Pokemon GoFest Day 1 – The Climb #876

Saturday 17^th July 2021

Today was the first day of Go Fest and it just so happened to be the hottest day of the year. For the first half we stayed inside but we ventured out for the latter half and I’m now hot, sweaty, knackered and sore.

Like last year, they did it so that each hour was one of four rotating environments each with their unique pokemon. There was a challenge to collect them all which we focused on the first half of the day.

Of course, there were also shinies and this is where the stress started. PoGo very much trades on FOMO, especially when it comes to shinies. And you’d think that over the course of a day the number of shinies would average out so everyone went home with roughly the same… but you never do. One account can do 8, the other 22.

That imbalance, together with the heat, just made the day miserable for the person getting hardly any shinies. So whilst I was having an OK day – I had set very low expectations for the event – they were having a terrible time and were understandably negative. I get it though. I’ve had days like that. You wait for ages for the event, pay for a ticket and then you have this massive disparity.

I personally didn’t do too bad but there were some shinies I was after that never appeared despite actively chasing them down.

The other complication, and something I will moan about is the fact that Niantic seems to forget there’s a pandemic on. With soaring infections and a lot of people being told to self-isolate, they had a couple of tasks that required people to go out and walk. They’d even organised meetup events which, whether it was legal or not, seemed massively immoral to me.

I get that people need a bit of entertainment, but it seems like Niantic have got bored with the pandemic and said “what the hell”, which massively disadvantages players who are being responsible.

We only went to the local park, and wandered between stops but there was an obvious further disparity in the shiny tally between those that acted responsibly and those who bombed around town in cars mixing and mingling.

So as hard as I tried to have a good event it’s impossible to do so when someone is having a terrible day. It just brought the event down for me, and that’s the fault of Niantic, rather than anyone I was playing with. This is the reason I really only do the events and research these days and leave everything else.

Tomorrow is raid day and I hope for a better day. Hopefully there will be spawns that will compensate for those shinies we missed today.