This Week in Pokémon Go News + Free-for-All

[inkstone]

Hello trainers! As you've no doubt noticed by now, the Halloween event has come to an end. I hope you enjoyed it and had a great time catching the event pokémon. :D

Niantic has announced a few updates for us. It's not quite clear when these changes will go live (or if they already have). Reports are conflicting at the moment.

• Look alive! Nests have migrated.

• Along those lines, spawning diversity has increased and you won't be seeing as many pidgeys, rattatas, and zubats as before. (source)

• As healingmirth pointed out in last week's post, eevees will now hatch from 5km eggs while pidgeys and rattatas will no longer hatch from 2km eggs. Oh no! But I'm still trying to evolve that good IV pidgeot with wing attack/hurricane!! (source)

• And finally, we will be getting daily bonuses for doing certain in-game activities everyday! More details here. This change will hopefully be included in the next game update, which if the schedule holds up, will start rolling out next week.

Any interesting bits of news from your neck of the woods? How do you feel about these upcoming changes?

For that matter...



How was your week in PokeGo?

Comments

[inkstone]

I started a new day job this week, so the PokeGo playing has been severely curtailed. Because it's been a week of settling in and obtaining credentials, I'm not even sure what my routine will be!

With the event ending, I switched my buddy from dratini to mankey. I'm planning to take a couple walks this weekend to get back into the PokeGo groove. It's been weird not playing much these past few days! (Though I did ride the bus a couple days this past week and got to play, "Spin the pokestop in time!")

[malnpudl]

I love the news of bonus stardust! I wasted SO MUCH stardust on unwise powering up before I knew what I was doing or how to evaluate the worth of my Mons. So the prospect of earning extra stardust is very exciting. There's no such thing as enough!

And I'm also grateful to hear that I won't be getting Eevees out of 10K eggs any more. Eevees are a dime a dozen here, and it made for a huge disappointment when that's all I got from a 10K egg... especially since egg CPs stop scaling at a level much lower than my current 30, so I wasn't even getting anything worth keeping.

As always, thank you so very much for the updates! I have learned so much from your posts, as well as from other people's input here. I am very grateful.

[ghost_lingering]

Has anyone suddenly had any additional sightings show up in their pokedex? Today I got a bunch of extra sightings of things I've never actually encountered: Venusaur, Blastoise, Snorlax, and Dragonite. I'd DEFINITELY have noticed them if I'd run across any of them!

[playswithworms]

Loving the spawning diversity! I've even been catching a few things at my home - there were zero Pokemon when I first started playing, and then a few weeks ago started seeing the occasional rattata or pidgey, but in the last week I've caught Tauros and Goldeen and Exeggcute!

[inkstone]

Did you see them in gyms? A few weeks ago, Niantic made it so that defenders you see in gyms count in your pokedex.

[ghost_lingering]

Ahhhhh, yeah, that's probably it. I don't spend much time with gyms, but the other day I was able to put my Vaporeon in a gym to defend it.

[healingmirth]

So many things!

I was traveling for work over a big chunk of the event, so mostly I walked a *lot* of eggs in the evening and going from one building to the next. City folk have much higher CP defenders than I do, and the good news/bad news was most of the gyms were stacked full of my team, because they were all arcanine towers with like one snorlax in the middle. I'm guessing, had the event not been in effect, the ground would have been crawling with growlithes.

Also, thanks to the Halloween event going on for-freaking-ever, I made it out to a pretty sweet exegcute nest before double candy ended. Around here, a couple silph road travelers are claiming that our one worthwhile nest has migrated to...caterpies? I'm skeptical and a little O.o that it could even be a thing, but I made a bunch of notes when I was there last week, so I'm going to check out what's up this weekend.

I hatched a grimer to match the one I finally caught a few days before, and a terrible koffing but thank you for the candy. Walked my lonely diglet for a bit, caught some geodudes, and then walked my bulbasaur some more to make up for having evolved two ivysaurs rather than a venusaur like I meant to, whoops. So! As of today's mass evolve, I've added golem, dugtrio, venusaur, muk, and weezing to my pokedex, hurrah! And it looks like I'm going to make it to level 30 before we all need to hibernate for the winter.

Ooh, and a new spawn point in my driveway that I noticed just now when I went to check my pokedex. I've got full sightings right now, and I never have full sightings from inside my house, so I'll need to take some laps around tomorrow and see what's changed.

[healingmirth]

Holy bleep, and a wartortle when I loaded the app again after submitting that comment. I'm going to have to really change up my carried item balance if stuff is going to spawn in range of my couch, but this is exciting! I didn't notice any changes on my walking route earlier, but it appears that I was too hasty and so, so wrong.

[yuuago]

It's starting to get too cold and dark to play it up here. Walking eggs isn't so bad when I'm already on my way to somewhere, but extra walking, not to mention catching and battling... brrrr.

Those upcoming bonuses sound great, though.

[lilacsigil]

I've only ever hatched Eevees from 10k eggs, so I'm excited to see what happens next! I have one 10k nearly ready and another one waiting.

[havocthecat]

Spin the pokestop in time is its own special skillset!

[vass]

Thanks to the Halloween event, got enough candy to evolve my Pikachu to Raichu. Hatched a Charmander.

Local friend I have dinner with regularly who does not play Pokemon (but lives near enough a Pokestop that you can access it from her living room couch) keeps making strange faces when I say things like "I have no balls at all" or "I wanted to catch this Pokemon, but I don't have the balls." I can't think why.

[healingmirth]

https://m.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/5b8dih/pokemon_despawn_times_increased_from_15_minutes/

Bunch of TSR folks reporting that spawn window seems to have changed from 15 minutes minimum to 30. I think my the local (suburban) spawn density is probably about the same, and the sightings window filling up is result of that. Seems like it could be a nightmare for urban players trying to track something down, even with the new tracker, but it sounds like great news for suburban and rural players.

[healingmirth]

It still *seems* nice out here insofar as it's mostly sunny, but I definitely noticed near the end of a gym battle last night that my hands were too cold to tap/swipe how I usually do, and I had to change it up.

Also, I did not remember I had made this icon til I was looking for an appropriate keyword just now. Thanks, Pokemon Go, for allowing me to insert arbitrary challenges unto my daily life ;)

[ephemera]

The daily bonuses sound like they could be a good way of keeping people hooked as the weather changes - I'm certainly up for extra stardust!

More Eevee eggs is certainly a good thing in my book, but I can see why people who live in Eevee rich environments might be disappointed by getting them in 10k eggs...

[malnpudl]

That sounds really daunting. I know you're way far north where the cold is really intense. Much sympathy!

Do you have a local big-box store? My local Costco store is a fantastic place to go hunting, and they have free wi-fi so I never need to worry about losing the signal. I figure I'll go there and do a couple of walking circuits of the store at least once a week during the ugly weather (though in my case that's just a lot of heavy rain, if we're lucky enough to get it).

I've heard malls are good, but ours locally doesn't have wi-fi and I lose 4G as soon as I walk through the doors. Oh, well.

[malnpudl]

HEE!

[malnpudl]

It's all about what's common in your area, right? I have six fully evolved Eevees, three of which are fully powered up, and I still have 1269 extra Eevee candies just sitting there.

But Charmanders? Nowhere to be found. Same for Dratinis. If I ever hit the all-but-mythical Level 40, I bet I still don't have a Charizard or Dragonite.

I wonder if trading will ever actually, you know, happen... *wistful*

[healingmirth]

Wow, that is a lot of eevee candy! I thought we were in pretty good shape around here, eevee-wise, but even if I transferred all my lowbie flareons and jolteons that never see any action... heck, even if I'd magically never evolved the eevees that I don't currently either train or attack with daily, coming up on level 30, that's still only 650 candies.

[yuuago]

I'm thinking of getting some of those fancy touchscreen gloves, just to make it easier to play. ;)

[yuuago]

Heh, we'll see how it is when it's actually winter. ;) It'll probably be okay.

Ah, part of the problem is that I don't drive, and the nearest bus stop is 20 minutes away. So, either way, it's going to be chilly. But since this is how I'll get to work, I'll probably get some playing in this winter, since I'll be outside no matter if I want to be or not. :P

[ephemera]

Wow, that is a lot of Eevees!

And oh, yes, I want trading to be a thing! I'm giving houseroom to a clutch of Mr Mimes in the hopes that when it does visiting non-Europeans might fancy them.

There was *briefly* a round of Charmanders in one local park, which got me as far as a Charmeleon, but I'm on about 15 candies from there, so some way to do, and the spawns in that park seem to have switched to mostly-Ghastleys, and the river used to have occasional Dratinis, but I haven't seen one in several weeks ;( (But I finally evolved my Vileplume, and the candy boost for Halloween means I'm only 50km of distance from a Venusour)

[sky_queen3]

If they do worldwide/non local trading and not just physical trading, I'll trade a Kangaskhan for one of those Mr. Mines. :D