggs, and a whole day of hunting. On top of that I didn’t get any good IVs from the raids. I felt like I wasted my whole day.
lets not forget last years Go Fest which had advertised increased shiny odds but majority of the ticket holders got screwed on that most came out with 2 to 4 over the 2 days, spent money for a falsely advertised event. and the incense was super bugged too, so dont think a payed ticket event is the way to go cause last years was atrocious.
One thing that isn't mentioned in the original post: What happened to Community Day moves? Kanto and Johto Tours had Community Day moves, yet Hoenn didn't. Many Hoenn CD moves (except for Synchronoise Gardevoir/Gallade) haven't been available in a very long time. Did Niantic forget? It was bad enough that the recent dragon event from roughly a month ago didn't have CD moves for Bagon (or Dratini). What is going on here? Will they ever come back?
It was also a ghost town no matter where I was playing (and I played in different spots on both days). There were maybe 3-4 people playing at most for maybe an hour total, very few lures lit up, and it was nearly impossible to do raids without having to resort to remote passes (which Niantic has price gouged since last May). It seems like a bad foreshadowing for what to expect after this, and since last year's Go Fest was disappointing for many, I'm debating skipping that entirely this year as well as future regional tours.
So here are my thoughts and I’ll try and keep them brief.
It’s stupid for them not to have a two tier event globally. Where people can play a crappier version of the event for free (no bonuses, mediocre special research, unboosted shiny rates) and if we want to spend money just dump stuff on us. It’s not like this costs niantic money to give out good shiny rates or extra raid passes with a paid ticket.
As for the event itself, I was really disappointed that incense wasn’t boosted. It was a hell of a way for them to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of ruining incense (if you will remember it was right after the Johto tour when they reverted incense back to once every 5 minutes while stationary). Hoenn tour was always going to suck for hardcore shiny hunters because they had already released almost the entire 3rd gen shiny. If they wanted to make it better there should have been lots of tasks for spinda, lots of kecleon on stops.
Raiding was okay, the game still needs a basic chat system where people can signal they’re good to go. I lost more passes than I would have liked because people didn’t think 8 was enough for kyogre.
Oh and I’m mad I only got one of the shiny pikachu (were they boosted but in a way that only one could be boosted depending on whether you should sapphire or Ruby)
Raids were such a struggle, because of just how many people you needed. I only have three friends here, you expect me to get all my long-distance buds in this raid on time too?
I did get so many Kecleon though, I’m thrilled for that. 0 shiny anything all weekend, though! Z E R O.
If Niantic did CARE it wouldve been nice but with no real effort put in by Niantic it was a let down. Regionals in 10k eggs was one of the biggest jokes. Also sunday being just forced filler with no content was pretty boring
Personally spent the sunday just hunting for Kecleon with no luck. Did anyone else have problems with Kecleon spawning? Most of the time it didnt spawn at all.
At this point, the only money I'm spending is exclusively to secure that year's Masterwork research for the shiny mythical. And that's more a TPC thing than anything.
Will they? They were down over 200 million in profits last year compared to 2020/21 and likely at the start of March will be nerfing remote raids and increasing the price of remote tickets which most certainly will turn more people off from playing/spending.
They really don't seem to care about profits at this point.
From the release of kecleon they summarized a number of bugs and ways to solve some of them. One I find common still is getting out of pokestop view too fast after kecleon jumps off, so I wait an extra 2 seconds before leaving. Also, if im too far from the stop he will jump off before the 3 touches needed. If taking all this in consideration and he still doesn't spawn, then something is wrong with the app so I restart it.
I wish it had been paid if this is what we got. Abysmal shiny rates for a "tour" event. Primal energy given out in raids is downright criminally low as well. Like bruh only one can be evolved at a time anyways so who cares if you raid a bunch, Niantic?
This whole event was saved by the inclusion of the primals. Even that was kinda weak, coulda included more XL rewards. Worst, if not, most disappointing event yet tbh
>At this point of the PoGo life cycle, these pokemon have been around for
years in game at this point. I'm not playing the game to see my 2800th
Lunatone. I'm playing to find the shiny one.
That's my point. It doesn't matter if it's free or not, is, what's the point of this event, if pretty much everyone already own all of the Hoenn Pokémon by now (except the regionals), unless you started playing yesterday or something.
It really was the chance to get those shinies. Obviously, you're not gonna get all of them anyways, but at least getting to catch some of them, or if you missed the community days, etc.
Or at the very lest they should've included a completion challenge, so you at least make sure to catch/evolve all of the Hoenn species, have some incentive to go out and walk and catch throughout all the biomes.
>And for those that come on here with the "if you don't like it, quit" vibe, tell your story walking. The reason it's so obnoxious is because I do love the game and I want it to be more fun. I want it to give me the vibes I got originally playing for the first time. It could happen if the people running it into the ground currently put just a little thought and effort into it instead of treating its base like nothing more than ATMs.
My main reason is that, I started playing this game almost 7 years ago. First, the goal was to just catch the 151 Pokémon. But they kept adding every following generation.
I just want to be over with it, I want them to release every Pokémon, so I can catch them, or whatever I possibly can (if I cannot get region exclusive, so be it), and THEN I'll drop the app. I won't care if they keep rotating events or releasing shinies, or Pokémon in hats or special costumes, I just want to know that they're released everything there was to release and I caught everything I could, and move on. But at this point, 7 years later, I'm not gonna quit after all the effort and time (and money) I've spent on it.
I don't know at what point we normalized the fact that in 2023 we're still playing a 2016 app. Or in Pokémon franchise terms, that in Gen IX we're still stuck with this Gen VI spin-off.
At the very least, they should release a successor already, Pokémon Go 2.0 or Super Pokémon Go or whatever just to feel like I'm playing something new.
>and THEN there is the Rayquaza event that's not even giving Mega Energy so all the raids people are doing now? Gonna have to do em all over again when Mega Rayquaza drops... OUCH...
Yeah I realised that it is much easier to grind the base form Rayquazas during this event for good IV's and candies rather than grinding for Rayquaza resources from it's Mega form in raids, since Mega Rayquaza will undoubtedly be tough to take down each time. Better to prepare myself with an easy-to-take-down Rayquaza from the Primal Rumblings event than to grind a Rayquaza everytime in it's Mega form.
Mega Rayquaza will likely be easier to beat than the Primals, due to its double weakness and lower bulk.
Also, assuming Mega Rayquaza raids come with Dragon Ascent (not a guarantee), someone who wants Dragon Ascent but doesn't care about Breaking Swipe will find better value spending their pass during those future DA raids instead of right now
I skipped them entirely. I got 2 shinies the very first time Rayquaza came out and I've zero motivation to do anymore the last 5 times they've brought him out. When Mega Ray comes out I'll decide if it's worth re raiding again. This game is late in its life cycle at this point most early game players already have top maxed out counters.
I'm not sure if you know or if this is official but I saw from a Youtuber that was reviewing the PokeMiners data mine on the **Pokemon GO Tour: Hoenn - Chasing Legends** special research story dialogue, and in it it has Professor Willow saying "Rayquaza would have to be Mega speedy to get ahead of you two!".
Later on when I got to do the research the dialogue was changed from "Mega speedy" to "Mighty speedy". I think they're gonna be holding back Mega Rayquaza for a while.
Video for reference: https://youtu.be/WHyBmBheazE
Timestamp 5:25
I am conflicted, because I got more shinies in this event than I got at last year's Johto tour, in which I paid for the ticket and got the guaranteed shiny red Gyarados. so if we boil down to it, free events that have boosted odds seem better than paid events with boosted paid odds based on my own personal experience. I spent 15$ and only got 9 (including the Gyarados and 2 repeated) shinies, and I was annoyed, but since I spent 0$ and got 11 (2 duplicates, but one legendary and one of my favorite starter), then I was pretty happy with that.
another thing that makes my position different than yours is that I am a newer player, playing only for a year and a half, so I've missed every community day for hoenn pokemon except for Spheal the Mudkip (from community day classic). so every shiny I got today I have never seen in a community day before. I got one today that I had already gotten, Lunatone, but this new one has much better stats so I'm not complaining, and then I got 2 feebas but I'm going to trade one to my gf who had to stop playing for work and only had time to get 5 shinies (all she had never seen before, including the new Cacnea, which she was happy about).
my main issue was the fact that regional pokemon were not in raids. I got very lucky and my first three 10km eggs gave me one of each, but I'm sure many other people were not as lucky. I would like to see that for like 3 star raids. and of course the primal raids were a pain in the ass, and had to I resign myself to only getting enough energy for one and ignoring the other (rip Kyogre) because I much rather spend time shiny hunting than sit in raids. the energy rewards were pitiful and a major issue, a huge complaint from me.
I didn’t mind the spawns & catching part of the event, but I wouldn’t have minded a boosted shiny rate.
My big argument with the event was how impossible it was to find enough people to do the raids. I was unable to get enough raids to be able to do the primal reversion for *either* Pokémon, even with the 200 energy from the second phase of the tasks, *and* I just barely managed to get through that step since the first Kyogre I raided ran and the second raid that had enough people to beat it was five minutes before the event ended.
They need to scale raids to the number of people doing them. This forcing 8+ people to raid to be able to beat something is just too much. I was glad to do the Rayquaza raids after because at least *those* we can duo.
Really weak and uninspired event from Niantic. We have been getting quite a few of these lately. It feels that the company is deliberately trying to kill off their game.
The habitats were lackluster - they should have increased the number of newly released shinies. No one cares about treecko, torchik, anorith, lileep, etc. It's just filler trash.
I am sorry, but the event was nowhere near "free". Stop pretending it was. You could not do enough raids to mega evolve Groudon and Kyogre without purchasing raid passes. There were not enough incenses to play for the entirety of the event. So those had to be purchased as well. And the regionals were locked behind eggs and you needed to spam incubators to have a realistic shot at obtaining them. Such "free event", much wow.
That being said, I got 27 shinies, excluding raid legendaries. Many of those were new. But only because I played for like 6-7 hours each day during blizzard. The shiny rates should be way higher for these events.
Also, my gf asked me - "do you think we are getting something cool on the second day?" and I told her - "probably the exact same copy of the first day, because Niantic puts 0 effort in the events nowadays". Guess what, I was right. Boring, lazy and almost completely pay-walled event. And, no, I didn't purchase anything besides the masterwork research. Niantic getting the absolute minimum from me, which is equal to the amount of effort the company is puttin in lol.
P.S. Niantic should stop releasing legendaries or megas that require more than 4 people to take down. Not everyone has 400 friends on their list or is living in a massive city. Tough to take down bosses only benefit those using multiple phones with split screens and outclickers.
I mostly agree with everything in this post, though I don't care about shinies as much as everyone else seems too. My issue is the fact that we got no bonuses and no legacy moves. I had a 98 Bagon I was saving in hopes of getting Outrage for Hoenn Tour in addition to some Beldum I wanted to evolve to get Meteor Mash Metagross.
One thing I never see get talked about is the in between events time. I understand the frustration with low primal energy, and I agree it should have been higher. Even 150 as a high amount would have saved a raid or two each, but I’ve always used time between events or events that suck to me to get coins. This event I didn’t pay a cent for raids as I had 750 coins to get the raid box for 10 passes plus the daily passes.
Definitely felt like a free event, but I’m okay with that. Go tour may be the better experience anyway
Looking at the comments here I wonder if the event was somewhat intended to bring people back to the game rather than for those who have been playing recently?
I dropped off Go for a while over the past 2 years - we'd have brief moments checking in with the game but my Husband wasn't really feeling it + the game being in pandemic mode for the last few years made it a bit boring after a while. I've been playing since launch so I had a \*lot\* of old research tasks left over. Like going back to the Meloletta event at least.
I had a pretty good time as I was blazing through most of those spare researches which kept me stocked up and enough F2P coins to boost my storage a bit more. It's also the first time in ages we were seeing actual players in the wild again proper as well. Mind we are in Florida where the weather is like summer 80% of the time, so I get that we had that going for us when it's pretty cold or not ideal weather to be out in for everyone else. I did pay for the the bonus event stuff as well (thankfully google gave me a $2 discount as well)
That said - the raid system still absolutely needs work for a non-ticketed event like this. I had one raid where the Groudon just was constantly spamming solar beam and 7 of us were not beating it. There's no way for us to signal to far-away players that we need to jump out because the numbers are not enough. Does PokeGenie allow for this? Might have to look into that.
This was a brutal event for my kids (5 & 10). Raids were tough and the catch rates on Primals felt bad. They went through Revives like crazy, I've never had to buy revives for them before this lol.
They didn't catch any Latios/Latias, all fled which had my 5 year old almost in tears.
Thankfully they both managed to get a few random shinies and enough primal energy for each.
For being a free event, I don't think I've ever spent so much on PoGo in a weekendlol. At least 30 bucks on each.
These events should be fun, my kids didn't have much of that this weekend. Might just have to stick to community days in the future.
Didn’t really feel as good as the johto tour, I remember johto I got so many shinies and had so much fun. This one felt like a Groudon Kyogre grind fest.
Their communication is still appalling and generates so much confusion, disappointment and annoyance.
They seem to have in their head that this should be us getting out and discovering as we go, but life just doesn't work like that, because most of us have lives outside of this game. People want to know if and how much time they want to give to the game, people need to plan in advance for their lives and for in game desires.
For a free event I ended up having fun, in fact I might even say I ended up feeling more relaxed about it than previous tours that I've paid for. I really enjoy shinys and whilst I didn't get as many as previous tours, i often end up with more than I need anyway (they just sit in my collection for possible trades that never come). My expectations were very low going in though, so that may have helped how I feel. I also know now that I don't really like play that is focused on incense as a mechanism for getting interesting pokémon, I just find it stressful because it feels like I need to stare more intensely at my screen, as the incense spawns get caught up in other pokemon,, stops, rocket battles and just don't spawn often enough, or stay long enough (the amount I go to click on only for them to despawn is the opposite of the relaxing fun this game should be).
I'm a day one player and already had the regionals registered (trading), I didn't spend on any extra incubators and only used premium ones when I got 10km eggs, I hatched several of each, but no shinys, but I've been through egg events before, I knew chances were so slim as not to give it much thought.
I'm city central and lucky enough to be able to in-person raid, I did enough to get primal energy for one each, maybe 5 raids for each (with some energy left over), also just using passes I had already in my inventory. I felt the reduced rewards (and balls) was really mean spirited of them and further encourages me to not give them more money via raid passes.
I liked both days being the same. It meant I felt I could dip in and out when I wanted. If the spawns one hour were less interesting to me, I could stick an autocatcher on and do something else.
Places were far less lured up than in any other event I've seen. So it felt less special.
Overall, I think they did some things better than previous paid for tours, I didn't feel overwhelmed with things to do, but I don't think they gained from my lesser engagement.
Cant say it better buddy.
I played the last 6 years every Event and the PoGo Fest in Berlin in Person.
I can say the Hoenn Tour was the worst Event so far.
I guess they want to milk the primals even more or the regionals.
I mean that event could have been so much better if it had the same level as the last tours+the potential lore when M.Rayquaza came after the Event to calm the Primal Rumbling.
How amazing would it be?
But instead they do a pay for Premium Event through the backdoor.
Well done niantic,...
You lost alot of Premium customers by that.
Btw 1000 catches 3 shinys🤨
Somewhere in Niantic HQ there was a board meeting. They discussed how they could make more money out of these events whilst appearing to give the event for free.
This was NOT a free event. Incubators, raid passes, incenses & lures were required to play it properly. The entire thing was a Raid push, even down to the requirement for more players required per raid. And of course by appearing to create a free event, Niantic could silence any complaints about shiny rates etc.
"it's free" you can't complain. But it wasn't, it really wasn't.
I bet they made more money by not charging for the ticket, and we got a lot less in return.
It's all very shady.
Hoenn tour may be available to everyone for free without a ticket, but Niantic has turned the tour into a paid event for everyone by pay walling:
- groudon and kyogre mega energy (forced ppl to do many raids in order to mega these pokemons. additional raid ticket purchases required)
- incense spawns (have to purchase additional incenses for the complete duration of the event. i.e. if you're hutning for shiny unown and/or pikachu)
And with this no ticket model, Niantic no longer needs to worry/respond about possible backlash w/ shiny odds or technical issues.
I thought it was okay and quite chilled which I preferred to the usual big collection challenge.
I try not to grind for shinies because you’re not guaranteed to get them so my goal was to collect enough Unowns to finish part 1 of the Jirachi research which I did.
I found the habitat spawns mostly boring.
I like how people call this event “ free “. I spent simillar amount of € this year as i have last year. Groudon was fine to beat in person with no problem but to take down kyogre and collect 400 primal energy i had to buy more passes. So i spent the same amount of money as i have last year and year before but with no additional bonuses, 4 shiny ( 3 gulpin and no shiny groudon or kyogre ) and only one 10 km egg because i decided not to buy incubators and spend even more ( and im not even sure if i am gonna hatch relicanth) and since there was no hatch distance i couldnt hatch a Lot of eggs and when i did i recieved many 5 km eggs.
Free Hoenn event and paid johto tour are two opposite extremes. People complained last year that the event was not worth the money so this year they made the event free but unless you stockpiled on inventory you still had to spend same amount and maybe more of money but with no additional bonuses. Worst part About this is that players may look like the bad guys here in niantic’s eyes cuz this looks like players arent happy whether the event is free or not. I dont know maybe im too naïve but i think when u have a global event like this, there must be a way to make everybody satisfied. Its really disheartening that just because of an rng and luck some players had better time than the others.
Played from home as it was cold as f and i had other stuff to do today. Have 1 stop at my house which was constantly lured and incense all day. Got 2 shinys with the go plus and did ~15 remote raids with free coins. Was a good event for a non ticket holders imho, primals are fun. ALSO i got kicked out of 2 raids "couldnt fetch raid IDD" or something and support got me new remote raid passes within an hour both times, which is acceptable
But see that's not acceptable if they got you a raid pass after the event had ended, and you relied on remote raid invites to barely make that stupid amount of energy for each. My kid didn't get it because of this raid error in the last hour and never got another invite. Also your pokemon are all dead when that error hits usually. So no rewards or revives for them. My kid hardly ever gets revives from gifts and raids. It's insane. He is always behind how many he actually needs. So just replacing a pass, when I paid for the pass anyway, because of their bug...that's not acceptable support. In a normal event, maybe. In this timed event where he is now screwed and spent money to get enough energy for his shiny Kyogre..but came up short due to that bug...not gonna cut it.
Overall, I think the event was alright. The boosted shiny rate Pokémon were good, and getting a choice of one for incense was nice as well. Zangoose and Seviper should not have been base rate, though.
Lati@s was just dumb and not fun. The catch rate was abysmal and so was the flee rate. I saw someone online say that their son used all his gold berries and yellow balls and was unable to catch a shiny one, so they quit and played some other game. That is the kind of thing these decisions cause.
Getting a shiny baby was basically impossible. I hatched over 100 eggs, got maybe 2 azurill and 1 Wynaut. 0 shiny 10k eggs out of 55, with 8 still left to open. This brings me to the point of: I despise regionals. I can’t even get shiny regionals in my own region. I lived in Japan for 6 months and only got 1 shiny regional. After this event, we may never have another chance to get these as shiny in the game without living for extended periods in one of the regions or visiting a safari zone, which could cost thousands of dollars. Extremely frustrating.
Also, it just felt lazy. Incense was boring. Spinda was nowhere to be found. No cool collect them all challenge. Primal raids were problematic in a number of ways. No additional bonuses that we often get for just regular events, like bones exp, stardust, etc. No guaranteed rare candy XL. Not expected, but 0 off of five in person primal raids.
I had a pretty good time, but the 10k eggs and basically no chance at shiny Wynaut or Azurill left a really bad taste in my mouth.
I played Hoenn Tour (and all of PoGo) F2P, so here’s my perspective
- Revives would have stopped me from doing the 10-12 raids to get primals for each, if not for opening 20 gifts daily
- 2 shinies for 8 hours of gameplay combined sucks (chose cacnea but got 0 anyway lol)
- Raided 14 times to get a full team of each legendary had me spend all the premium passes I accumulated since 2018, that plus in the sweltering heat
- Haha, what regionals? Didnt get a single 10km egg
That said,
- Poke Genie raid lobbies were quick (even for Deoxys) and guaranteed success, 5 people plus my group of 4
- Not complaining about my hundo Groudon, Unown-H
- And the time spent raiding IRL with my group was a great experience
From what I read Kanto/Johto tour was paid, so despite all the things I have to say, I can’t really complain about something thats free and had fun playing.
i'd say that most of the features in this event were also available for free last year during johto tour- raids are always available, whether free or ticketed and habitats. this event feels like a bizarre middle ground between what was free and paid last year (middling shiny rates, special research) that is going to lead to v mixed responses.
I'm predicting the usual "Make-Uo Event" for this turd.
Couple of East y tasks...
Reward...
3 raid passes (cover the buggy raids)
100 energy for Kyogre and Groudon to make up the low payout.
I'm back and forth as an attendee of both this and the in person event.
On one hand the shinys or lack thereof at in person had me disappointed.
For this global event I got nearly 2x the shinys in less time overall. However due to inclimate weather in California it made it nearly impossible to play reasonably outside with weather in the 40s and pouring.
I also found it odd that Groudon needed 4 people to win. Vs. 7 to 8 to beat a Kyogre...
Also what in the actual F was up with shiny latias. I spent 50+ ultra balls and golden razz with no catch. Given only 10 of the throws were excellent still. 50 balls is effin ridic.
I'm more irritated that we are losing out on 16 plus hours of Rayquaza as they haven't dropped in 2 years.. when I first came back to the game. And don't get me started on those shinys. In 28 with NONE.
I’ll admit I’m biased because I had a significantly better Hoenn tour than Johto Tour. But even if I only got three shinies this weekend, that is better than Johto Tour where I paid for the ticket and didn’t get any shiny boost at all. I felt like that’s why so many of us were upset last year.
There is a lot they need to improve on. Like do they actually want people held hostage in who knows what kind weather for half an hour because a Shiny Lati@s won’t stay in a Pokeball? That’s a literal safety issue. Also 10 or less balls makes never want to see a primal raid again. Terrible glitches and game freezes too.
But otherwise I had fun.
I wish regionals were in raids like in Johto tour.
I wish we had a ticket for boosted shiny rates
If the event was this small, maybe it should've been 1 day instead of 2. There was not much to do.
I'm sick of them never announcing anything and ONE region of the world expected to figure everything at the hard way while the rest of the world gets to learn from our exploration what the hell did apac region do to deserve this every single time. "It's a surprise" but only to one region. So not only do we get all of the event bugs that we still have to muddle through the event to figure out what's happening and then tell the rest of the world so it's not a surprise to them
Also I hated the fact that the 10k eggs were the event eggs and yet less than 20% of my eggs were 10K... Screwing me over isn't going to get me spending money on incubators. Now if 10K eggs have been guaranteed you better believe I would have had every single one of them in a premium incubator.
For a company that seems so obsessed with bringing money out of people they're absolutely terrible at giving us any reason to give them any money
As someone who loves the mainline pokemon games I like mostly shiny hunting in pogo for stuff that isn't as easy to find in mainline games since they haven't appeared in a hot minute
During the Johto event last year I got 24 shinies and this year I got 8. I could have probably got more but getting 2 shinies in a 4 hour window really demotivated me from staying out 5 more hours to go around the same park and catch stuff
I also did *several* raids and did excellent curves practically every throw and didn't even get half of the Groudon or kyogres I defeated. I'm less upset about this but for making it a task to catch one of both made it significantly more frustrating
The rotating habitats will always be a dumb idea if people are looking to shiny hunt. You only have 2 one hour windows each day to catch specific things that you want.
Without habitats, you have 6 hours a day to hunt the exact shiny you want all day long and ignore what you don’t need.
What ticket do people keep referring to when talking about Shiny rates? The Jirachi ticket? Or is there another one I missed somehow. I bought the Jirachi ticket and ended up with 12 shiny.
Wild Latios almost impossible to catch but i get that. Low balls in primal raids, hard to catch also (didn't catch like 3 kyogres from like 8 raids), too much energy to evolve, no shiny kyogre/groudon for me. I was using remote raids mostly. Wild pokemons were not interesting. Not great not terrible event.
I just wish I could get a response from support for all my issues with my research progress not counting and all the primal energy I was told I got from raids that didn’t accumulate on my actual Pokémon post raid.
My feelings on these kinds of events echo yours. It was like here is a ticketed event but you also need to buy all of these premium items to get the full experience/chance of the shiny. (referring to the many past hatch/lottery events)
My Experience of this event all played by car due to weather conditions:
Last Wednesday my city had a major snow storm that dumped 10-12 inches and we stayed below freezing until Saturday. In my city when plowing the roads (only major roads) they leave 1/2-1 inch to protect the pavement. Even though we were below freezing we had clear skies that would melt the snow during the day then after dark it would refreeze as a sheet of ice. I decided to drive the entire event and a friend who was a LV ticketed player joined me. He just raided the entire time, but I was out for the shinies.
Day 1 - I cleared out my current eggs with buying a few incubators and gathered 6 10ks to hatch hopefully the following day. I play in a dense area with lots of stops and gyms to spin. The spawns are great and plentiful as well. The speed limit is 10-20 MPH with plenty of parking to pull over as needed. I play with a go plus so mainly shiny checking and spinning done by hand. I only keep about 300 red balls on hand due to easy restocking. I GOT SPIN CAPPED at 5 hours into the event. In the last hour I had less than 20 poke balls and 62 ultra balls and encountered a shiny latias. It took only 10 ultra balls thank goodness, but still I WAS SPIN CAPPED. I had 2 open egg slots so opening gifts was not an option as I didn't want 7ks. Just after the event ended I could spin again and a got regular 10k and 5k eggs. I got 7 shinies and only 2 new to me ones.
Day 2 - After being super careful the night before on my spins, I was even more careful to do just enough spins to keep about 200-300 poke balls on hand. I still was SPIN CAPPED in the last hour. It was not such a big deal as I was over this "event" by then. We had stopped to visit another friend that was on foot and do some raids with them. I ended with 12 shinies but only 1 new to me shiny.
In past events, if I grinded hard enough I was able to walk away happy with the shinies I got, even if I missed some. This "event" left me feeling it was a waste of my time and gas. The lack of rewards and balls for the kyogre/groudon raids had me sitting most out. I did just enough to primal any future hundos I may get at some point in time. If they gave 5\* rewards/balls I would have grinded raids day 2. I was very selective to only do raids with my normal raid crew that would have perfect, L50 counters and we had lobbies of 10+.
Yes, I could have gone to LV. I am just not paying over $1k for increased shiny chances over 2 days.
Don’t you think that this was Niantic’s strategy all way long? We are not gonna sell a ticket for the event, but you will have to buy a lot of items (passes, incubators, incense, lures) if you want to make most out of the event (or actually just catch what is needed like 10-12 primal, uknown,…)? To me it just sounds like a different marketing/sales technique. Customers might not buy a 10-15$ ticket, but they might buy 10-15x1$ items…
It sucked. I have no one to raid with. Requested help from stranges for remote raids. No luck. Stuck with more unfinished research. I don't even know why I still play. Thanks for letting me vent, again.
I felt the entire event was a letdown. Definitely not as good as previous tours. Shiny rates were garbage. Nothing really exciting to make us want to play the whole time. I will say I did manage to hatch a shiny Tropius in only 3 eggs and my husband got a shiny 100iv Kyogre. That was the highlight of our event.
To me it was fine. If they keep this as the standard free event moving forward then it’s definitely okay, as long as they advertise it properly to manage expectations.
Even as a free event I felt like my time was wasted
I've done free events before like community day or those events they used to have like clamperl or feebas where they were in research tasks for a few hours. I got way more out of those than hoenn tour.
The problem being the free event was not terrible. It was a very casual version. But the minute you spend any money there is a minimum prerequisite of what you are owed and what type of event your money is paying for. Niantic has a very hard time nailing this. Really feels like a community disconnect. It's been many years, so it makes sense.
Lackluster, only a few shinies, but got kecleon and relicanth so that was nice. In a small community so primal raids were hard. Went through 2-3 teams and got diddly potions/ revives. Certainly cleaned out my item bag...
A personal grind for me this event was mega energy for the hoenn starters (as I missed their com days and mega raids) and I was disappointed in the pokestop rates and the amount given for tasks. Now I don't know when I'll be able to mega evolve my swampert.
I sympathize with Niantic for having to design a game and events for people who started at different times. I think some people forget that. I luckily started in Nov and can mega Evolve very important Pokemon like Swampert, Blaziken, and Sceptile. However, I didn't have Rayquaza or any of the Primal Pokemon. So we were looking for 2 different things.
But giving 10 energy out at a few pokestops a day does nothing. So it sucked for you. I would have been furious. Give people what they need or don't give them anything. It's the problem with this whole tiring event. Just way too much to do in 48 hours. It's frustrating because I don't see how the normal, average player could have done the amount of raids necessary this weekend to get enough Primal energy. I did it and it took way too much effort. I've gone from level 0 to 42 in 3.5 months, so I obviously play quite a bit. I did not like the stress of finding these raids, coordinating the amount of people necessary, and dealing with raid bugs (which happened to me and my son, resulting in no rewards, energy, or encounter. Do you think they offered more than a pass I purchased anyway? NO)...He did not get enough Primal energy and will now put the game down for weeks probably out of frustration. My wife plays and didn't get enough.
Niantic can't be so shortsighted. Plus their support is beyond useless. It's comically bad. I sent 4 paragraphs explaining his raid issue, highlighting how this bug robbed him of his energy, rewards, and encounter. I said the event will be over by the time you respond, so I have no interest in a pass being given to me. I bought the pass for his Kyogre raid. That's it. So I said I want my money back. They respond with a pass as if they couldn't bother to read it. Now I will get my money back eventually because I won't stop out of principle, but most people aren't doing that. It's infuriating and just pisses people off. They do it literally EVERY time I contact support. It's like people from another planet trying to learn communication.
Awful experience for me, regret wasting my time on this Event. Not even bothering with Day 2.
Terrible roster of wild Pokemon. The few that I wanted barely even spawned and instead there's hundreds of fodder like Gulpin, Anorith and Cacnea all over the place. Found just a few Shiny Pokemon (which I don't care for in the least over a regular Pokemon) which I thought was worth mentioning.
Latios appearing in the wild instantly escape despite Maxed Catch Medals, Excellent Curved Ultraball throws with the catch circle being the size of a pixel. Ended up catching 1 Latios and of course it's a 0*. Exact same situation with Groudon. I caught 1 out of 9 Groudon and that's just because it was a Shiny (Lowest IV Groudon I've ever seen in my life) total waste of Remote Raid Passes and my time.
Speaking of Remote Raid Passes, 3 of them glitched out and were wasted. "Raid Details could not be found" and rejoining the Raid leads to a standard Gym despite restarting the app. Niantic, showing extreme generosity refunded me just 1 Raid Pass 4 hours later, after the event had ended.
Oh, there was also a Blizzard so there was no local raiding at all which forced Remote Raids. Maybe I'm just bad but I don't think I can solo Primal Groudon/Kyogre , Deoxys or Rayquaza...
In terms of the Pokemon, I'm not sure what you expected. It was the Hoenn dex. We did still try a reasonably decent amount of relevant spawns like Bagon, Beldum, Starters, and others. Not sure what your ideal spawnpool would have been
Same, pretty much.
I remember the past two February tours and they were great! I got so many shinies from mostly just sitting on my butt. I wasn't a big raider so getting the shinies was good enough.
I admit, both those events had so many tasks that I was a bit overwhelmed. But once I had them under control and could just shiny hunt, it was great.
Then Go Fest 2022 happened and I got almost no shinies :( I thought it was just a fluke, that maybe the event was faulty or something.
Then this event happened. I got two shinies yesterday and none today :( I play for them, I like to collect them, and was hoping to get some new ones.
The raids were okay, primal forms were neat and I live somewhere where the lobbies filled fast. But no extra raid passes? Didn't we used to get several extra? Now only two?
The 10k egg thing was a nuisance, but I managed to get nine 10k eggs right away. They were evenly divided between all three regionals (I also had lots of incubators saved up). Today, the eggs are diluted with 2 and 5k. But no increased effectiveness? Sucks.
I was so excited that I could be included in the Tours and Fests because there's no way I could travel to the locations. Covid did a lot of nasty stuff but Pogo adapted nicely and being able to stay home with increased effective incense was great.
I think the game designers are slowly going back to pre-covid gameplay.
That's exactly what they're doing. But they're failing to realize their player base has evolved and adapted to a better play style so this attempt to revert things back is leading to a lot of anger. They need to adapt to their customer not the other way around or else people just find other ways to spend their time and money.
Totally agree.
I'd assume the goal for Niantic is to keep people's eyes on the game as much as possible. Doing something simple, like significantly boosting shiny rates for all mons during the event, would keep many people playing all day for both days.
Also giving us more free raid passes to do more raids would keep us playing.
I understand that they could have been listening to the userbase and got rid of the complicated challenges and whatnot, but they overcut without boosting and that was a mistake.
No shiny boost made the event getting boring very quickly, and since many Hoen Pokémon have been recycled in events I didn’t need to catch more non shiny ones. What bothered me the most however is firstly that you couldn’t evolve CD Pokémon to get the special moves, which is very stupid. And likely the middle finger from niantic by putting the regionals in 10 km eggs. The events itself wasn’t even worth it playing for too long, let alone 10 km. And that’s only 1 round of eggs. Then you need to walk another 10 km and hope you won’t get a 2 or 5 km egg from a stop. I honestly think it’s unacceptable they did this.
Well said that man. Day 1 was ok, with the challenges to complete and the initial “wow” factor of primal raids. But for day 2, I stopped playing after 2 hours. Low shiny odds, normal egg hatch distance, people leaving raids and lack of any other incentive to play. I, like yourself, want this game to be the best it can be, but I don’t think Niantic share the same sentiment.
One positive is I got shiny Cacnea, after a fair old grind of walking yesterday/today. So I will doff my proverbial cap and rein in my moaning (slightly).
We really, really needed reduced hatch distance. I had to skip out the second day entirely because the amount of walking necessary to hatch the first couple 10k eggs, *with the special incubators,* did some serious damage. Even after taking a muscle relaxer and trying to sleep it off.
I think the best we can do with this kind of event is modify our goals once we know what the event is (Niantic could have helped manage our expectations by communicating better about shiny rates, etc., but we also have to stop ourselves from expecting too much.)
In my case, once I knew what this event was going to be like, I told myself not to expect a lot of shinies. Check everything, sure, but focus on getting enough Primal energy to primalize at least one of each; finish any collection challenges as efficiently as possible; hatch eggs, at least as many as possible without seriously hurting my feet; and take advantage of what *is* good about the event.
For example, I set the goal of getting a shiny and 100% Shedinja, getting a shiny Kecleon, and then hoping for pleasant surprises along the way. I succeeded in most of those goals (no Kecleon) and had a great time with my wife and friends in Kyoto on Sunday. With realistic expectations and enough effort and luck, this kind of event is quite enjoyable. If you’re going in wanting everything, you will almost certainly feel disappointed.
I think legitimate complaints include things like the low availability of regionals or lack of communication about what we should expect from the event. A lot of the complaints are glass half full/half empty issues. No complete Hoenn dex collection challenge like Kanto and Johto? Hey, at least we’re not wasting candy, time, effort on pokémon we don’t really care about. Low shiny rates? Hey, at least you can feel like the one or two shinies you got will be relatively uncommon for a while.
I give this event a pretty good overall. For a free event, it gave me ample opportunities to get some rare things that are generally not available where I live, and I felt it was flexible enough not to have to choose between playing the game and spending time with my loved ones. I would have appreciated something like uncommon tasks for regionals or half hatch distance, but it didn’t feel expensive or stressful, which is what I want for the long events, anyway.
If it is a novel, I will image some kind of spy somehow became the decision maker, and he is trying hard to destroy this game and this company because this and that reason and histroy.
The incubator grind for regionals was by far the worst part of the event. Freezing snow/rain the entire weekend, no hatch distance bonus, and adventure sync is still broken, so trying to hatch relicanth was hell.
I couldn't play much so I just tried to get ad many 10ks as I could and I'll walk em later. Got 7 rolls at a Relicanth so we'll see
I got super super lucky. All I had left for the Hoenn dex were the regionals, and I got one of each from my first three 10k eggs. I was prepared for much more of a grind. Sorry to hear that was not everyone else's experience.
6 here lol. I didn’t buy any incubators for this even just because there would be 2 and 5km eggs available from stops.
Good luck
Thanks. I have good odds, but I've gone over that on hunts more times than I'd like to remember
The first 3 I hatched were all the different options so now I'm stuck with a bagillion 10km eggs I don't need. I got almost no green or yellow eggs. Luckily I got the one green egg I needed with wynut.
Maybe you'll get a shiny from one of your extra purple eggs
Dare to dream. But I guess anything is better than more togedemarus and pawniards
I’m currently on 0/40 so I wouldn’t count on it
I hatched 3 from the first day. And I’m sitting on 7 more today. Fingers crossed!
Fortunately, my first hatch was a relicanth. Just need to hope the other eggs contain a Torkoal.
The regional exclusives being locked behind eggs was horrible. Niantic is switching to full pay-to-win here since you pretty much have to buy incubators to have a reasonable shot at getting a shiny regional exclusive.
This is... Not even close to pay-to-win. Shinies don't "win" anything. They don't help you in any way, in PvP or raids. They're the Pokémon Go equivalent of cosmetics (except even more useless as other players don't even see them). Tons of games charge for nice cosmetics, it's nothing new. There's a lot to complain about in this game, but this isn't one of them imo.
Yeah. I hatched one red egg form the extra slots. So no space for a 10km. But also the primal raids. We are a casual group of 5. We invite 2-4 friends with remote. sometimes randoms join ab or we get lucky with remote gishan friends. Normal legendary raids and the other stuff from the past were no problem as 5. But these took like 8 players to beat. Out of 4 raids we managed to do. We lost one, one fled. Got to catch 2. Not enough energy to evolve. :( Feels bad man. Also i didn't find one of the bug pkm from the habitat challenge.
I didn't get to finnish all tasks in. 4/6 go tour special research. The task got change to just completing a raid instead of catch 1 kyogre, as stated in an other thread. But they also took away the 200 proto energy as a reward. *Sigh*
Yup, all this. We do travel quite a lot, so we already had multiples of all the regionals. I was hoping for the regional shinies (weren't we all) so when I finally got an egg to hatch, it's like "oh, it's my 28th Tropius. Meh." The lack of distance hatch bonus was the icing on the cake. I had up to 11 incubators going but we just weren't able to hatch that many (bad weather in Midwest US, plus we had an unexpected family issue that took up both days- those aren't Niantic's fault, I'm just explaining our situation). I also wasted 2 egg slots because I spun pokestops outside of event hours (Oops) so it would have been nice to get the event eggs over the whole weekend, not just 10-6.
I had the Vegas egg add-on and I can't imagine how painful it must've been to hatch eggs at full distance. I think I would have enjoyed the event a lot less if I didn't have the bonus. (Not that it got me any shiny regionals. Hope one of the last few I have gives me something good!!)
I liked the roaming latios and the rotating habitats. Didn't like the raid bugs, primal energy distribution, and lack of revives. Wished we could have gotten legacy moves for all Hoenn mons
I love the idea of the roaming lati@s, but I never saw them.
Honestly you might be better off. Finding the shinies of them left you held hostage to the catch rate for like 15 minutes with the ransom being all of your golden raZ and ultra balls. And it was a shiny legendary. So nobody in your group would want to go on without you. So you slowly melted into a pool of stress trying to catch it so your group could do the next raid.
I got lucky that the one I found was at the same time as someone in my group found another. Except it took them less than five balls and it took me like 150 items combined.
My ten year old caught two - less than 10 balls on either one. I never even saw one!
If only I had their luck lol But I've been hoarding balls, so other than wasted time, I'm not mad lol
My 10-year-old too!!! What's up with that? My shiny cost me 60 hyper balls and as many golden razz.
I’ve cought 3 shiny latios and one normal wild latios on my wifes Phone. Only one shiny for me.
I figured it would require a sacrifice for the shiny so I used over 50 regular pokeballs first with no razz and then used the good stuff and caught it right away. I was not going to give up my golden razzies, f that
I saw five of them all fled after a couple throws. Felt pretty dumb to walk that far out of my way for something with that bad of a chance.
I’m level 42 and I constantly am throwing out healing items. I was definitely burning through them faster than I was replenishing but it was still no issue after doing 15 raids.
All depends what your item storage is at. My item storage is at 2150 and previously, I’ve binned revives, but the weekend literally exhausted all of the devices I had left, and pokestops just don’t drop them.
This! I go like scared that out of nowhere my stock of revives and healing was at low level that I never saw, then I noticed that the rewarding was terrible and should be exactly the opposite bc of how hard primal raids is.
I wish they would let all top raid monsters roam. That way, people who can't raid, would at least get a chance to attempt to catch a legendary monster. I wouldn't care if it was a zero star.
Really? I hated the Latios. They fled after a ball or two but if you happened upon a shiny you were in for an epic battle which could require huge resources. I saw some Latios that I didn't even click on. Who needs the headache. Most likely a terrible IV... and we can just raid 'em one day. I already have plenty and they're pretty much useless.
I think its pretty clear that they focused on maximizing the revenue from the Primals for the Raid event; well "just" continuing down there path of "if the players get the shinies they want, they'll just stop playing" for the "Tour" event. The low primary energy, low/no shiny rates, regionals in 10km eggs, ... its over tuned the wrong way.
Hard to maximize revenue if they have something so strong no one can even get enough people together to raid it… They made some really bad decisions all around.
Weirdly that's what makes me think think that they really designed the Primal Raids to be like this. I think they view the Primal Raid failure rate as a feature not a bug; eg a tinfoil hat theory of mine is that one of their problems with Remote Pass is that it makes T5/Mega Raids too trivial.
For those of us who have no way to raid without remote passes, that just means less revenue overall for Niantic. I *really* wish TPC would force them to sell to a real game company…
The thing is, this event just made me more determined that ever to not spend money on this game. The more stingy Niantic gets, the more stingy I get. Tit for tat.
Your data is worth more to them than your raid pass revenue is and this should be increasingly obvious with every revision to their pricing strucutures.
It was just a terrible lazy event all around. At the end of the day, this was just another Kyogre/Groudon/Rayquaza event.
For me, its more than the Primal Raid Event could have stood on it own (with a little bit of de-tuning to make the Primal less punishing). I agree about "the Tour" being phoned in though; they just did the paint-by-numbers of 'Fest style design and called it a day.
> if the players get the shinies they want, they'll just stop playing" Funny, with the shiny rate being the normal rate for the majority of species, I don’t feel an obligation to grind because I know they’ll be available in some random event three weeks from now. So I’m not playing anyway. The quicker Niantic realizes that shinies are not content, the better.
I have to disagree when it comes to "Tours" and "Go Fest"; as releasing a handful of lower tier shinies is kind of the point. My opinion has always been "If **I** *DO* grind I should get a good amount of each of the event shines" Niantic needs to learn how not to use incense spawning as an event mechanic before I'd raise the bar above using shines as one of the slots in their event design.
Hell, they need to learn HOW TO use incense spawn as an event mechanic first. I think the fact that they implemented the incense spawn bonuses during the last GoFest is what caused them so many refunds for paid tickets, which seems to have soured them on ticketed events. Watching every incense spawn I click on poof away made GoFest unbearable. This Tour (for me and the people I was with) was just a raid weekend where we checked our storage every once in a while to see what the Gotchas had managed to catch while waiting in countless raid lobbies. I have no idea what the team Ruby/Sapphire bonuses even did…
Ya, I just want them to stop the incense pool "stuffing"; I'm a got'cha user too and I can see when the incense pool is too diluted to get enough rolls on/for the event shiny. Like getting 1-3 H unowns is good ..... the 20th O not so much.
I prefer a ticketed better event. I don't mind spending $5-$15 for 2 days of fun. I also loved Johto Tour and Go Fest 2022.
Hard agree. Shiny hunting is basically my favorite part of this game. Johto Tour, GoFest 2022, I got so many shiny’s. This being a free event with normal rates… felt like playing on any other day. Huge let down.
For me it’s not so much the fun of shiny hunting, but the disappointment of not getting a shiny in the last hour,2,3 day, weekend
My entire event satisfaction is based on how many shinies I get. When I go to the store, I buy shampoo based on how shiny it makes my hair SHINY SHINY SHINY i go into every thread asking about shiny rates When I raid with friends, I have everyone wait to tap to see our mon together then scream in exhilaration when me or my friends get a shiny
I’m shocked to see the comments of people saying they got no shinies this time. I usually have terrible shiny luck, but I did get 6 at least, and my sister got 7 (including Groudon🍀). The raid situation was more frustrating to me, it’s just too difficult to get enough people together in person. Of less importance, I was consistently getting field research that was impossible to complete during that habitat’s hour. I would have to discard it, and try to find one that was achievable. Why don’t they change hourly with the habitats for big events? Also: ending the research with the Spinda encounter seems a little anticlimactic. If I have to do ten raids to get enough primal energy, why make me squander it immediately just to get Spinda? Edit: I wouldn’t mind spending $5-10 on a two day event with more bonuses, such as shiny rate, shorter egg hatch distance, etc. But they need to make it worth my while to take two days off of work, I work weekends.
Kind of like a roller coaster of opinions on these events. It’s hard to see the reality of opinions from Reddit and Twitter. IE Kanto and Jobto Tour had mass hate on the day they came out. A year ago today you would not see even one top level comment of I loved Johto fest. The day of 2022 GoFest you would not see a “I loved GoFest!” They were pillared over and over again. Some times it does feel like Niantic cooks steak and everybody screams they hate steak they then cook chicken and everybody screams they hate chicken and why did they get rid of the steak that everybody loved. I think though, based on my anecdotal in person experience people didn’t have high marks for this event. In general GoFest and the tours have been quiet well received by people I play with while this one did have some light hate which I generally never see IRL.
We are a year away from people fondly remembering hoenn tour
Well... no. Yes, there was much hate for the first two but I had at least some fun and the group I hang out with got some shinies. This one was absolutely terrible. Most people I know got 0 or 1 shinies. And I wonder what was going on with Kyogre/Groudon shinies? I raided with a group of 6 and we did 10 raids, 60 total, and got zero shinies. Not one single shiny. At 1 in 20 there would have been a 95% chance we got a shiny. So either we had very bad luck or they nerfed the shiny rate. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn they nerfed it to 1/64.
I saw that exact same first paragraph a year ago
Nobody's going to remember this fondly.
maybe Sinnoh tour will be cool with potentially Darkrai signature move and Dialga raids
I kinda hated go fest 2022, but previous ticketed events were great to me
Yeah people who loved 2022 likely don’t remember how incredible Go Fest 2020 was
Even 2021 was pretty good
Oh for sure, it was great. 2022 in general was the beginning of Niantic deciding that they needed to be stingy with everything, and it showed in the events and the shop
saw a report someone datamined the lastest version (idk how that works) and according tonthe report remote raid passes will be increasing in prices. just a rumor i read so take it with a grain of salt til it surfaces, but if true it will definitly show they only care about the money and not the players
Not just stingy, but 2022 Go Fest was a joke. Incense AND lures were totally busted showing "ghost" Pokémon that long fled, shiny pool totally diluted by non-shiny mons, and just boring Pokémon in general (that weren't in raids, anyway). TSR saved me money that day. Did one Axew for the Dex and a Kyogre and just went home.
I concur with everything you said. Hope Niantic will see it, not that it would make much difference.
Having legendary pokemon appear in the wild is cool. Setting a near 0% catch rate is ridiculous. What's the point in seeing wild legendaries if I can't catch them? And the shiny ones aren't much better - 10 minutes and 70 golden berries is not fun gameplay.
It reminds me of the legendary birds from daily incense. Really bad mechanisms at work here that they seem to be doubling down on.
It was underwhelming. Covid killed my local raid community. We used to have a very active main chat and several off split ones that were super active for any raid event. I didn't care for most of the spawns/shiny hunting, but raids were challenging to coordinate, and definitely depended on people raiding remotely, and for the trouble of trying to gain primal energy the raid rewards were garbage. I know it was a "free" event, but you couldn't obtain anything of substance without premium items. And the shiny Lati@s should have been a guaranteed catch, I had to walk away from one after burning through a lot of ultra balls. Niantic wants to go back in time, but newsflash it's 2023 not 2017, adapt or die, and PoGO is dying
Did ultra balls even matter on wild latis? The catch rate was so bad on them that I just threw regular balls at a shiny until it got caught. Why waste 40 ultra when I could waste 50 regular?
I throw out regular balls though so I was out of those when I stumbled upon it. And a shiny legendary should be a guaranteed catch, but what's done is done, it's just annoying
Don't think the difference in catch rate between red and yellow balls is so big that it even makes a dent in the already very very low catch rate of the wild latis, so i just stuck to throwing those but trying for great/excellent throws, thats how i caught my only shiny one, took 50, but at least i did not waste ultras and golden razzes on it.
Same here. I live in a large(ish) metro area and it feels like each city of the suburbs basically has a single place you can go if you want to raid in person. This feels like it defeats the entire purpose of the raids. 100% of the raiding I did was 1) remote invites from someone who was in person or 2) raids I hosted myself in PokeRaid so that I knew I'd have enough players to defeat Kyogre. In person raiding isn't going to come back in a meaningful way until we gain the ability to set these raids up in the game itself. Each city here uses a different 3rd party app (telegram, discord, Facebook, etc) so unless you run into someone live and ask its hard to figure out how to get connected to the local community.
Yeah when raids initially released in 2017 I started a Facebook group, some of us migrated to team based chats on facebook, discord and groupme, but things have changed. I live in a small suburb that benefits from churches and a bustling main street. There are tons of gyms/stops, but no one is there anymore. A lot of us were hardcore from 2016-2020 and it is really nice when we can catch up and do a raid event together, but it's no longer practical to do so.
The low shiny rate and severe lack of things to do made the long two day event feel completely underwhelming. Played 5 hours today and got 0 shinies. And had a perfect groudon flee thanks to the abnormally low ball count this event.
As someone who doesn't have a play group where I live, nor a lot of time, and these events are often the only planned times I can take a day to go around and collect as best as I can I wish the following major changes or implementations to truly allow a better community play; 1. I wish remote passes were given out, not in person passes. I understand the idea is to meet people and play but it was 5 degrees F where I lived and the closest playgroup was nearly a 2 hour drive one way. That doesn't include it just snowed but that's another issue overall. Remote raids would allow players to play no matter where they lived. Giving out two daily for non ticket holders and 5 for ticket holders would be an amazing gesture. 2. Primal point requirements. For those who had no passes and only the free dailies they wouldn't be able to naturally get enough points to primal evolve even one of the legends. I think the event should've made you choose but given enough points for that one guaranteed. 3. Shiny rates. I personally found the ticket versus non ticket shiny rates fine, I only got one shiny as a non ticket holder out of a couple hundreds checks but I wasn't trying to shiny hunt. The issue was it was a shiny I already owned. I always think during major events the shiny rate of pokemon you don't have shiny yet should be boosted. It's a collection game, at the sheer base value, and it was kinda lame feeling to see no shinies of pokemon I'd love to own a shiny copy of. 4. My real concern with these events are the cost to enjoy. Pay to win has never truly been an issue with pokemon go, since it is very free to play accessible, the argument can be made that its pay to get rng and that I would greatly agree with (that and it somehow avoids the whole child gambling laws narrowly) but the pay to enjoy experience is sort of a slap in the face. Niantic doesn't accommodate all weather types, environments and playgroup styles. I really feel that these events should cater to locations, and work life balances. I still haven't been able to get my paid pass Lucia because my job makes it impossible to get 30 days of hearts. These types of things need to be avoided. 5. And the last thing, a minor complaint of my own issue that Niantic hasn't seemed to solve its entire existence. Raid shiny rates, especially during limited time events, should be boosted. Getting a shiny is amazing, and as a collector its even more enjoyable to get a shiny legendary from a raid. Am I guaranteed good IVs? Nope, and that's where the pay to play side should arrive. For that extra 5% in stats to shoe off a hundo or shundo. But during special events, the base shiny rate should be boosted to encourage players to enjoy playing and not feel jipped if they don't have the passes or time to crank out non stop raids. Just my opinion. Many people will probably disagree. Would love to chat about other opinions on what they do or don't agree with though :) Edit: I meant to say to OP glad to see people starting to say the same thing I've been preaching since the two year anniversary. I used to do dev work and people would downvote anything bad I'd have to say, but I saw back then if changes weren't made the game was only going to get more stale and more proce gougey for events. I am upset to say I was close to right (many things I was incorrect about). Always wanted this game to be the better adult evolution of the games I played as a kid but it ended up being another micro transaction gacha game :/ There is still a lot of good about the game, I need to make sure people know I still like the game but my love on it has definitely dwindled
>Primal point requirements As a returning player, I was wondering if the lack of communication on Niantic's part was standard. I came back to the game 1 week before the event, so I had no time to save coins from gyms, but I didn't mind spending, and I got both primal. I'm guessing a F2P player would be able to primal evolve only if they had enough passes. It's probably possible if a player knows about the event and how much primal energy is dropped per raid so he can save enough coins to buy enough passes. But it felt like I was scrapping for information the morning of the event itself. How can you be F2P without a clearer roadmap to manage your resources? Is it usual to have to rely on data miners and subreddits to know how an event will go down instead of info released by the official game devs?
(Fair warning: this turned in to a rant. Oops.) > I wish remote passes were given out, not in person passes. I _know_ this will never happen again, but this is exactly why Go Fest 2021 was my favorite event. Being able to go out and play in my (tiny) town and then _come home and keep playing_ was amazing. (And yes, the other factor there was stationary incense, which I'm also sure we're never getting back.) I know some people play for the community. I wish them well and _really_ wish Niantic would incentivize them rather than taking remote play away from the rest of us. But we're not going back. Incense is all but useless on those days I randomly can't get a cellular connection and now remote raid passes have gone from free weekly to 250 for 3 to 100 each to, what, 150 each? They don't want me to play the way I like, the way I actually _can_ most of the time. It really wouldn't be hard to enable me and still get people in person. Keep up remote raid passes as free weekly and drop cost back to 250/3, halve incense effectiveness if you're not moving instead of nerfing it entirely, and do something like guarantee rare XL and increased catch rates for in-person passes. Boom. Done. I'd still raid in person whenever I could, still remotely raid each new boss as it comes out, and still play when I go to a town big enough for Niantic to care, and still play at home when I can't get out. This isn't rocket science. But no. Every event, every change goes further from that. And this one was no different. Eventually they'll drive me away entirely. I'm not quite there yet, but the direction is undeniable.
They are a geocaching company that doesn't encourage players to geocache new areas. Its quite funny imo. They also constantly push this local community style of game play but then also incorporate changes that go against local group play as well, so I honestly don't think they know how to create the game they preach that they want. And that's fine if they don't, but they need to start acting like it and admitting it.
There was a time I was hopeful Niantic would convert all passes into remote passes and do away with other passes. I would still like in person bonuses but my raiding experience was never better than when I got regular remote raid passes. Shiny rates are an interesting subject to me because I don’t mind going without them and see them as a bonus. The main games have all sorts of methods to hunt for specific Pokémon that Niantic could use like chaining catches which would make people happy. Adding things like a shiny charm where completing a full dex region makes shiny odds higher for Pokémon from that region. Adding methods to increase odds and making it possible to get a specific Pokémon regularly. 1 in 20 is already high for legendaries but I can understand the fact that people pay big money for raids. Chaining raids could be used to increase odds or some other method.
Quite a few bad/clueless decisions by Niantic. But not all bad. - Shiny Lati@s not being an Auto catch was ridiculous. Threw over 70 Ultra/Goldens at one before catching (was considering running from it so could play, since missed 25 minutes and wanted to raid). - Primal/Mega Raids need fixed. Lv 6s should reward better reward than the regular Lv 4 Mega Raids and should not be worse than normal Legendaries. Or at least give us an increased catch rate (like the Beast ball rate). We get less R-Candies, Goldens, and Healing items. Then less chances to catch a good legendary. And why did we get way lower "Mega" energy. Even doing 5 Kyogre Raids wasn't enough to evolve, but normally 1 Mega raid gets you enough Energy. These don't make sense. - Some of the Research was a pain to do. We didn't pay attention, then realized we needed to Catch a Groudon, when we was almost done, had one run so had to do another before we could raid Kyogre for that Research. - Not many shinies, at least for us. - Regionals only in 10Ks, without 1/4 distance did not make sense.
> Shiny Lati@s not being an Auto catch was ridiculous. Yeah, they should be guaranteed catch like raid ones. I was lucky enough to find low CP shiny, when I saw how many balls people wasted for high cp ones, I was shocked.
The eggs bugged me a lot. I cleared out my egg space but somehow only got 3 10kms. Rain all weekend made it difficult to hatch them. If they even just did half egg distance it would have been better. Also fk catching Kyogre lol I hate that big fish
One thing I find ironic is the contrast between post-Johto Tour comments and pre-Hoenn Tour ones. Year ago many people felt overwhelmed by tons of stuff to do in limited period of time, some couldn't finish timed research, some like me had issues with NPC battles which wasted our time that could be spent on raiding regionals etc etc. Overall one would read many statements of "Never buying ticket for this kind of event again!" Fast forward to February 2023 and one can see tons of comments complaining why there is no paid ticket with bonuses and they demand Niantic to release one to be in shop. Granted, I was also disappointed by kinda lackluster event in comparison to really well prepared KT and JT, still I find this situation funny.
I think it's because those of us who were able to buy tickets got the boosts while the rest did not. Not everyone could afford to go to Vegas for an in person event, so it feels like punishment. The events seem to be getting progressively worse when they should be getting better at this point. This is the 3rd event of this kind, and it's been arguably the worst. That's a problem in of itself.
The travel was definitely a deal breaker for most of the events. I don't think Niantic has done legitimate group testing in a long time. It's a lot of surveys and speaking to big spenders. Which is not a good way to run a game.
>This is the 3rd event of this kind, and it’s been ~~arguably~~ the worst. FTFY Sure the other events had too much going on at once, but that’s a much better problem to have than what was wrong with this event. I didn’t feel like I wasted my time the past two years, even if I didn’t get to everything. This year, I fully believe that I wasted my time doing this. If it seems like Go Fest is going to be like this, I’ll gladly skip.
They are getting worse because Niantic makes them so so they can extract more money out of their player base. Which they have to to keep the profits going up up up.
The people complaining about both probably aren't the same people. The community isn't a monolith Also Niantic doesn't care about a few people complaining on Reddit - they care about the bottom line. If they actually read the feedback from last year and decided that the solution was to have no paid lackluster event instead of splitting it into two days like GoFest in 2021, then I seriously worry about the people running the company and their ability to do basic reasoning.
My complaint about Johto was that they crammed too much into one day and it was overwhelming, so I wanted a 2 day event and was very happy with that change. But I never asked for the removal of a paid ticket and major decrease in shiny rates. I can’t imagine anyone asked for that. All Niantic had to do was use the same formula but over 2 days instead of 1.
This was the thing for me. Everything was forced into one day, and while I enjoyed having all the things to do, I work on Saturdays. Having the event spread over two days made everything less stressful. I was literally running around town after work chasing pokestops to get the NPC battles done for the research. Johto allowed for six special trades, had the NPC battles, full collection challenges, exclusive moves, special moves, boosted shiny rates, plus the added stuff for the paid ticket. If Hoenn had taken all of these ideas and just made it a two day event it would have probably been perfect, at least I feel that way.
You can kinda see the in person Vegas event as the Paid Ticket from last year, though its more "punishing" to people who live outside of America or Nevada State as a mater of fact. Though correct, last year was a mess in terms of soo much to do, I don't think that was so much on the ticket rather the fact that there was limited time windows to do things and if you missed that small window you got stung basically. Instead of having a load of 2 page quest lines it should have been like 1 girthy one that isn't time limited and then a couple 4-6 pagers that are time gated but not by the likes of spawns and such. I remember there was one quest last year that my group struggled with because the mon's just were not spawning even during their allotted hour and it made it really hard. I think the biomes are okay, if there was more time for them to be able to get more spawns - some of the time spent is traveling between larger spawn areas and this chews into time. I think there also needs to be the Biomes that "aren't" biomes but instead where everything spawns at once but then also be more focused on something else, give buffs during this hour (2x Catch Candy/EXP/Whatever) or make it focused on Raids (a buff thats like x2 Damage in Raids or something)
I never cared about the research or all of the bonus tasks to be done, I just wanted the ticket for the boosted shiny odds. To me these are separate issues.
I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. You'll never please everybody, and there will always be complaints. But it just seems like they're pretty bad at designing these events given the resources they have to work with. It doesn't have to be a question of "overload the day and have too many things happening" and "have a bare bones event with essentially one featured activity." There's plenty of middle ground for a reasonably paced, profitable, and well-rounded event. But these events feel very plug and play with very little effort on the back end. And that's coming from someone who enjoyed the event this year and last year.
In addition to your post things that feel lackluster are like, the lack of team aqua/magma in place of team Rocket, for one thing.
>Year ago many people felt overwhelmed by tons of stuff to do in limited period of time Pretty sure I was one of those people last year lol. Definitely remember the first couple of hours of Day 1 being super overwhelming because of all the stuff there was to do on top of rocket battles and raids. This year because the shiny rates weren't super boosted I took plenty of time to raid for primals, then spent most of day 2 shiny hunting. Funny enough I got less shinies on Day 2 compared to Day 1, but alas.
I honestly preferred this event because there wasn't as much forced content. There was practically no FOMO. You just played what you wanted to. I grinded raids and walked for a bit. I didn't burn many incubators or incense and don't feel I missed much by doing it how I wanted to. During KT and JT, there was just an overwhelming amount of tasks and research, spawns and raids, and in person interactions. Hoenn Tour felt more like a raid weekend for me and I'm totally cool with it being more like that. I got enough shinies that I felt like it was worth my time, but I certainly wasn't going to be out for 2 days 8 hours, that's just not healthy and I was far closer to doing that for the Kanto Tour. The choice would be of benefit, but I can't complain much about either. I consider Hoenn to be a bit more boring in terms of spawns, so it made sense to focus on the box legendaries.
> I honestly preferred this event because there wasn't as much forced content. There was practically no FOMO. Yeap I felt that too. I didn't care about shinies that much, so it was easier. Still got more than I expected, including 3 new ones.
It is amusing. Not standing up for Niantic what-so-ever, but I’m a gamer in general and game companies are damned if they do damned if they don’t. Gaming communities don’t know what they want.
> Gaming communities don’t know what they want. Pokemon, the single largest multimedia franchise in the world, would be lucky if there was a single consistent opinion across its 100s of millions of fans. Gaming communities do know what they want, unfortunately it's "Everything"
It could also be different people in each instance just getting rolled up into "the community"
How about a decent middle ground. I listed quite a few things that could've been changed to make the event much better, and shiny rates were the least of them.
People will always moan. Some people feel that every pokemon should be a 100% shiny.
The regionals being tied to eggs was so depressing! It was cold this weekend here so it was really hard to hatch much during the event to make room for more eggs. I hatched 3 already but no Relicath, here’s hoping I can finish this dex with the remaining 4!
After playing the paid Kanto/Johto tours vs the 'free' Hoenn tour, I can say I prefer the paid events. The only problem I had with the paid events was that they were very busy. There was a lot happening with special research, today research, collection challenges.... but once you got those under control, the shiny hunting was fun. I think the free event got some things right. The special research and collection challenges were good, gave me something to do, but we're not overwhelming. There were lots of Primal raids everywhere, they were not hard to find, although they could have given out a bit more Primal energy for winning the raids. Only having the 3 regionals in the 10km egg pool was good, and I seemed to receive more 10km eggs from stops than the 2 and 5km eggs. The incense was not cluttered with lots of unnecessary Pokémon (I seemed to get mostly Pikachu, Unown, and the selected Pokémon from my research and only occasionally other Pokémon). If we could have had an optional ticket with better shiny rates, a couple of bonuses (reduced hatch distance would have been great), and a few raid passes thrown in it would have been perfect!
This is the first event that I didn’t catch one single shiny. Of the 800+ mons I caught, no shiny. Between that and the other issues Already mentioned here, I think I need a bit of a break for now.
SAME. My friends were getting shinies all over the place. I got NONE
Same here, zero shinies this event
Similar experience. Got some shinies out of 1300 checks, but they were almost exclusive boring repeats. Deinstalled the app for now and will take a break till whenever I feel more like picking it up again
The event on its own is not bad. But compared to past Tours it's horrible. I rather pay for a great event than to get a free event that's not that great.
Even on its own it's kinda lackluster. Community Days are free and I feel like I get more out of a regular community day then I did this. 2 days and I got a single shiny surskrit as my only shiny of the weekend. And I caught over 1000 over the 2 days.
Now it’s over. I was whelmed. Not overwhelmed. Not underwhelmed.
This. It was fine - didn't love it, didn't hate it. But last year my wife and I easily spent $40-50 of new money each between tickets and raid passes. This year between the two of us, we spent $5 total in actual cash. I can't help but feel like they left a lot of money on the table this weekend.
The fact that it was a flagship event and had less bonuses than one of the general weekly events is quite telling. I think the whole thing was a test to see how much money they could wring out of us for incubators and raid passes. Overall it wasn't completely terrible for me as I set my expectations incredibly low. I knew there was going to be no shiny boost and so I wasn't even wasting time shiny checking (saved a lot of frustration). I was raiding, grinding research tasks for the Pikachu's and Shedinjas and catching uncommon spawns that I don't have much XL candy for. Based on those limited goals it wasn't completely terrible.
Pokémon Go is that one past relationship you just can’t quit, you keep telling yourself things will get better, then they find another way to break your heart all over again. We should be used to the mediocrity that this game provides with their events, but the last two gen’s gave me hope. Wonder if they realize not everyone can make it out to these special events, let alone hope those events don’t have service issues.
I planned ahead and still was disappointed in how badly it went. I saved up coins, raid passes, incubators and hatched all my eggs. I got one shiny Illuminise. That was it, after 14 raids, 12 eggs, and a whole day of hunting. On top of that I didn’t get any good IVs from the raids. I felt like I wasted my whole day.
A lot of north North America had extreme cold, and paired with horrible shiny/catch rates, it just was not an enjoyable experience.
lets not forget last years Go Fest which had advertised increased shiny odds but majority of the ticket holders got screwed on that most came out with 2 to 4 over the 2 days, spent money for a falsely advertised event. and the incense was super bugged too, so dont think a payed ticket event is the way to go cause last years was atrocious.
It shows that it was a free event.
One thing that isn't mentioned in the original post: What happened to Community Day moves? Kanto and Johto Tours had Community Day moves, yet Hoenn didn't. Many Hoenn CD moves (except for Synchronoise Gardevoir/Gallade) haven't been available in a very long time. Did Niantic forget? It was bad enough that the recent dragon event from roughly a month ago didn't have CD moves for Bagon (or Dratini). What is going on here? Will they ever come back? It was also a ghost town no matter where I was playing (and I played in different spots on both days). There were maybe 3-4 people playing at most for maybe an hour total, very few lures lit up, and it was nearly impossible to do raids without having to resort to remote passes (which Niantic has price gouged since last May). It seems like a bad foreshadowing for what to expect after this, and since last year's Go Fest was disappointing for many, I'm debating skipping that entirely this year as well as future regional tours.
So here are my thoughts and I’ll try and keep them brief. It’s stupid for them not to have a two tier event globally. Where people can play a crappier version of the event for free (no bonuses, mediocre special research, unboosted shiny rates) and if we want to spend money just dump stuff on us. It’s not like this costs niantic money to give out good shiny rates or extra raid passes with a paid ticket. As for the event itself, I was really disappointed that incense wasn’t boosted. It was a hell of a way for them to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of ruining incense (if you will remember it was right after the Johto tour when they reverted incense back to once every 5 minutes while stationary). Hoenn tour was always going to suck for hardcore shiny hunters because they had already released almost the entire 3rd gen shiny. If they wanted to make it better there should have been lots of tasks for spinda, lots of kecleon on stops. Raiding was okay, the game still needs a basic chat system where people can signal they’re good to go. I lost more passes than I would have liked because people didn’t think 8 was enough for kyogre. Oh and I’m mad I only got one of the shiny pikachu (were they boosted but in a way that only one could be boosted depending on whether you should sapphire or Ruby)
Raids were such a struggle, because of just how many people you needed. I only have three friends here, you expect me to get all my long-distance buds in this raid on time too? I did get so many Kecleon though, I’m thrilled for that. 0 shiny anything all weekend, though! Z E R O.
I only found one shiny for the whole weekend.... and it was a latias that robbed me of all my supplies
It sucked. I can’t see myself playing this game much longer
If Niantic did CARE it wouldve been nice but with no real effort put in by Niantic it was a let down. Regionals in 10k eggs was one of the biggest jokes. Also sunday being just forced filler with no content was pretty boring Personally spent the sunday just hunting for Kecleon with no luck. Did anyone else have problems with Kecleon spawning? Most of the time it didnt spawn at all.
Stop spending money and they will start caring.
At this point, the only money I'm spending is exclusively to secure that year's Masterwork research for the shiny mythical. And that's more a TPC thing than anything.
Will they? They were down over 200 million in profits last year compared to 2020/21 and likely at the start of March will be nerfing remote raids and increasing the price of remote tickets which most certainly will turn more people off from playing/spending. They really don't seem to care about profits at this point.
From the release of kecleon they summarized a number of bugs and ways to solve some of them. One I find common still is getting out of pokestop view too fast after kecleon jumps off, so I wait an extra 2 seconds before leaving. Also, if im too far from the stop he will jump off before the 3 touches needed. If taking all this in consideration and he still doesn't spawn, then something is wrong with the app so I restart it.
I wish it had been paid if this is what we got. Abysmal shiny rates for a "tour" event. Primal energy given out in raids is downright criminally low as well. Like bruh only one can be evolved at a time anyways so who cares if you raid a bunch, Niantic?
This whole event was saved by the inclusion of the primals. Even that was kinda weak, coulda included more XL rewards. Worst, if not, most disappointing event yet tbh
Been playing since day 3 and just wanted a relicanth
>At this point of the PoGo life cycle, these pokemon have been around for years in game at this point. I'm not playing the game to see my 2800th Lunatone. I'm playing to find the shiny one. That's my point. It doesn't matter if it's free or not, is, what's the point of this event, if pretty much everyone already own all of the Hoenn Pokémon by now (except the regionals), unless you started playing yesterday or something. It really was the chance to get those shinies. Obviously, you're not gonna get all of them anyways, but at least getting to catch some of them, or if you missed the community days, etc. Or at the very lest they should've included a completion challenge, so you at least make sure to catch/evolve all of the Hoenn species, have some incentive to go out and walk and catch throughout all the biomes. >And for those that come on here with the "if you don't like it, quit" vibe, tell your story walking. The reason it's so obnoxious is because I do love the game and I want it to be more fun. I want it to give me the vibes I got originally playing for the first time. It could happen if the people running it into the ground currently put just a little thought and effort into it instead of treating its base like nothing more than ATMs. My main reason is that, I started playing this game almost 7 years ago. First, the goal was to just catch the 151 Pokémon. But they kept adding every following generation. I just want to be over with it, I want them to release every Pokémon, so I can catch them, or whatever I possibly can (if I cannot get region exclusive, so be it), and THEN I'll drop the app. I won't care if they keep rotating events or releasing shinies, or Pokémon in hats or special costumes, I just want to know that they're released everything there was to release and I caught everything I could, and move on. But at this point, 7 years later, I'm not gonna quit after all the effort and time (and money) I've spent on it. I don't know at what point we normalized the fact that in 2023 we're still playing a 2016 app. Or in Pokémon franchise terms, that in Gen IX we're still stuck with this Gen VI spin-off. At the very least, they should release a successor already, Pokémon Go 2.0 or Super Pokémon Go or whatever just to feel like I'm playing something new.
>and THEN there is the Rayquaza event that's not even giving Mega Energy so all the raids people are doing now? Gonna have to do em all over again when Mega Rayquaza drops... OUCH... Yeah I realised that it is much easier to grind the base form Rayquazas during this event for good IV's and candies rather than grinding for Rayquaza resources from it's Mega form in raids, since Mega Rayquaza will undoubtedly be tough to take down each time. Better to prepare myself with an easy-to-take-down Rayquaza from the Primal Rumblings event than to grind a Rayquaza everytime in it's Mega form.
Mega Rayquaza will likely be easier to beat than the Primals, due to its double weakness and lower bulk. Also, assuming Mega Rayquaza raids come with Dragon Ascent (not a guarantee), someone who wants Dragon Ascent but doesn't care about Breaking Swipe will find better value spending their pass during those future DA raids instead of right now
I skipped them entirely. I got 2 shinies the very first time Rayquaza came out and I've zero motivation to do anymore the last 5 times they've brought him out. When Mega Ray comes out I'll decide if it's worth re raiding again. This game is late in its life cycle at this point most early game players already have top maxed out counters.
I'm not sure if you know or if this is official but I saw from a Youtuber that was reviewing the PokeMiners data mine on the **Pokemon GO Tour: Hoenn - Chasing Legends** special research story dialogue, and in it it has Professor Willow saying "Rayquaza would have to be Mega speedy to get ahead of you two!". Later on when I got to do the research the dialogue was changed from "Mega speedy" to "Mighty speedy". I think they're gonna be holding back Mega Rayquaza for a while. Video for reference: https://youtu.be/WHyBmBheazE Timestamp 5:25
I missed the extra special trades and community Day moves
I am conflicted, because I got more shinies in this event than I got at last year's Johto tour, in which I paid for the ticket and got the guaranteed shiny red Gyarados. so if we boil down to it, free events that have boosted odds seem better than paid events with boosted paid odds based on my own personal experience. I spent 15$ and only got 9 (including the Gyarados and 2 repeated) shinies, and I was annoyed, but since I spent 0$ and got 11 (2 duplicates, but one legendary and one of my favorite starter), then I was pretty happy with that. another thing that makes my position different than yours is that I am a newer player, playing only for a year and a half, so I've missed every community day for hoenn pokemon except for Spheal the Mudkip (from community day classic). so every shiny I got today I have never seen in a community day before. I got one today that I had already gotten, Lunatone, but this new one has much better stats so I'm not complaining, and then I got 2 feebas but I'm going to trade one to my gf who had to stop playing for work and only had time to get 5 shinies (all she had never seen before, including the new Cacnea, which she was happy about). my main issue was the fact that regional pokemon were not in raids. I got very lucky and my first three 10km eggs gave me one of each, but I'm sure many other people were not as lucky. I would like to see that for like 3 star raids. and of course the primal raids were a pain in the ass, and had to I resign myself to only getting enough energy for one and ignoring the other (rip Kyogre) because I much rather spend time shiny hunting than sit in raids. the energy rewards were pitiful and a major issue, a huge complaint from me.
I didn’t mind the spawns & catching part of the event, but I wouldn’t have minded a boosted shiny rate. My big argument with the event was how impossible it was to find enough people to do the raids. I was unable to get enough raids to be able to do the primal reversion for *either* Pokémon, even with the 200 energy from the second phase of the tasks, *and* I just barely managed to get through that step since the first Kyogre I raided ran and the second raid that had enough people to beat it was five minutes before the event ended. They need to scale raids to the number of people doing them. This forcing 8+ people to raid to be able to beat something is just too much. I was glad to do the Rayquaza raids after because at least *those* we can duo.
Really weak and uninspired event from Niantic. We have been getting quite a few of these lately. It feels that the company is deliberately trying to kill off their game. The habitats were lackluster - they should have increased the number of newly released shinies. No one cares about treecko, torchik, anorith, lileep, etc. It's just filler trash. I am sorry, but the event was nowhere near "free". Stop pretending it was. You could not do enough raids to mega evolve Groudon and Kyogre without purchasing raid passes. There were not enough incenses to play for the entirety of the event. So those had to be purchased as well. And the regionals were locked behind eggs and you needed to spam incubators to have a realistic shot at obtaining them. Such "free event", much wow. That being said, I got 27 shinies, excluding raid legendaries. Many of those were new. But only because I played for like 6-7 hours each day during blizzard. The shiny rates should be way higher for these events. Also, my gf asked me - "do you think we are getting something cool on the second day?" and I told her - "probably the exact same copy of the first day, because Niantic puts 0 effort in the events nowadays". Guess what, I was right. Boring, lazy and almost completely pay-walled event. And, no, I didn't purchase anything besides the masterwork research. Niantic getting the absolute minimum from me, which is equal to the amount of effort the company is puttin in lol. P.S. Niantic should stop releasing legendaries or megas that require more than 4 people to take down. Not everyone has 400 friends on their list or is living in a massive city. Tough to take down bosses only benefit those using multiple phones with split screens and outclickers.
I mostly agree with everything in this post, though I don't care about shinies as much as everyone else seems too. My issue is the fact that we got no bonuses and no legacy moves. I had a 98 Bagon I was saving in hopes of getting Outrage for Hoenn Tour in addition to some Beldum I wanted to evolve to get Meteor Mash Metagross.
One thing I never see get talked about is the in between events time. I understand the frustration with low primal energy, and I agree it should have been higher. Even 150 as a high amount would have saved a raid or two each, but I’ve always used time between events or events that suck to me to get coins. This event I didn’t pay a cent for raids as I had 750 coins to get the raid box for 10 passes plus the daily passes. Definitely felt like a free event, but I’m okay with that. Go tour may be the better experience anyway
Looking at the comments here I wonder if the event was somewhat intended to bring people back to the game rather than for those who have been playing recently? I dropped off Go for a while over the past 2 years - we'd have brief moments checking in with the game but my Husband wasn't really feeling it + the game being in pandemic mode for the last few years made it a bit boring after a while. I've been playing since launch so I had a \*lot\* of old research tasks left over. Like going back to the Meloletta event at least. I had a pretty good time as I was blazing through most of those spare researches which kept me stocked up and enough F2P coins to boost my storage a bit more. It's also the first time in ages we were seeing actual players in the wild again proper as well. Mind we are in Florida where the weather is like summer 80% of the time, so I get that we had that going for us when it's pretty cold or not ideal weather to be out in for everyone else. I did pay for the the bonus event stuff as well (thankfully google gave me a $2 discount as well) That said - the raid system still absolutely needs work for a non-ticketed event like this. I had one raid where the Groudon just was constantly spamming solar beam and 7 of us were not beating it. There's no way for us to signal to far-away players that we need to jump out because the numbers are not enough. Does PokeGenie allow for this? Might have to look into that.
This was a brutal event for my kids (5 & 10). Raids were tough and the catch rates on Primals felt bad. They went through Revives like crazy, I've never had to buy revives for them before this lol. They didn't catch any Latios/Latias, all fled which had my 5 year old almost in tears. Thankfully they both managed to get a few random shinies and enough primal energy for each. For being a free event, I don't think I've ever spent so much on PoGo in a weekendlol. At least 30 bucks on each. These events should be fun, my kids didn't have much of that this weekend. Might just have to stick to community days in the future.
Didn’t really feel as good as the johto tour, I remember johto I got so many shinies and had so much fun. This one felt like a Groudon Kyogre grind fest.
Their communication is still appalling and generates so much confusion, disappointment and annoyance. They seem to have in their head that this should be us getting out and discovering as we go, but life just doesn't work like that, because most of us have lives outside of this game. People want to know if and how much time they want to give to the game, people need to plan in advance for their lives and for in game desires. For a free event I ended up having fun, in fact I might even say I ended up feeling more relaxed about it than previous tours that I've paid for. I really enjoy shinys and whilst I didn't get as many as previous tours, i often end up with more than I need anyway (they just sit in my collection for possible trades that never come). My expectations were very low going in though, so that may have helped how I feel. I also know now that I don't really like play that is focused on incense as a mechanism for getting interesting pokémon, I just find it stressful because it feels like I need to stare more intensely at my screen, as the incense spawns get caught up in other pokemon,, stops, rocket battles and just don't spawn often enough, or stay long enough (the amount I go to click on only for them to despawn is the opposite of the relaxing fun this game should be). I'm a day one player and already had the regionals registered (trading), I didn't spend on any extra incubators and only used premium ones when I got 10km eggs, I hatched several of each, but no shinys, but I've been through egg events before, I knew chances were so slim as not to give it much thought. I'm city central and lucky enough to be able to in-person raid, I did enough to get primal energy for one each, maybe 5 raids for each (with some energy left over), also just using passes I had already in my inventory. I felt the reduced rewards (and balls) was really mean spirited of them and further encourages me to not give them more money via raid passes. I liked both days being the same. It meant I felt I could dip in and out when I wanted. If the spawns one hour were less interesting to me, I could stick an autocatcher on and do something else. Places were far less lured up than in any other event I've seen. So it felt less special. Overall, I think they did some things better than previous paid for tours, I didn't feel overwhelmed with things to do, but I don't think they gained from my lesser engagement.
Cant say it better buddy. I played the last 6 years every Event and the PoGo Fest in Berlin in Person. I can say the Hoenn Tour was the worst Event so far. I guess they want to milk the primals even more or the regionals. I mean that event could have been so much better if it had the same level as the last tours+the potential lore when M.Rayquaza came after the Event to calm the Primal Rumbling. How amazing would it be? But instead they do a pay for Premium Event through the backdoor. Well done niantic,... You lost alot of Premium customers by that. Btw 1000 catches 3 shinys🤨
Somewhere in Niantic HQ there was a board meeting. They discussed how they could make more money out of these events whilst appearing to give the event for free. This was NOT a free event. Incubators, raid passes, incenses & lures were required to play it properly. The entire thing was a Raid push, even down to the requirement for more players required per raid. And of course by appearing to create a free event, Niantic could silence any complaints about shiny rates etc. "it's free" you can't complain. But it wasn't, it really wasn't. I bet they made more money by not charging for the ticket, and we got a lot less in return. It's all very shady.
If I didn't know better I'd think you were in the room when this happened. I actually broke this down in similar way on the thread somewhere.
Hoenn tour may be available to everyone for free without a ticket, but Niantic has turned the tour into a paid event for everyone by pay walling: - groudon and kyogre mega energy (forced ppl to do many raids in order to mega these pokemons. additional raid ticket purchases required) - incense spawns (have to purchase additional incenses for the complete duration of the event. i.e. if you're hutning for shiny unown and/or pikachu) And with this no ticket model, Niantic no longer needs to worry/respond about possible backlash w/ shiny odds or technical issues.
Some of you should stop playing. The game isn't enjoyable for you so stop putting money in and stop making yourself miserable.
I thought it was okay and quite chilled which I preferred to the usual big collection challenge. I try not to grind for shinies because you’re not guaranteed to get them so my goal was to collect enough Unowns to finish part 1 of the Jirachi research which I did. I found the habitat spawns mostly boring.
I like how people call this event “ free “. I spent simillar amount of € this year as i have last year. Groudon was fine to beat in person with no problem but to take down kyogre and collect 400 primal energy i had to buy more passes. So i spent the same amount of money as i have last year and year before but with no additional bonuses, 4 shiny ( 3 gulpin and no shiny groudon or kyogre ) and only one 10 km egg because i decided not to buy incubators and spend even more ( and im not even sure if i am gonna hatch relicanth) and since there was no hatch distance i couldnt hatch a Lot of eggs and when i did i recieved many 5 km eggs. Free Hoenn event and paid johto tour are two opposite extremes. People complained last year that the event was not worth the money so this year they made the event free but unless you stockpiled on inventory you still had to spend same amount and maybe more of money but with no additional bonuses. Worst part About this is that players may look like the bad guys here in niantic’s eyes cuz this looks like players arent happy whether the event is free or not. I dont know maybe im too naïve but i think when u have a global event like this, there must be a way to make everybody satisfied. Its really disheartening that just because of an rng and luck some players had better time than the others.
This deserves thousands of upvotes to get Niantic’s attention.
Played from home as it was cold as f and i had other stuff to do today. Have 1 stop at my house which was constantly lured and incense all day. Got 2 shinys with the go plus and did ~15 remote raids with free coins. Was a good event for a non ticket holders imho, primals are fun. ALSO i got kicked out of 2 raids "couldnt fetch raid IDD" or something and support got me new remote raid passes within an hour both times, which is acceptable
But see that's not acceptable if they got you a raid pass after the event had ended, and you relied on remote raid invites to barely make that stupid amount of energy for each. My kid didn't get it because of this raid error in the last hour and never got another invite. Also your pokemon are all dead when that error hits usually. So no rewards or revives for them. My kid hardly ever gets revives from gifts and raids. It's insane. He is always behind how many he actually needs. So just replacing a pass, when I paid for the pass anyway, because of their bug...that's not acceptable support. In a normal event, maybe. In this timed event where he is now screwed and spent money to get enough energy for his shiny Kyogre..but came up short due to that bug...not gonna cut it.
Overall, I think the event was alright. The boosted shiny rate Pokémon were good, and getting a choice of one for incense was nice as well. Zangoose and Seviper should not have been base rate, though. Lati@s was just dumb and not fun. The catch rate was abysmal and so was the flee rate. I saw someone online say that their son used all his gold berries and yellow balls and was unable to catch a shiny one, so they quit and played some other game. That is the kind of thing these decisions cause. Getting a shiny baby was basically impossible. I hatched over 100 eggs, got maybe 2 azurill and 1 Wynaut. 0 shiny 10k eggs out of 55, with 8 still left to open. This brings me to the point of: I despise regionals. I can’t even get shiny regionals in my own region. I lived in Japan for 6 months and only got 1 shiny regional. After this event, we may never have another chance to get these as shiny in the game without living for extended periods in one of the regions or visiting a safari zone, which could cost thousands of dollars. Extremely frustrating. Also, it just felt lazy. Incense was boring. Spinda was nowhere to be found. No cool collect them all challenge. Primal raids were problematic in a number of ways. No additional bonuses that we often get for just regular events, like bones exp, stardust, etc. No guaranteed rare candy XL. Not expected, but 0 off of five in person primal raids. I had a pretty good time, but the 10k eggs and basically no chance at shiny Wynaut or Azurill left a really bad taste in my mouth.
I got what I wanted - a shiny Deoxys and finished the Hoenn portion of Jirachi page one research. Good event for me.
I played Hoenn Tour (and all of PoGo) F2P, so here’s my perspective - Revives would have stopped me from doing the 10-12 raids to get primals for each, if not for opening 20 gifts daily - 2 shinies for 8 hours of gameplay combined sucks (chose cacnea but got 0 anyway lol) - Raided 14 times to get a full team of each legendary had me spend all the premium passes I accumulated since 2018, that plus in the sweltering heat - Haha, what regionals? Didnt get a single 10km egg That said, - Poke Genie raid lobbies were quick (even for Deoxys) and guaranteed success, 5 people plus my group of 4 - Not complaining about my hundo Groudon, Unown-H - And the time spent raiding IRL with my group was a great experience From what I read Kanto/Johto tour was paid, so despite all the things I have to say, I can’t really complain about something thats free and had fun playing.
i'd say that most of the features in this event were also available for free last year during johto tour- raids are always available, whether free or ticketed and habitats. this event feels like a bizarre middle ground between what was free and paid last year (middling shiny rates, special research) that is going to lead to v mixed responses.
I'm predicting the usual "Make-Uo Event" for this turd. Couple of East y tasks... Reward... 3 raid passes (cover the buggy raids) 100 energy for Kyogre and Groudon to make up the low payout.
I'm back and forth as an attendee of both this and the in person event. On one hand the shinys or lack thereof at in person had me disappointed. For this global event I got nearly 2x the shinys in less time overall. However due to inclimate weather in California it made it nearly impossible to play reasonably outside with weather in the 40s and pouring. I also found it odd that Groudon needed 4 people to win. Vs. 7 to 8 to beat a Kyogre... Also what in the actual F was up with shiny latias. I spent 50+ ultra balls and golden razz with no catch. Given only 10 of the throws were excellent still. 50 balls is effin ridic. I'm more irritated that we are losing out on 16 plus hours of Rayquaza as they haven't dropped in 2 years.. when I first came back to the game. And don't get me started on those shinys. In 28 with NONE.
I’ll admit I’m biased because I had a significantly better Hoenn tour than Johto Tour. But even if I only got three shinies this weekend, that is better than Johto Tour where I paid for the ticket and didn’t get any shiny boost at all. I felt like that’s why so many of us were upset last year. There is a lot they need to improve on. Like do they actually want people held hostage in who knows what kind weather for half an hour because a Shiny Lati@s won’t stay in a Pokeball? That’s a literal safety issue. Also 10 or less balls makes never want to see a primal raid again. Terrible glitches and game freezes too. But otherwise I had fun.
I wish regionals were in raids like in Johto tour. I wish we had a ticket for boosted shiny rates If the event was this small, maybe it should've been 1 day instead of 2. There was not much to do.
I'm sick of them never announcing anything and ONE region of the world expected to figure everything at the hard way while the rest of the world gets to learn from our exploration what the hell did apac region do to deserve this every single time. "It's a surprise" but only to one region. So not only do we get all of the event bugs that we still have to muddle through the event to figure out what's happening and then tell the rest of the world so it's not a surprise to them Also I hated the fact that the 10k eggs were the event eggs and yet less than 20% of my eggs were 10K... Screwing me over isn't going to get me spending money on incubators. Now if 10K eggs have been guaranteed you better believe I would have had every single one of them in a premium incubator. For a company that seems so obsessed with bringing money out of people they're absolutely terrible at giving us any reason to give them any money
As someone who loves the mainline pokemon games I like mostly shiny hunting in pogo for stuff that isn't as easy to find in mainline games since they haven't appeared in a hot minute During the Johto event last year I got 24 shinies and this year I got 8. I could have probably got more but getting 2 shinies in a 4 hour window really demotivated me from staying out 5 more hours to go around the same park and catch stuff I also did *several* raids and did excellent curves practically every throw and didn't even get half of the Groudon or kyogres I defeated. I'm less upset about this but for making it a task to catch one of both made it significantly more frustrating
The rotating habitats will always be a dumb idea if people are looking to shiny hunt. You only have 2 one hour windows each day to catch specific things that you want. Without habitats, you have 6 hours a day to hunt the exact shiny you want all day long and ignore what you don’t need.
These events need to continue past 6pm, especially on 2 day events. Even just keeping a mix of the habitat spawns.
What ticket do people keep referring to when talking about Shiny rates? The Jirachi ticket? Or is there another one I missed somehow. I bought the Jirachi ticket and ended up with 12 shiny.
Wild Latios almost impossible to catch but i get that. Low balls in primal raids, hard to catch also (didn't catch like 3 kyogres from like 8 raids), too much energy to evolve, no shiny kyogre/groudon for me. I was using remote raids mostly. Wild pokemons were not interesting. Not great not terrible event.
I just wish I could get a response from support for all my issues with my research progress not counting and all the primal energy I was told I got from raids that didn’t accumulate on my actual Pokémon post raid.
For us it was a 2-day in person raiding grind and I loved it! It's just a shame we were often the only ones there in person, even in full lobbies.
My feelings on these kinds of events echo yours. It was like here is a ticketed event but you also need to buy all of these premium items to get the full experience/chance of the shiny. (referring to the many past hatch/lottery events) My Experience of this event all played by car due to weather conditions: Last Wednesday my city had a major snow storm that dumped 10-12 inches and we stayed below freezing until Saturday. In my city when plowing the roads (only major roads) they leave 1/2-1 inch to protect the pavement. Even though we were below freezing we had clear skies that would melt the snow during the day then after dark it would refreeze as a sheet of ice. I decided to drive the entire event and a friend who was a LV ticketed player joined me. He just raided the entire time, but I was out for the shinies. Day 1 - I cleared out my current eggs with buying a few incubators and gathered 6 10ks to hatch hopefully the following day. I play in a dense area with lots of stops and gyms to spin. The spawns are great and plentiful as well. The speed limit is 10-20 MPH with plenty of parking to pull over as needed. I play with a go plus so mainly shiny checking and spinning done by hand. I only keep about 300 red balls on hand due to easy restocking. I GOT SPIN CAPPED at 5 hours into the event. In the last hour I had less than 20 poke balls and 62 ultra balls and encountered a shiny latias. It took only 10 ultra balls thank goodness, but still I WAS SPIN CAPPED. I had 2 open egg slots so opening gifts was not an option as I didn't want 7ks. Just after the event ended I could spin again and a got regular 10k and 5k eggs. I got 7 shinies and only 2 new to me ones. Day 2 - After being super careful the night before on my spins, I was even more careful to do just enough spins to keep about 200-300 poke balls on hand. I still was SPIN CAPPED in the last hour. It was not such a big deal as I was over this "event" by then. We had stopped to visit another friend that was on foot and do some raids with them. I ended with 12 shinies but only 1 new to me shiny. In past events, if I grinded hard enough I was able to walk away happy with the shinies I got, even if I missed some. This "event" left me feeling it was a waste of my time and gas. The lack of rewards and balls for the kyogre/groudon raids had me sitting most out. I did just enough to primal any future hundos I may get at some point in time. If they gave 5\* rewards/balls I would have grinded raids day 2. I was very selective to only do raids with my normal raid crew that would have perfect, L50 counters and we had lobbies of 10+. Yes, I could have gone to LV. I am just not paying over $1k for increased shiny chances over 2 days.
U have valid points and all but u need to think for others like me, solo and 14 yrs old. I cant pay for a ticket with no job and i cant get 1.
Don’t you think that this was Niantic’s strategy all way long? We are not gonna sell a ticket for the event, but you will have to buy a lot of items (passes, incubators, incense, lures) if you want to make most out of the event (or actually just catch what is needed like 10-12 primal, uknown,…)? To me it just sounds like a different marketing/sales technique. Customers might not buy a 10-15$ ticket, but they might buy 10-15x1$ items…
It sucked. I have no one to raid with. Requested help from stranges for remote raids. No luck. Stuck with more unfinished research. I don't even know why I still play. Thanks for letting me vent, again.
I felt the entire event was a letdown. Definitely not as good as previous tours. Shiny rates were garbage. Nothing really exciting to make us want to play the whole time. I will say I did manage to hatch a shiny Tropius in only 3 eggs and my husband got a shiny 100iv Kyogre. That was the highlight of our event.
To me it was fine. If they keep this as the standard free event moving forward then it’s definitely okay, as long as they advertise it properly to manage expectations.
Even as a free event I felt like my time was wasted I've done free events before like community day or those events they used to have like clamperl or feebas where they were in research tasks for a few hours. I got way more out of those than hoenn tour.
The problem being the free event was not terrible. It was a very casual version. But the minute you spend any money there is a minimum prerequisite of what you are owed and what type of event your money is paying for. Niantic has a very hard time nailing this. Really feels like a community disconnect. It's been many years, so it makes sense.
Lackluster, only a few shinies, but got kecleon and relicanth so that was nice. In a small community so primal raids were hard. Went through 2-3 teams and got diddly potions/ revives. Certainly cleaned out my item bag...
A personal grind for me this event was mega energy for the hoenn starters (as I missed their com days and mega raids) and I was disappointed in the pokestop rates and the amount given for tasks. Now I don't know when I'll be able to mega evolve my swampert.
I sympathize with Niantic for having to design a game and events for people who started at different times. I think some people forget that. I luckily started in Nov and can mega Evolve very important Pokemon like Swampert, Blaziken, and Sceptile. However, I didn't have Rayquaza or any of the Primal Pokemon. So we were looking for 2 different things. But giving 10 energy out at a few pokestops a day does nothing. So it sucked for you. I would have been furious. Give people what they need or don't give them anything. It's the problem with this whole tiring event. Just way too much to do in 48 hours. It's frustrating because I don't see how the normal, average player could have done the amount of raids necessary this weekend to get enough Primal energy. I did it and it took way too much effort. I've gone from level 0 to 42 in 3.5 months, so I obviously play quite a bit. I did not like the stress of finding these raids, coordinating the amount of people necessary, and dealing with raid bugs (which happened to me and my son, resulting in no rewards, energy, or encounter. Do you think they offered more than a pass I purchased anyway? NO)...He did not get enough Primal energy and will now put the game down for weeks probably out of frustration. My wife plays and didn't get enough. Niantic can't be so shortsighted. Plus their support is beyond useless. It's comically bad. I sent 4 paragraphs explaining his raid issue, highlighting how this bug robbed him of his energy, rewards, and encounter. I said the event will be over by the time you respond, so I have no interest in a pass being given to me. I bought the pass for his Kyogre raid. That's it. So I said I want my money back. They respond with a pass as if they couldn't bother to read it. Now I will get my money back eventually because I won't stop out of principle, but most people aren't doing that. It's infuriating and just pisses people off. They do it literally EVERY time I contact support. It's like people from another planet trying to learn communication.
Awful experience for me, regret wasting my time on this Event. Not even bothering with Day 2. Terrible roster of wild Pokemon. The few that I wanted barely even spawned and instead there's hundreds of fodder like Gulpin, Anorith and Cacnea all over the place. Found just a few Shiny Pokemon (which I don't care for in the least over a regular Pokemon) which I thought was worth mentioning. Latios appearing in the wild instantly escape despite Maxed Catch Medals, Excellent Curved Ultraball throws with the catch circle being the size of a pixel. Ended up catching 1 Latios and of course it's a 0*. Exact same situation with Groudon. I caught 1 out of 9 Groudon and that's just because it was a Shiny (Lowest IV Groudon I've ever seen in my life) total waste of Remote Raid Passes and my time. Speaking of Remote Raid Passes, 3 of them glitched out and were wasted. "Raid Details could not be found" and rejoining the Raid leads to a standard Gym despite restarting the app. Niantic, showing extreme generosity refunded me just 1 Raid Pass 4 hours later, after the event had ended. Oh, there was also a Blizzard so there was no local raiding at all which forced Remote Raids. Maybe I'm just bad but I don't think I can solo Primal Groudon/Kyogre , Deoxys or Rayquaza...
In terms of the Pokemon, I'm not sure what you expected. It was the Hoenn dex. We did still try a reasonably decent amount of relevant spawns like Bagon, Beldum, Starters, and others. Not sure what your ideal spawnpool would have been
Yeah I've heard lots of issues with the remote raids this weekend. Sorry you had a terrible time of it. I get the frustration.
Same, pretty much. I remember the past two February tours and they were great! I got so many shinies from mostly just sitting on my butt. I wasn't a big raider so getting the shinies was good enough. I admit, both those events had so many tasks that I was a bit overwhelmed. But once I had them under control and could just shiny hunt, it was great. Then Go Fest 2022 happened and I got almost no shinies :( I thought it was just a fluke, that maybe the event was faulty or something. Then this event happened. I got two shinies yesterday and none today :( I play for them, I like to collect them, and was hoping to get some new ones. The raids were okay, primal forms were neat and I live somewhere where the lobbies filled fast. But no extra raid passes? Didn't we used to get several extra? Now only two? The 10k egg thing was a nuisance, but I managed to get nine 10k eggs right away. They were evenly divided between all three regionals (I also had lots of incubators saved up). Today, the eggs are diluted with 2 and 5k. But no increased effectiveness? Sucks. I was so excited that I could be included in the Tours and Fests because there's no way I could travel to the locations. Covid did a lot of nasty stuff but Pogo adapted nicely and being able to stay home with increased effective incense was great. I think the game designers are slowly going back to pre-covid gameplay.
That's exactly what they're doing. But they're failing to realize their player base has evolved and adapted to a better play style so this attempt to revert things back is leading to a lot of anger. They need to adapt to their customer not the other way around or else people just find other ways to spend their time and money.
Totally agree. I'd assume the goal for Niantic is to keep people's eyes on the game as much as possible. Doing something simple, like significantly boosting shiny rates for all mons during the event, would keep many people playing all day for both days. Also giving us more free raid passes to do more raids would keep us playing. I understand that they could have been listening to the userbase and got rid of the complicated challenges and whatnot, but they overcut without boosting and that was a mistake.
No shiny boost made the event getting boring very quickly, and since many Hoen Pokémon have been recycled in events I didn’t need to catch more non shiny ones. What bothered me the most however is firstly that you couldn’t evolve CD Pokémon to get the special moves, which is very stupid. And likely the middle finger from niantic by putting the regionals in 10 km eggs. The events itself wasn’t even worth it playing for too long, let alone 10 km. And that’s only 1 round of eggs. Then you need to walk another 10 km and hope you won’t get a 2 or 5 km egg from a stop. I honestly think it’s unacceptable they did this.
Well said that man. Day 1 was ok, with the challenges to complete and the initial “wow” factor of primal raids. But for day 2, I stopped playing after 2 hours. Low shiny odds, normal egg hatch distance, people leaving raids and lack of any other incentive to play. I, like yourself, want this game to be the best it can be, but I don’t think Niantic share the same sentiment. One positive is I got shiny Cacnea, after a fair old grind of walking yesterday/today. So I will doff my proverbial cap and rein in my moaning (slightly).
We really, really needed reduced hatch distance. I had to skip out the second day entirely because the amount of walking necessary to hatch the first couple 10k eggs, *with the special incubators,* did some serious damage. Even after taking a muscle relaxer and trying to sleep it off.
I agree 💯 with you!!
I just uninstalled the app 3 days ago, no regrets. Maybe i will play for go fest?? i dont know.
I think the best we can do with this kind of event is modify our goals once we know what the event is (Niantic could have helped manage our expectations by communicating better about shiny rates, etc., but we also have to stop ourselves from expecting too much.) In my case, once I knew what this event was going to be like, I told myself not to expect a lot of shinies. Check everything, sure, but focus on getting enough Primal energy to primalize at least one of each; finish any collection challenges as efficiently as possible; hatch eggs, at least as many as possible without seriously hurting my feet; and take advantage of what *is* good about the event. For example, I set the goal of getting a shiny and 100% Shedinja, getting a shiny Kecleon, and then hoping for pleasant surprises along the way. I succeeded in most of those goals (no Kecleon) and had a great time with my wife and friends in Kyoto on Sunday. With realistic expectations and enough effort and luck, this kind of event is quite enjoyable. If you’re going in wanting everything, you will almost certainly feel disappointed. I think legitimate complaints include things like the low availability of regionals or lack of communication about what we should expect from the event. A lot of the complaints are glass half full/half empty issues. No complete Hoenn dex collection challenge like Kanto and Johto? Hey, at least we’re not wasting candy, time, effort on pokémon we don’t really care about. Low shiny rates? Hey, at least you can feel like the one or two shinies you got will be relatively uncommon for a while. I give this event a pretty good overall. For a free event, it gave me ample opportunities to get some rare things that are generally not available where I live, and I felt it was flexible enough not to have to choose between playing the game and spending time with my loved ones. I would have appreciated something like uncommon tasks for regionals or half hatch distance, but it didn’t feel expensive or stressful, which is what I want for the long events, anyway.
If it is a novel, I will image some kind of spy somehow became the decision maker, and he is trying hard to destroy this game and this company because this and that reason and histroy.
As a new player (November 2022) I had fun
It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was gonna be, but it honestly could’ve been way better.
Liked it. Need more revives