For so many years, so many have been lamenting the dire state of Pokémon Go’s monthly Community Days. What should be events that encourage players to fill local parks for a fun series of challenges have become repetitive, desultory events that can be completed almost without trying. And now they’re doubling in price!
The one thing that could be said for a Community Day was that it was cheap. Each month, developer Niantic would pick a Pokémon that evolves twice, and then have them take over the game on a Saturday or Sunday. (It used to be for six hours; then in June 2022, in an act that seemed only attributable to self-sabotage, it was reduced to just three.) Players are given three stages of tasks to complete, which almost all are based on—or inevitably completed by—catching 15 of the given Pokémon. Along the way, you’re rewarded with more of the same Pokémon to catch, and finally a fully evolved version with a good chance of decent stats. And not much else. But it was only 99c.
There were, ostensibly, storylines involved, the most hand-waving, low-effort nothings from the character my son only calls “Professor Blah-Blah” whose statements, full of waffly language and over-long words, are impenetrable to children, but even these are gone now! Also recently lost is the raid hour that followed the three-hour event, once added as a sop when Niantic mindlessly halved the length of the day. The challenges never change, the rewards are never novel, and really, the only reason anyone takes part at all—the motivation to make it the day you meet up with other players—is because of the increased chances of catching shiny versions of the Pokémon. A successful Community Day is one where you catch at least three shinies, so you can have one of each evolution.
January’s Community Day was revealed as featuring the Gen IX starter Pokémon, Sprigatito, back in December, but what’s proven a surprise is the price of a ticket for January 5’s event. As Eurogamer spotted, it’ll now cost you $1.99 to take part, an increase of 100 percent, for almost nothing new.
The one revealed additional reward for this doubling of price is a single Premium Battle Pass—a ticket that lets you take part in online battles for slightly better rewards than those you’d get from the regular Battle Pass, and something the game just hands out for free all the time anyway. You can get two a day for free right now, for instance. I have nine of them in my inventory right now, and while the in-game store charges the equivalent of a buck to buy one, you’d be daft to ever do that.
It may prove that Niantic has some surprises, new changes to the Community Day format, or other better rewards it’s keeping quiet about, but rather crucially, we don’t know any of that yet, and yet tickets are already being sold for the event at their new price. Come late Saturday, when New Zealand tips over first into Sunday’s event, it’ll all become clear. But given everything that’s happened since the game was improved for covid, I won’t be holding my breath.
I have no data, but it seems very unlikely that Community Days can possibly be anywhere near as popular as they once were, given how much worse they’ve become, and how little effort is put into making them varied or interesting. So presumably this is an attempt to make up for losses, hoping that people desperate for better chances of finding a shiny Sprigatito will pay up anyway. Perhaps a better idea would also be doubling the rewards, the quests, and the fun to match the price?
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