Hi. I honestly believe that legacy moves/cummunity day ruins pokemon go. Especially for new players.
Here are my reasons:
1. If you started to play today and you missed all those past community events, you can catch thousands of (for example) charizards, venusaurs,.. and even if they'll have 100 IV, your pokemon will suck in comparison with those who recieved that special OP move on community day. Don't get me wrong, i get it, those pokemons are supposed to be rare and stuff. But if you are a new player, it is not only hard to get charizard or venusaur, because of how rare they are and how many candys you need, hence it is even harder to get one with great IV.. But in the end why bother if this pokemon will still suck in comparison to those with legacy moves? I honestly believe this totally ruins the fun of even trying to get these pokemon. So for new player it is a lot harder to even get that pokemon, but in the end reward is a lot, A LOT smaller in some cases 30% DPS less (i'm looking at you metagross)
2. If you own pokemons that didn't have community day it makes no sense to evolve them! For example if you have any of gen 3 starters with great IV, you should probably wait before evolving them, to get that OP move when community day for you pokemon comes.. and don't blind yourself, this day will come! So again, who is hurt the most? New players! As a new player you finnaly hatch your Treecko, thinking finnaly I got a good grass pokemon.., but why evolve it knowing this? It makes no sense and it is a mistake imo.
3. Shiny pokemon are supposed to be rare. If you miss community day, odds that you will get one are small. But odds to get that special move? 0% Isn't it enough for community day to get GUARANTEED special move on evolve, do you really need to make it impossible for everyone else to get it? It should be hard, but not impossible imo. Again for new player geting that charizard or any other pokemon, on evolve you have (in most cases, considering most pokemon have 3 charge moves) 33% chance to get second best charge move, SECOND best. A lot more effort to get it, and reward?..
4. When PVP comes, having those moves might mattter, making it impossible/a lot harder for new players to compete. My point is, new players at least need a chance to get those moves to compete.
5. So why should I even catch pokemon during the month? It makes more sense to just wait for community days and play those 3 hours and do some legendary raids during the month, because everything else you catch during the month either already had community day, meaning your pokemon can only have second best move.., or in other case if that pokemon didn't yet have community day why even bother? When community day for this pokemon comes, same new pokemon will be better, making your past efforts useless.
So that's basically it. Any thoughts?
I agreed, mostly. But then we had a counter example just recently (one I took advantage of) to point 1, so I'm no longer sure.
(I saved a perfect research Gastly, despite there being no tie-in to October research or Halloween, and despite being tempted to go ahead and make it Hex/Shadow Ball, I saved it anyway...and we got Gengar Day. It's now a lovely level 39 L/SB).
The XP difference between evolving NOW every time and waiting until you have 75 evolutions and doing it on a lucky egg adds up fast. I probably lost 2 million by being impatient.
And I wouldn't say I was rewarded for being passive. I was rewarded (against my own expectations) for playing strategically. Like I said, I would have almost entirely agreed with you three weeks ago; now I'm substantially more unsure that we'll never see Frenzy Plant Venusaur go live again.
You should have seen what it was like for older players to evolve anything before there were TM’s. The disappointment of working so long to get a good mon to evolve and enough candy to evolve it, only to get a cr@p move set, was pretty painful.
You should have seen how much effort it took to level up your trainer level for older players. Soooo many pidgy’s (lol).
You should have seen how hard it was to hunt Pokémon’s before they started showing you exactly which Pokestop it was at. We had to search in a grid pattern just to find things that showed up as being somewhere nearby.
New players have it so easy now.
I wouldn't say easy, I'd say it is more fair now... because honestly, what's the reason for your account to acquire levels other than being able to level up your Pokémon? The main effort for players to get stronger is to level yourself while gathering stardust and candies so your Pokémon get stronger in an effortlessly way themselves, since battling is not a way to power them up.
I dislike the trainer level system because the experience curve sounds really unfair, I accept it a bit more now because there are faster ways to level up, but if someone levels up too fast they'll probably not have the means to power up their mons, because having the level doesn't mean you have the other resources needed to have higher level mons. So yeah, I don't care if someone is level 40, I care if their Pokémon are high level as their levels is what matter in this game the most.
And for the other features you mentioned, my opinion is as I stated at the beginning, they make the game more fair, because back then we had maps to tell us where the Pokémon were, even if that method was against the rules (a fact that barely matters because how could Niantic know the users to punish them?) and now we have it in a way that everyone is allowed to have access to.
Evolving into bad movesets was a concept that really bothered me because I knew TMs and HMs existed in other games, so we should've been able to change movesets from the very beginning of the Go, but that's just how bad the game was for quite a while since it released and as for leveling, it is expected that new ways of getting more experience are added to help new people catch up in any online game that has competition inherent to it, that's a way to balance the game by allowing new ppl to be able to battle older players, even if the trainer level alone is not enough without Pokémon level, that just takes one problem away for everyone, and it's okay.
These are mostly opinions, tho, I'm not trying to say everyone should agree with everything I said.
Completely agreed. This is one of the problems that made me literally cannot stand it anymore. Death and destruction comes in an alarming rate and this game's fate is already sealed.
Maybe instead of giving high stat pokemon the worst possible moves in the game and making Heatran on the same level as Rapidash or Gallade on the same level as Primeape they could give them better moves on default or fix the existing bad moves, but at the market perspective this is not the case. Fuck this SHIT.
From another perspective, I am lvl40 & play everyday. Community & raid days are predominantly Saturdays & I cannot play during the small 3 hr window as I work so have missed out big time on not just shinys & exclusive moves but the bonus xp & dust on offer. CD's are a short term money maker for Niantic & not doing slot for the game long term alienating large chunks of their playerbase, new & old. The APAC region problems are just adding to this. Solutions? Extend CD over 2 days & make the new moves TM'able once they're in the game.
A better example would be a kid, they don’t have the freedom to dictate their own schedule...Soccer games and Boy Scout Jamborees take precedence for a while. When they don’t, save your limited free storage space for treecko, bulbasaur is forever gone. If you miss Beldum day, but then you hatch a 10k beldum...May as well be one of the older 10k egg stinkers: Mantine, Skarmory, Sudowoodo.
The game wants to establish a pattern of rare-legacy versions of pokemon to encourage trading, but new player will never have something of value for someone who is level 40.
On the bright side the new xp system is better for new players... but everything else sucks for them.
I wouldn't lose my mind over community days. It sure sucks, but Niantic showed us with Lick Gengar that they can help players missing strong legacy Pokemon. Maybe in a few months they do a kanto starter event with 3hr exclusive raids with the CD moves and increased shiny chance. Do you have a 100% charmander that you need to save? well then save it and wait for an event. The game is all about keeping special Pokemon anyway.
Catching Pokemon is part of a never ending grind for candies, dust and xp. Grind the resources, evolve what is currently useful. If you see potential in a Pokemon and already have a few copies of it, no reason to evolve, just save the candies. You might put them to better use after a balance change or move change or during an event.
Let's not make assumptions about PvP, currently there are bigger issues/worries about the battle system than exclusive moves. All we can do is pray for the best.
It's a game of patience, a new player cannot be able to solo all 3-star raids right away, but eventually he will build the team to get there.
If thats niantic goals, I think this goal is ruining the game long term, because of the reasons stated in the post and it alienates lots of new/old players as one of the comments stated above. Also the feeling of catching your own pokemon versus traded one is just not the same imo.
As for saving 100% charmander example or saving candies etc and waiting for events. I think this is wrong in its core porpuse of playing the game. The game stystem should encourage players to play and not to wait for events and be passive. Therefore evolving whatever pokemon should never be a long term mistake you can't fix.
Yet they had the chutzpah to make Heatran perform as bad as a Rapidash or Ninetales by giving it Fire Blast as its best move (Same as Magmortar which was given Fire Punch.) Then you get the Giratina that gets shadow sneak that makes it worse than a Gastly EVEN in Origin form. And don't talk to me about Gallade because that is just a glorified Primeape and nothing else. And even worse Honchkrow or Staraptor which were given the worst charged move in the game (Brave Bird).
All of these decisions are performed with CHILLING accuracy, but they would rather make the good moves exclusive and all the old pokemon crippled afterwards.
In situations like this, even the Ultimate Hope will become the Ultimate Despair and the Ultimate Despair will be laughing in the deepest pits of hell.
But what else can they do since the community wants frequent events? It's really the only option Niantic has to compensate for the lack of gameplay depth and keep players interested without excessive effort/resources. If they devalue those events the events will lose their whole purpose. The events are not perfect, but they are alright; as long as Niantic is focusing their effort/resources in adding more content (either new features like PvP, trading etc. or new waves of Pokemon) I'm fine with the effortless events.
The game does encourage playing. It's not that it doesn't encourage playing; what you mean is that they reward min-maxing. Which is also fine. I had no beldum and no candy and got 4 fully usable Metagross with 2 of them having decent IVs. Someone who had saved candies and high IVs probably has like 6 Metagross all having decent+ IVs, probably a couple with 95+%. Is it that much of a difference?
Likewise assuming a Charizard exclusive raid (like Gengar) happened tomorrow, saving candies and a perfect charmander would get you 6 charizards, including a perfect one. Then another trainer plays without candies and catches 4 Charizards. Chances are he will catch at least once high IV Charizard that will perform almost identically to your perfect. Chances are he will almost never need 6 Charizards.
On very few occasions, you will have an advantage by having 6 copies. Or having a perfect that hits breakpoints. And that's rewarding min-maxing, which is totally acceptable. But it's in no way "encouraging players to be passive", at least not in my opinion
The passive aspect is there for sure, specially for pokemons with terrible movesets which could become meta changing if they got a good move. Saving my three lucky 90%+ Ralts for an eventual Ralts CD is annoying but not terrible sine Gardevoir is not so relevant today but if given a Fairy fast move that could change (but Gengar day felt like robbery to people who had given up and evolved a high IV Gastly for the Mewtwo month, when the mon is useful it's annoying being afriad to evolve it and miss out). On the other hand we know that any Beldum hatched after CD is basically more candy to power up an Meteor Mash Metagross since that move is so OP. Raid days like the one with Gengar could be a hotfix, but limiting useful moves to short 3 hour periods for a game that relies on the person being free to move around the world may make workers stuck at an office or kids grounded by their moms really pissed if they miss out
I would keep the 3 lucky pokemon regardless of what they were or when their CD is. But other than that, saving an unevolved pokemon that could be useful after moveset changes is fine.. if you are saving 5 of them, you can't argue that Niantic makes you play passively. Noone even guarantees that your pokemon will get a CD, unless it's a starter or pseudo-legendary.
Those that evolved their Gastlys before the event probably did get 4-5 Gengars with decent IVs (since it's a raid catch). Perhaps they were low on gastly candy, but eventually they will power up their Gengar team. No harm done there really
The real problem is actually the 3 hour window, because Niantic wants to promote communities and social groups. If you miss like 30% of events you are supposed to compensate by playing more the days you can attend and finding people to trade. I mean, if you know you're skipping a CD and tell a couple of friends that you would need a trade beforehand, I bet you would get a few exclusive mons. But it's still a nasty system cause some people don't have friends playing and forcing them to join some toxic communities is not fine.
"Those that evolved their Gastlys before the event probably did get 4-5 Gengars with decent IVs (since it's a raid catch)." is kind of a wild guess... some people are unlucky, so there could be old players who didn't get the best out of these events, but yeah, I agree with some of your other statements
1. Trading makes it so you can obtain Pokemon you may have missed from events. Two of my colleagues missed out on Beldum day, but I've got two high CP BP/MM Meta's ready for trade once they're back from their travels. Also, Body Slam's Snorlax return has now established the possibility of re-occurring legacy or CD movesets (slim and unpredictable, but they are capable of bringing them back).
2. I disagree with this point based on what your requirements are. If you need a solid dragon-type attacker and don't have a slew of legendaries, why not evolve your Bagon all the way to Salamence now? It will be useful to you in this context. Or, if you have a couple of Dragonites, you don't need to evolve Bagon right now, and no harm is done waiting until its CD. If you feel inclined to evolve a Pokemon now.
3-5. Notable points, but all are consequential of point #1.
As a rare argument supporting Niantic, CDs mirror exclusive content that numerous other game companies provide to players for dedication. Were you playing during the first global PVP event? Have this exclusive mount! Were you part of the closed beta player base that tested our game? Have this cool armor set! You've been playing our game for three years now? Here's a box of exclusive crafting materials!
Niantic isn't the first and won't be the last company to reward players for their dedication. I humbly regret not braving February winter weather to secure an army of Dragonites...
That is a noteworthy point. Most of my examples usually do stretch over a week, maybe more. Narrow timeframes are (usually) the only deal breaker for myself, likely for you and others too.
Apples to oranges; I missed out on an EX Raid last week that conflicted with my work schedule. --> Papa_Gunz used Pain Split.
WHAAAA!!!! you have something I don’t have Whaaaa!!!! .... Whaaa!!!! it’s slightly better than mine Whaaa!!!! ..... Whaaaa!!!! I can still short man and effectively battle gyms without them Whaaaa!! .... Whaaaa!!!! Most Community Days aren’t Meta relevant anyway and the VAST MAJORITY of players seem to enjoy them Whaaaa!!!! ..... Whaaa!!!! if I hasn’t such an entitled twat maybe someone in my Pokémon community would trade me a few of the hundreds they catch Whaaaa!!!
I find this quite funny. Old players keep complaining about how new players like yourself are handed everything over with very little effort. And new players complain that they are in disadvantage because they missed out a lot of good stuff. People really need to make their mind about their complaints.
Saying that, I agree with many of your points. I don't particularly like the way the game has turned regarding exclusive moves. As you say, the game forces you to play passively. Holding on evolving good IV Pokemon with potential for months/a year until they become useful. It also discourages you from powering up legendary pokemon, cause their shiny variant or a better moveset will come eventually and candy and dust are too limited to power up several iterations of the same mon.
I definitely dislike this game style. I'd like to use and enjoy my pokemon as soon as I get them. Or would love to bring the best new moves to my oldest pokemon. They walked with me for a long time to just kick them off because they don't have potential anymore...
Anyway, I still believe that all exclusive moves will come back eventually. So far Niantic always brought back past pokemon or features for new players to have their shot. In the meantime you have trading.
P.S. I want to point out that I enjoy a lot CD or special raid days. I really support this format of event because they keep the game interesting. What I don't like is those new moves not being available to your old pokemon which forces you to not evolve or powering up your best mons.
Old players are hostages of CD since they are so invested they can't afford to miss out on a new shiny or a meta relevant/OP new move (i had so many friends skip work for Metagross day) while new players feel they have caught something rare and powerful (or at least more powerful than the non legacy variant) with little effort.
Event exclusive rewards are present in any online game, but the main problem with pok go is they are limited to a ridiculouly narrow window of 3 hours, made worse by the fact that you need to be able to move around in the real world to play (not like an mmo that you can play from home). Bad weather, being in a remote location or internet failing that day make it so easy to miss out on a very important reward for any kind of player
I only disagree with your first paragraph. Both old and new players seem to have made up their minds about what to complain, and not related to what you said: IMO, as an old player, I think it's not unfair for new players to be able to catch up, because they should be allowed to compete with older players even with the disadvantage of missing good stuff from the past
Trust me i did but they just replaced those with other despair inducing stuff like OP said and some were still persistent.
* Fleeing rate is 99% regardless of Pokemon level, ball, berry and catch rate and no matter how you are just catching pokemon with the equals of 1 red ball in straight throw
* Cannot change Pokemon moves, if your pokemon gets garbo moves like twister it's GG
* Charged moves are comically bad
* Gyms are unbeatable using conventional methods, especially against gyms with 10 Blisseys. A Blissey takes 1 full Pokemon to kill and 10 is not possible at all costs considering you have 6 Pokemon
* No events for a straight 3 months and the game is left to rot
* Ridiculous speed locks, you cannot play in a car even when now
* Dodge Glitch (Neverending mess)
* Spawns are all Pidgeys, Zubats and Weedles and nothing else, if you see anything else they flee after 1 throw without fail or take 50+ balls then flee
* Pokemon hitboxes are very, and i mean VERY hit or miss. Dragonite and Rapidash are impossibly hard to catch or even AIM at that time and now they are large, easy to catch and don't move much
Yep, my Dragonite got SW/HB then, and forget about taking down a gym of 10 Blisseys, I had trouble even taking 1 down then because Machop were so rare in the place I live. Even after the gym meta was changed, I would instantly give up taking down an opposite gym if the first Mon in line was a Blissey.
I disagree with these opinions a lot - and this is coming from someone who didn't play last winter and missed every community day before Charmander (so I have no Frenzy Plant Venusaur, and the only two dragonites I have are both from dratini hatches and buddy walking after I returned - I didn't have any Dragonites or even dragon types other than a Latias until the Regis came to raids).
First, I'll compare to a game I used to play - RuneScape. In that game, there was also legacy content - tradeable discontinued items. They were purely decorative, but since they were unobtainable otherwise these items were insanely expensive. People who had played when those items were released (and kept even just one of each, which most people would keep one of each legacy item at minimum) would by default have a slew of items worth anywhere from 50M to 2B gold coins each. To put that in perspective, as a max level player in the game the best money-making methods (outside of getting really lucky drops from killing monsters or "merchanting" which basically involved trading constantly with real people for profit) earned you roughly 1M gold per hour (generally farming high level frost dragons for consistent drops). At even reaosnably high levels your income was likely to be closer to 200K per hour. Yet a single blue party hat was worth 2B gold - and it was actually worth (quite a lot) more than that, but the games code had the maximum gold stack at 2B so you couldn't really value it higher (people pretty much had to earn up multiples of the other discontinued items to trade for it). That's roughly 2000 hours for a maxed level player or 10000 hours for a high-level player to earn enough money that an "original" player could get just by selling a legacy item.
In contrast, the effort a new player would have to put in to trade for a community day pokemon is pretty low. On top of that, they have a significantly easier time leveling up, finding good wild pokemon to evolve to reasonable tier 2 or tier 3 counters (or in Machamp's case tier 1), raiding Machamp and Tyranitar, etc...
Sure, they can't get a MM Metagross or a Shadow Ball Mewtwo or Blast Burn Charizard etc... on their own, but they can trade for it and they can also earn plenty of other stuff that performs almost as well.
Also, a boatload of pokemon will NOT get community days. Plenty of Shiny pokemon have been released outside of a CD and it's highly unlikely that Niantic would do a CD on pokemon that already have Shiny versions (unless they do a CD rerun of all CD pokemon on the same day at the 1 year anniversary of CDs, which I think is reasonably possible). It seems very unlikely that there will be a CD for Murkrow for example, so trying to obtain a good one to evolve to Honchkrow is still worth playing for. I also think there are lots of pokemon that won't get community days and also don't have shiny versions yet (they're more likely to just get a shiny version released at some point outside of a CD). Magnemite, Rhyhorn, Tangela, Porygon, Togepi, Electabuzz, and Magmar, all have fairly strong evolutions coming in gen 4 and I don't think it's at all likely that any of these will ever get a CD. It's also very unlikely that anything with only 1 level of evolution will get a community day (excluding Pikachu, because Pikachu). So Arcanine, Exeggutor, Gyarados, ... , RAMPARDOS, all seem unlikely to get a CD. The gen 1 pokemon had their time for a long time, and Rampardos will definitely be worth getting. There's plenty of reason to play - and plenty of reason to buy bag space to store pokemon that are likely to get a CD so you can get a good version (but it's NOT mandatory as you'll likely find at least one or two good pokemon on the community day itself!). It's great to save them if you can and you have them, but I didn't have any good Beldum saved and I still left community day with 8 MM Metagross, of which 2 were level 30 shinies (low IV), 3 were lucky with 96/91/89 IV (levels 34, 35, 33), one was 98 15A (level 24 at catch), one 93 15A (level 34), and one 84 15A (level 34). Sure, weather boost obviously helped, but the point is that you can get plenty of really good pokemon on the CD itself.
For the people that can't play on CD - I agree that it kind of sucks. However if you work weekends, you probably don't work weekdays. Obviously missing CDs is worse, but (at least in the Americas) having raids stop at 6:45pm absolutely sucks when you work until 5:30pm and have an hour commute to get home (average commute time in Toronto). I basically have to wish for my tier 5 raids to be during lunch at one of the 6 nearby gyms if I want a chance to raid them. People get it rough in different ways. Extending community day over more than the 3 hour windows defeats the purpose of getting people to play together though. I'm probably being presumptuous but most I hear about weekend jobs is typically part-time work for younger people, so I'm surprised they don't just swap shifts with someone (e.g. take the morning shift or night shift or something...) as we get the CD announcement nearly a month in advance. Although perhaps I'm wrong about what kinds of jobs these are - would definitely be interested to learn.
Where i live (Argentina) most standard jobs include saturday as a working day too (even sunday for those in retail and restaurants). Some jobs have absolutely no chance of taking "other shift". A friend who is a physician has no chance to leave the hospital for CD no matter how much he wants it, since his patients or surgeries programmed are not a thing you can suddenly stop and take a break. Of course it's an extreme case but also think of little kids who can't play alone or are grounded of forced to have dinner at a relatives house and miss CD hours because of it. Hell i even had a double date arranged by my girlfriend during one of Eevee days and the only thing i could do was think of the shinies i was missing.
Limited event rewards exist in any online game but the extremely narrow time window and the need to be able to freely move around the real world to play is what makes CD so hated by those who can't attend (even if they manage to evolve a mon to get the exclusive move). Actually adding an extra hour to evolve to CD was the best pro consumer move Niantic made, now i can see peoole actually talking and trading during CD. Before it was just a rushfest, specially for hardcore players, so the "playing together" aspect was not really there.
In the short term CD is great for new and old players who can attend but in the long run it creates resenment on those who miss out (which if more new players join or those who left in 2016 come back will be more and more people) so i believe in time some kind of compromise will be reached (like raid days although those are flawed hotfixes too)
Niantic has at least shown that they're willing to make some quality of life changes regarding CD events and the game in general. For instance, for the last few CD events, they gave us the extra hour where the exclusive move could still be learned, giving us time to do appraisals, evos, and trades. CD events are still far from perfect, I'll admit, as players do have issues with them being confined to narrow 3hr windows. If you live in the Asia Pacific Region, then CDs are a hot mess, and that's something Niantic REALLY needs to address. I would be all in favor of extending CD events to an entire weekend (like they did with Eevee CD), making special TMs available from the CD research tasks or something, that allows people to access previous CD moves that they missed, etc. I'm not in favor of removing event-specific moves though (half of which are just novelty moves and aren't event meta-relevant). A lot of online games have event-specific content, which is a huge draw for keeping people actively subscribed/playing. If the playerbase becomes vocal enough in a space where Niantic will actually read it (not this forum), there's a chance things could change though.
To your other points though, there's a multitude of ways in which this game is so much friendlier to newer players compared to the days of old.
- XP is so much easier to earn nowadays with friendship milestones, raids, daily streaks, etc. Gone are the days when players felt the need to mass evolve on a lucky egg ad nauseum in order to reach lvl 40.
- Gyms have a much lower barrier to entry thanks to motivation decay and the one-per-species limit. New players actually have a chance now of taking gyms.
- Raids offer an avenue to obtaining rare Pokemon that is much easier than what we once had. If you wanted a Tyranitar in early 2017, you had to get lucky hatching a Larvitar from an egg, walk it for ages, then evolve and hope it doesn't get iron tail and/or fire blast. Now, if you have people you can raid with, getting a t-tar takes all of a few minutes and some well-aimed throws.
- TMs were a huge QoL improvement when introduced to the game. Newer players will never know the pain of walking a Dratini for hundreds of KMs only to get their 11th Dragonite in a row (yes, this actually happened to me) with steel wing. Or hatching a perfect IV Magikarp, dumping 400 candies to evolve it, only to get twister. Now, if you get a bad move, you can just TM it away.
- Berries. We have an abundance of them at this point. Berries to make catches easier, to make Mons stop moving, to give us extra candies, etc.
- Events. They're pretty much a constant at this point, so we always have something new to go after. This is a stark contrast to the early days of the game, where events took place during major holidays, and that was it.
- Trading. We're at the point now where if you missed out on something, you can acquire it via a trade. You may have to do some searching in some cases to find what you're looking for, but there are always players that have an abundance of extra Mons from raid days and community days. And some of them may very well ask for little in return.
- Items/Rewards. With gifts, gold gym spins, raids, research task rewards, and adventure sync rewards, it's never been easier for players to stock up on items. Gifts and Adventure Sync, especially, are helpful even for rural players who often have it the hardest.
I'll agree that the game is far from perfect and has several issues that need to be addressed. But as far as newer players go, this game has never been friendlier to them.
Most legacy moves, sans gengar, tyrantiar and metagross, largely arent as good as their other mvoes. just look at dragonite, whose best moveset is its currently available one.Dodging and switch outs can also largely impact how PvP works and pokemon like gengar likely wont even be viable there given its frailty.
Legacy moves also do encourage trading, the reason most people arent trading things like legacy omastar, Sc gengar and such is point blank they dont have them they weren't available for very long in the case of omastar, or in the case of gengar, shadow claw and gengar itself wasnt event good until long after it was made legacy, raids were what made gengar good as well as after SC was legecy'd, it was buffed, prior to it being legacy both it and gengar weren't overly good.
The mass availability of these CD moves encouraged trading because we all know when they are coming, where im from most evolve 10-15 CD pokemon with several of the being explicitly for trades after the fact for players who missed the event, and the same for shinies, most average out 6-15 shinies per event
Its only the old legacy moves from before trading was added people dont have many of or arent willing to trade them, few to no players would be willing to trade their fantastic IV SD tyranitar for anything because the only evolved the best of the best for it, but when it came to things like gengar, most evolved 20-30 gastly with trash iv's just for trades after the fact. Theres a massive difference between the old legacy moves and the new legacy moves, you cant put them in the same boat
I started playing right before dratini's event, and im not complaining about not getting legacy moves from before I started, mostly because those moves are only super valuable to people looking out for hard core shortmans or collectors, it you gave a hex gengar and a SC gengar to someone who didnt know much about those moves, they'd never notice the difference in practice, so just stop complaining, if its that big of a problem then just stop playing.
The game isnt perfect, nothing is
Well one friend once asked me hiw did i have so many shinies/good pokemons. Well i play during events because rewards are maximized there while most of the time there is little incentive to play the game once you get all the new pokemon and beat all the raids. The difference is so huge that as you said, evolving a gen3 starter now is stupid, no matter how much you want or like that pokemon.
I would also argue that CD works to make new players feel they caught something rare and powerful, while at the same time holding long time players hostage, since they can't afford to miss a CD to get some meta relevant pokemon or a new shiny to collect (so many friends skipped work for Metagross day), and keep on coming back every month for CD at least. In the short run CD may be a cool idea but in the long run will create more harm than good the way it has been implemented. A special TM to learn the exclusive move (or making the.move avaible again during CD time to all past pokemon of the same.type than the one featured in community day, like Charizard and Typlosion when Blaziken day arrives) would solve the issue while still making those pokemin rare anyways.
The special TM to learn exclusive moves during CD frame time is something that PoGo community has been asking for a long time. I think that it is indeed necessary and it would prevent many of the current drawbacks. You could evolve your 100% pokemon without fear, cause you'd know that you have a chance to teach them any better moves introduced in the future.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but why not just add the Community day move to the movepool of the pokemon permanently afterwards? This way everybody can TM it but you still get rewarded for playing during the CD with 1) A lot of candy 2) Higher shiny chance 3) Bonus rewards like exp and stardust 4) Not having to bet on a 25% cTM chance and most important 5) Being able to enjoy the CD without having to pressure yourself in grinding good IV/tons of candy to get enough of the relevant pokemon
"But but but it's supposed to be exclusive, I am entitled to have it for the hard work I put into the CD grind." This fixation on exclusive stuff is something I never understood in this game. In this game there is hardly any competition, you don't have disadvantages of others having nice things too. In contrast, it's nice when people have good raid counters, makes your raid experience more smooth as well. If you somehow think your exclusive stuff gets devalued by others having it too you might want to work on your mindset.
I agree, that sounds perfectly reasonable. Everyone gets it eventually, and the people who played at the time it was released got to enjoy something special for a time which makes it valuable to them personally, and the people who didnt get it at the time but got it later value t more for the reason of now they have something they wanted for so long, both players value it for different reasons.
I agree theres not many instances where an exclusive move makes a huge difference in the game, yes its nice to have the best options when playing with friends, but its not like the other versions are unusable in most all instances.
I don’t know, as a recently returning player (I played for 2-3 months summer of 2017 but pretty casually, now starting to play a lot more competitively) I’m really enjoying CDs. This has been the third I’ve participated in but I couldn’t really get out on Chikorita day, so more like my second. I missed out on Dragonite, Venusaur, Charizard, etc. but hey that’s life. Maybe I’m not as hardcore but I just enjoy it as it comes and don’t worry so much about what I missed. I get that hardcores have FOMO on everything that might improve their game, it just doesn’t seem like the end of the world to me, or ruin an otherwise really enjoyable game.
Typhlosion is currently my strongest pure fire Pokémon (I have Sky Attack Moltres, and Entei but not the candies to power up him up to the level of the Typhlosion I got yesterday). Maybe they bring back BB for Charizard but until then, 1 DPS because of Ember isn’t going to ruin the game for me. I don’t have all the meta-relevant ‘mon most long-time players do and don’t expect to right away. These last couple CDs have been good opportunities for me and I’ve had fun with them.
30 something comments latter and the crust of the argument is still “ Whaaa you have something slightly better than me and that’s not fair!!!” Sorry but Pokémon Go was designed as a social game and will always have social events... It sucks that real life sometimes gets in the way...But that doesn’t change the fact that most of the exclusive move Pokémon aren’t that much better than the non event ones, and in the few cases that they are it’s easily remedied by, Oh I don’t know, actually going out into your local Pokémon Go Community and making a few friends and doing a few trades or using some creative team building.... My first Community day was Charmander, my first raid was back when Latias was in North America, that’s an awful lot of Legendary and legacy move Pokémon that I missed out on with almost zero effect on my ability to get damage balls or flip gyms and it had ZERO effect on my ability to enjoy the game... STOP focusing on what players that played from the BEGINNING have in their Dex and raid parties and focus on yours!!!!
"I don’t think you can evolve it to get the special move set."
That's right, you can't. The point of the original post was precisely that it sucks.
"But I still got Blast Burn"
Once the 3 hour community day is over, you have an extra hour where evolution still nets you the exclusive attack. You can't see many spawns of the day's hero any longer though.
