7 events in 7 months..... more a ramble commentary than anything else
The first 4 months of PoGo there wasn't a single special event. Then came late October, and the Halloween event with the 'spooky' pokiemon.
Since then, there has been a special event per month. November was the Thanksgiving event. December had the release of the gen2 babies, the Holiday event, and that led right into the January New Year event. February was the Pink event, March the Water event, and April the Eggstravaganza.
The very first event came as a total surprise, and it was amazing! Players were super excited, and came out in droves to catch things like Cubone, Meowth, Ghastly, and the like. (For me, I had never seen a Cubone before the event, and I ended up with an evolved Marowak. The pink event was the first time that I had ever seen a Porygon, and that was the last mon I needed for my regional Kanto (#143).
Each subsequent event has been different. Each has had it's good points, and also maybe things that were not as effective.
Recently it has been more of an expectation than an anticipation when it comes to events. More and more, people are only playing for the events. In between, playership is falling off. It has turned into a game where only the absolute diehards, and the cheaters, are active on a daily basis, and everyone else just logs in for the daily bonus unless there is an event going on.
I guess I'm wondering, are the events happening too often? Should they occur less frequently? Are they really a good thing at all?
An example of where an event might not be good for the long haul of the game. Double XP events.
Double XP events induce a ton of gameplay. Players see the opportunity to rapidly gain XP, and thereby increase level. But this can also be bad! Too many players can jump from level 25 all the way to level 30 in a single week. This means that they skip hundreds, maybe thousands, of catches and hatches, not catching valuable Mons while jumping levels. Now you have a level 30 player with nothing but level 25 player Mons, and no stardust. Should PVP get introduced, these players will be left out in the cold, since they can't compete at their level.
I freely admit that I increased almost 500K in XP this last event. It was enough to take me from high level 34 to 1/3 the way to 36. But now that it's over, was it really beneficial to me to evolve all those mons at 4X the XP?
What's next, and are these types of events the new standard for the game?
Answers
One event per month does not seem bad to me at all. This of course taking into consideration that the things that will keep the game alive on the long term are updates to the game, not events.
I think that Niantic is not a good company knowing what their players want/need and making it happen, and I really hope they are not just looking at numbers during events and not looking at the hole perspective/stat of the current game.
I keep seeing tweets and news about their "amazing" numbers, like the last event hatches, or the magikarp numbers that were caught during water event, talking in conferences and articles about their huge player base, etc...
They just look at numbers, and numbers can lie pretty easy, how many of that magikarp were caught by bots? How many eggs hatched by bots?
Gym sytem can be considered the only endgame gameplay, how are gyms at this point? Are they attacked as much as the first months? Or are they just sitting there? What will happen if we don't get new gym system, legendaries, pvp, breeding and other features very soon?
Numbers can lie and the truth is that the game is going back to the months before gen2 release, even worst, just a week of an event does not make an active player base, also taking into consideration that those events are happenning during holidays, so people has a lot more of free time to play, and if the player base is not engaged is just a matter of time they will find better things to do than play pokémon go, even during holidays.
My guess is Niantic has a last chance before this summer, if we don't get something very big by then even the players that have had the patience will just leave, there is no more excuse as we are a small team, or we are working on server loading...A year of life is a pretty long time for any videogame, more than enough to know if it will stay around or just fall into oblivion.
I think a lot of the problems stem from the fact that niantic is essentially a mapping company that made a game. I have heard that they are co-operating heavily with nintendo for the gym update which is a good thing.
A lot of faction based MMO's develop the issue of faction balance and they can at least give the underpopulated faction various boosters and incentives to change factions. But in these cases all the players are playing in the same place (a server). Niantic has massive faction imbalances but they are not consistent across regions and so for instance giving Instinct a global boost may be a disaster in another area I do not know how they can fix this.
