Friday 31st July 2020

Back a thousand years ago, before lockdown, I would go out around town with my friend most evenings to play Pokemon Go.  We’d catch the day’s last raids, take some gyms, then collect Pokeballs by spinning stops and catch pokemon for rares, shinies and stardust.

We had a nice little routine.  We knew all the spots, and would often drive around letting our gotcha devices collect resources or Pokemon.

When lockdown hit, we stopped.  To be fair to Niantic, they quickly introduced changes to the game to allow people to play from home.  Whereas to be effective you really needed to venture out, with the changes it really was possible to play at home.

And so, we’ve not gone out, except on two occasions where we took a longer driving route to my friend’s doctors to pick up a prescription, spinning stops on our gotchas along the way.

After the fun of GoFest last weekend, we were looking forward to the event we’d unlocked for this week:  Dragon week.

It looked like there could be a load of good spawns.  Whilst I’ve managed to trade to get perfect IV Gibles, I still don’t have shinies… and it’s a pokemon I want a few decent ones of.  And with the release of shiny Deino, we were looking forward to actually hunting pokemon again, instead of sitting at home waiting on incense spawns.

So we decided to go out for the start of the event.

This is possibly purely anecdotal but it seems the best chances of finding the rare event spawns seems to be in the first 24 hours of an event.  Likewise, Shinies always seem to be found in the first hour.

So for the first time since early March, we got in the car and headed to a spot in town to await the event.

We’ve got a new decent spot in town where you can reach 6 pokestops whilst parked in your car.  So we went there and lured all the stops… and waited.  And waited.

Sure there were dratinis, as well as starters… but Gibles?  Very, very few.  And Deinos?  None.

Perhaps, we thought, the spot was just proving bad, and so like the good old days we headed out on our driving route around town hunting down Gibles.

There were hardly any.  In fact, it was so bad, we’d not even completed a single laps before we were heading home to just do it with an incense from the comfort of a sofa.We don’t seem to be the only one disappointed with the event. Forums and Reddit were full of legitimate complaints.  Which is all a shame of course, because this was our triumphant return to playing the game the way we did prior to lockdown.

I suppose some things were bound to change for good.

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