Anyone Notice The Game Dieing Off?
The Eevee event brought some people out but for the most part I haven't seen anyone out playing or chatting on Discord/Social Media. Is the hype over? or is it back to work?
Answers
My take on this is Yes the hype is over, for now.
IIt's been a very boring month and it's going to be boring for another month unless Niantic introduces changes/new updates. Registeel is terrible and people only want one for their pokedex so no reason to talk about T5 raids. Regirock will be the same. I'm only interested in raiding Kilira, Machamp and T-Tar and for T-Tar i just msg my Ultra friend and we duo it.
Trading is a very interesting feature that brought people together but we don't know anything about it so people are reluctant to trade unless they are throwing away their trash.
Eevee Community Day event was cool but Last Resort is worthless for the eevelutions so that didn't really interest me either.
Gym system sucks so forget that.
So ya there really isn't any reason at all for people to come together on social media to talk. There just isn't enough going on at the moment but when Gen 4 Dragons come out it'll be Rayquaza all over again. People took the entire week off work to raid it 14 hours a day non stop.
As others have mentioned above, I think a lot of this is due to the Regis taking over the legendary raid scene. We're two days away from the 2nd month of Regis ending, and we still have a month to go for Regirock. None of them are very useful, and in my local group, the only time people are interested in doing then is: to level up friendship with a bunch of people at once, because it's at an EX raid location, or because they have a free pass to burn and there isn't a Kirlia or t-tar raid active. It's also around the time when kids are starting up school again, so there's also that.
I'm also of the mindset that things will pick up again (a lot) when Gen 4 drops and we have new Mons to chase and new lvl 5 raids that don't feature dumpster fire quality legendaries.
While I love the concept of 'community days' the last two have been a bit disappointing. I think with a Pokemon like Eevee the community day could have been much more epic but overall it fell flat for me. There also seems to be a consistent stream of tier 5 raids by me, none of which I want to do. I still enjoy the game a lot but the past few months the only thing that is interesting to me is Kirlia raids.
Agreed, upper level raids other than tyrantiar haven't been worth it as the lower tier ones offer great pokemon (Kirlia, Alolan Eggtree, MAchamp) or the others that are somewhat rare to get like that have potential magmar, donphan, porygon and is a good way of getting candy for all of them. Theres a lot more options open unlike other times where tyranitar, EX possible gyms or the tier 5 were all that really registered
Eevee had triple dust and the highest number of possible shinies for any given community day, those reasons had a lot of people in my area out for it.
I agree about it falling flat though. I think Eevee days would have been a great opportunity to reveal Glaceon and Leafeon given their message of "exploring the wonders of evolution". As fun as it was, Niantic really dropped the ball for there to be nothing outside an ordinary community day. I've said it before but I really hope the two days and later evolution window elements stick for the rest of them.
After going full bore since launch, I'm really starting to slow down. The FOMO is corrosive; the iterative shiny rollouts, botched trading implementation, and constant superseding is demoralizing; and frankly, there's nothing worth doing at the moment. I skipped the last two Community Days entirely, and if the next is Chikorita, that one's getting bypassed too. Also picked up tabletop D&D again with friends and creating a new character with backstory has been amazing.
Honestly? It feels great. Transitioning my mindset concerning PoGO from something I *had* to do to something I *can* do has been liberating.
I have seen more and more people playing, or coming back to play. One of my friends started playomg again and I didn’t know he played! He even traded me a Shadow Gengar! I guess it depends on your area. I still get taken down regularly at gyms where I live, and do a raid once in a while with a group. I think they need to stop with the needing a group to raid. That is what it bringing the game down. If they have an unlimited timer to raids, or maybe you can use one party, but once that party dies the raid ends, instead of a timer to make TDO more important, that would be interesting. I only do teir 4 and teir 5 raids because of rewards. I only do teir 2 and 3 for the Pokémon (Kirlia and Machamp). But overall I’ve seen more people play, not less.
I can't remember if it was with you or another member that brought this up a while back, but going to a one-party TDO only system wouldn't always work out either. The most extreme example of this being Blizzard Kyogre, where the only reliable high-TDO options are Blissey, Thunder Kyogre, and Raikou.
A team full of Blissey within the first 300 seconds would only take out ~16% of the boss's HP and you would already be on Blissey #4 or #5, meaning you wouldn't last long enough to solo it. A team full of Thunder Kyogre manages to take out 20% before getting completely wiped. Raikou falls somewhere in the middle but also ultimately gets wiped. This is assuming full teams of maxed out 100%'ers, the realistic scenario would be much worse.
The only thing to truly revive the raid scene would be to have more interesting bosses.
I do not see a decline in interest, some streets were packed with trainers during the last CD. I think most people are aware of which gyms are more likely to be attended for current level 5 raids. It is easier to go to gyms located in the city center, than to arrange a raid party in the more peripheral parts of town.
There’s definitely some T5 (and ex-raid) fatigue in the London and Stockholm areas where I play. I’m personally trying to do solo raids on gyms where I don’t have gold yet. Eevie day could have been area specific. I went to Kew Gardens in London on the Saturday and there must have been 100 people queuing to get in. My Stockholm suburb was also very busy with families playing in the Sunday. Our Stockholm Discord group seems to have quite a few new players but I wonder whether they will get frustrated by the lack of T5 meetups.
What doesn't die out when GARBAGE is being presented in Tier 5 raids for 3 STRAIGHT MONTHS without a break (No sane person can withstand 3 months of Regis in bloody summer), INVESTMENT is pointless (Stardust and rare candy investments can be voided in 3 hours), Scanners are DEAD FISH (So you cannot even try to hunt for wild dragonites) and THE WELL KNOWN FACT that death and destruction will inevitably come to this game is SOLID AND STEEL HARD? Tell me, i'm curious.
But seriously i cannot stay out for more than 3 hours if this shit continues. It has zero redeeming values, i used to go out for 12 hours now i am barely even out of my home for 3 hours.