As stated in our recent Shadow Pokemon article, the Gamepress Pokemon Go team has finally bitten the bullet and fully acknowledged the existence and role of Shadow Pokemon in Pokemon Go.
In light of this change, our development team has been hard at work adding new features to Gamepress in order to help us better rate and explain these new unique formes as compared to their "normal" variants, as well as convey them better in our resources such as raid graphs. We still have a few kinks to iron out, but in this article we wanted to discuss where we stand, and what still needs to be dealt with moving forward.
Shadow Pokemon Pages
Over the past week or so, our team has been working on creating pages for every single existing Shadow Pokemon that exists in Pokemon Go. These pages are simple to access as they show up in our normal Pokemon list...
...as well as having special access via a bar on the normal variant of a given Shadow Pokemon's page.
These pages will look surprisingly similar to a Pokemon's main page, but we are striving to customize each one to highlight the differences, especially in PvP where shadows tend to play very differently from their main counterparts Please Note that while all current Shadow Pokemon already have pages made, many of them are currently not yet up to date.
Why Make New Pages?
It may seem a bit odd, but given the way that our database cross-references itself on many different levels, adding Shadow Pokemon as their own entries made the most sense on our end, For example, if we were to speak of a shadow Pokemon in an upcoming article and wanted to reference it, then this....
...makes enough sense, but it's a bit more intuitive to reference them like this:
...and making unique pages makes this a bit less complex. On top of this, while Shadow Pokemon are generally considered superior to non-shadow Pokemon in PvE, in PvP they tend to work very differently as previously mentioned, which should hopefully make this far easier to work with. On top of this, many of you have probably already noticed that we now have Shadow Pokemon showing up on our newly updated raid graphs with custom images. This was the beginning of our experimentation with these new features, and we appreciate those of you who have logged helpdesk tickets reporting issues with it up until now.
Known Issues/Bugs
As previously mentioned; our database references itself on many, many different levels, and adding new pages like this can make things a little confusing at times. As such, we've compiled a list of issues that we're currently aware of and are working to fix:
- The DPS/TDO Spreadsheet may show multiple versions of given Shadow Pokemon. We are currently looking into the best way to consolidate the parts that make up this issue, and should have an answer once we've worked out the issues with these new pages.
- The Purification cost is showing on the normal Pokemon pages, but not the Shadow Pokemon pages. Due to how the DPS/TDO spreadsheet works, we're currently leaving purification costs off of Shadow Pokemon pages. We'll get this fixed once we've got the previous issue fixed.
- The Shadow Pokemon List shows normal Pokemon pages, not Shadow Pokemon pages. This is basically the same issue as above, and will be fixed along-side everything mentioned up until now.
- Shadow Pokemon Pages are showing the wrong images/have the same information as their normal pages/don't have new info. As stated, all Shadow Pokemon have pages, but not all are up to date. The team is working on adding proper ratings to these Pokemon.
- Shadow Pokemon aren't on any of the tier lists. See the previous answer.
- Shadow Pokemon images look strange/don't have red eyes. Datamines have discovered the potential for Shadow Pokemon to have their own main sprites, but for the time being we're just adding a special effect to existing sprites to convey the difference visually. When/if we have official Shadow sprites, they will replace our existing Shadow Pokemon image sets.
This may not be a comprehensive list, but it is what we're aware of currently. If you happen to discover an issue not mentioned on the list, then please note that every page on Gamepress has a button to submit feedback:
Our team actively watches for tickets, and we do our best to resolve them in a timely manner. So if you see something that you feel needs to be brought to our attention, this is the easiest way.
Hopefully the new features brought from this update will be beneficial, but please feel free to let us know in the comments what you think. In the mean time, thank you for your patience as we get our new Shadow Pokemon features up and running!
