Since I last posted, we've had Adventure week 2018 which meant lots of Kabuto and Omanytes (I snagged one shiny Omantye, who is now a lovely purple Omastar, but am still desperately seeking a shiny Kabuto, who's one of my favourites.) and also 10x XP on spinning "new" Pokestops, which seemed to mean stops you hadn’t spun ever, or in some time that was longer than three months but less than six. That, fortunately, coincided with a random day off work, so I shamelessly took the bus to various random areas of town I never go to, and got my grind on, hitting Level 38, and making about a 20% dent in that over that week. \m/
Thanks to some of the fab people here, I have been really enjoying that the friends / gifts mechanics work long-distance, and I did a raid last week where the "friends bonus" with several local people made a critical difference. That said, our group hasn't settled into a protocol or rhythm for regular trading (vs focusing on trading for regionals, shinies, and other "high value" special trades") - maybe I need to try and find some folks who play near work that I can catch up with over lunch a couple of times a week to do just regular trades for candy and distance with?.
The friends interface badly needs some way to make it more wieldy - I'd love to be able to organise players into useful-to-me-groups, and at a minimum, some way to search for a specific trainer. I hear that they're planning to role up further updates to these mechanics, though, and I can't imagine that they're not hearing the wide-spread complaining about this, and the fact that you can only trade a pokemon once. I do understand why they're trying to put road-blocks in the way of the spoofers and scammers, but you'd think that some kind of "no re-trades for N days" could introduce enough friction without just blocking onward trading entirely (and, frankly, the spoofers can just nip over to the other side of the globe to trade "locally" so this is more of a limit on actual players.)
The Dortmund Safari event at the end of June meant Shiny Roselia, and then, in a PR master-stroke (/irony) a couple of days of Corsola for all across Europe. (A goodly sized group from my local Discord headed to Dortmund, had a really frustrating first day, a good second day, and then came home to what felt like a smack in the face with that "apology" - it sucks to see folks feeling that badly, and it put a dent in our group for the past week.)
It also marked the start of the "Global Challenge" which is currently giving out XP bonuses like candy, and also gave us Shiny Articuno Day, which I'm assuming was a money-spinner par excellence for Niantic, with all the raid passes people were buying (I finally went silver on my Legendary Raids badge, after hitting 20 raids, for a grand total of zero shinies... Folks who headed to central London and really did the heads-down grind hit 40+) I think they managed the event itself pretty well, but the shiny ratio was a disappointment all over - I'm not sure people will be as enthusiastic to buy tons of passes if, as the rumours suggest, we get Zapdos Day after the Chicago event unless they also boost the shiny ratio at least a little.
(Personally, I know I'll be budgeting more exactly for my passes, having got a better sense of the potential pace now, and then buying ahead, so I don't end up rushing to dump/use items to be *able* to buy another pass on the run, as I did this time. Two full mornings of Pokemon-hiking back to back in a heat wave (30C+ each day, and sunny and humid) is also *exhausting*, so here's hoping the weather cools off before we do that again. I'm also pretty sure now that I don't want a more efficient-raiding-focussed group to hang with. Our pace for the day was plenty, and I just can't imagine that the 40+ raids in 3 hours group were having that much fun, and the fun-to-cost ratio makes me wince. Saturday was pushing that for me this time, to be honest.)
Today's community day was also an XP bonanza with the Global Research bonuses running alongside, and introduced a new twist with a special Squirtle-in-sunglasses available only through research encounters, and which could come in shiny variant. Australia/Asia figured out (thank you future people) that is a stop gave a research task that resulted in a shiny sunglasses squirtle for one player, it would do so for all. That gives a real bonus to communities who organise, and share info, and I was pleased to be able to contribute two such stops to the general store of knowledge. There were several such just outside the radius of our usual community day circuit, which I think is why things felt a bit thinner - I did run in to quite a few folks, but more at the start and the end than in the middle.
I snagged 3 "wild" shinies, and 4 with sunglasses. My minor frustration of the day is that I am *one squirtle* away from another shiny sunglasses - I have the research queued up, one with 4/5, one with 3/5 and one with 2/5 - which is the one that is going to be shiny. The encounter Squirtles count, so I could do this, if that last squirtle hadn't turned into a rattata a split second before I was close enough to click on it. I'm holding them in the desperate hope I randomly trip over a squirtle in the wild in the next 24 hours, but after that I'm going to have to let it go, because I want to keep my research streak going more than I want a fifth shiny sunglasses squirtle.
My current stats are 365 caught, 372 seen (+7, 7 gap) with a 150/97/118 split (Articuno being the +1 Kanto: I just need Tauros to complete that chapter of the 'Dex, and I have a trade promised once we level up as friends.) I'm a good way into level 38, about 1/6th of the way from level 39, because the XP bounty on multiple events have been crazy.
no subject
Thanks to some of the fab people here, I have been really enjoying that the friends / gifts mechanics work long-distance, and I did a raid last week where the "friends bonus" with several local people made a critical difference. That said, our group hasn't settled into a protocol or rhythm for regular trading (vs focusing on trading for regionals, shinies, and other "high value" special trades") - maybe I need to try and find some folks who play near work that I can catch up with over lunch a couple of times a week to do just regular trades for candy and distance with?.
The friends interface badly needs some way to make it more wieldy - I'd love to be able to organise players into useful-to-me-groups, and at a minimum, some way to search for a specific trainer. I hear that they're planning to role up further updates to these mechanics, though, and I can't imagine that they're not hearing the wide-spread complaining about this, and the fact that you can only trade a pokemon once. I do understand why they're trying to put road-blocks in the way of the spoofers and scammers, but you'd think that some kind of "no re-trades for N days" could introduce enough friction without just blocking onward trading entirely (and, frankly, the spoofers can just nip over to the other side of the globe to trade "locally" so this is more of a limit on actual players.)
The Dortmund Safari event at the end of June meant Shiny Roselia, and then, in a PR master-stroke (/irony) a couple of days of Corsola for all across Europe. (A goodly sized group from my local Discord headed to Dortmund, had a really frustrating first day, a good second day, and then came home to what felt like a smack in the face with that "apology" - it sucks to see folks feeling that badly, and it put a dent in our group for the past week.)
It also marked the start of the "Global Challenge" which is currently giving out XP bonuses like candy, and also gave us Shiny Articuno Day, which I'm assuming was a money-spinner par excellence for Niantic, with all the raid passes people were buying (I finally went silver on my Legendary Raids badge, after hitting 20 raids, for a grand total of zero shinies... Folks who headed to central London and really did the heads-down grind hit 40+) I think they managed the event itself pretty well, but the shiny ratio was a disappointment all over - I'm not sure people will be as enthusiastic to buy tons of passes if, as the rumours suggest, we get Zapdos Day after the Chicago event unless they also boost the shiny ratio at least a little.
(Personally, I know I'll be budgeting more exactly for my passes, having got a better sense of the potential pace now, and then buying ahead, so I don't end up rushing to dump/use items to be *able* to buy another pass on the run, as I did this time. Two full mornings of Pokemon-hiking back to back in a heat wave (30C+ each day, and sunny and humid) is also *exhausting*, so here's hoping the weather cools off before we do that again. I'm also pretty sure now that I don't want a more efficient-raiding-focussed group to hang with. Our pace for the day was plenty, and I just can't imagine that the 40+ raids in 3 hours group were having that much fun, and the fun-to-cost ratio makes me wince. Saturday was pushing that for me this time, to be honest.)
Today's community day was also an XP bonanza with the Global Research bonuses running alongside, and introduced a new twist with a special Squirtle-in-sunglasses available only through research encounters, and which could come in shiny variant. Australia/Asia figured out (thank you future people) that is a stop gave a research task that resulted in a shiny sunglasses squirtle for one player, it would do so for all. That gives a real bonus to communities who organise, and share info, and I was pleased to be able to contribute two such stops to the general store of knowledge. There were several such just outside the radius of our usual community day circuit, which I think is why things felt a bit thinner - I did run in to quite a few folks, but more at the start and the end than in the middle.
I snagged 3 "wild" shinies, and 4 with sunglasses. My minor frustration of the day is that I am *one squirtle* away from another shiny sunglasses - I have the research queued up, one with 4/5, one with 3/5 and one with 2/5 - which is the one that is going to be shiny. The encounter Squirtles count, so I could do this, if that last squirtle hadn't turned into a rattata a split second before I was close enough to click on it. I'm holding them in the desperate hope I randomly trip over a squirtle in the wild in the next 24 hours, but after that I'm going to have to let it go, because I want to keep my research streak going more than I want a fifth shiny sunglasses squirtle.
My current stats are 365 caught, 372 seen (+7, 7 gap) with a 150/97/118 split (Articuno being the +1 Kanto: I just need Tauros to complete that chapter of the 'Dex, and I have a trade promised once we level up as friends.) I'm a good way into level 38, about 1/6th of the way from level 39, because the XP bounty on multiple events have been crazy.