Opinion: Weather System is Flawed and Here is Why
Niantic's' weather system in Pogo is a direct response to Draconious Go portal system. In Draconious Go players have the ability to find portals in the wild that allows them to go to other dimensions and have an increased chance of finding certain type monsters. Niantic needed to respond to that introducing weather in Pogo which at first seemed like an amazing idea but there are 3 major flaws to this.
1. Players Cannot Control The Weather: In Draconious Go players have the ability to choose which portal to jump into or not jump into increasing player satisfaction and makes the game not feel like such a grind. In Pogo if you are stuck in a place that has the same weather plan every day... well... have fun with all those Paras.
2. The Weather Mechanic Is Already A Mess: Why on earth you Niantic not have Ghost and Dark types spawn on a clear night?? Instead you just keep getting the same type of Pokémon as you did during the day... I do feel sorry for Trainers in the desert areas who pleaded out to Niantic for Water Pokémon only to be answered with "well you can get water Pokémon if it ever rains there" and "you can get ice or steel type if it ever snows there" Why not have temperature as well? if it goes below 50 degrees ice and steel start spawning? and only in certain regions like desert areas you mark at 50 and Canada you mark like 20? That way it doesn't feel so stagnant like cmon... and I guess fighting, Poison, Normal, Rock and Fairy types just got completely forgotten about. Why is there only Paras during sunny days? It's already causing Trainers to go right back to Draconious in my area...
3. Wild Level 35 Mons and Increase Damage is Destroying the Meta: Usually big updates like these takes trainers straight to the shop and buy incubators. However in my area no one as spent a dime. Reason? lvl 35 mons in the wild! why buy incubators for lvl 20 mons when you can find lvl 35 mons in the wild? and dust is to hard to come by to try to power up a lvl 20 mon, and not only can you find a Rhydon at lvl 35 he also gets a power boost! Which completely throws the others in the trash and since weather never changes in some areas it's the only investment
How do you like or not like the new update? Answers below.
Answers
I absolutely agree that introduction of wild level 35 Mons skewed towards better IVs, is having a negative impact on game play. Easy access to these Mons may raise some enthusiasm in the short-term, but it destroys the motivation for hatching and catching regular Mons. Accumulation of Stardust is also not very relevant anymore. Easy come easy go..
The legendaries at 25 is a pretty big deal. I got 3 today, probably 2 tomorrow. Maybe 1 or 2 more after that. Typically it was taking a week to raise my best of each legendary type to level 30. I might just lose brave bird on these 25s and use the fire blast and solar beam since those moves are always amped up here.
Obtaining legendaries at lev25 is not the biggest of problems because there is still a way to go to get these Mons to lev 35 or even 40, which would require a lot of stardust requiring a real effort (grinding). The boosting of attacks is also fine, as it is a temporary effect and dependent on the weather condition. Aquiring Mons at level 35 is however destroying the need to work on regular Mons normally obtained at much lower levels.
It would have been fair to everyone to just have random weather in the game world instead, or in-game seasons that would change every week. They didn't accurately predict weather here, it said it was rainy but the sky was clear and not a drop of rain.
Also sunny day for my area was mostly Rhyhorn and Vulpix, too bad they didn't spawn a bit closer.
Yeah, though that means some people who never leave their country might not even get to experience all of the stuff the game has to offer. As for whether it's accurate or not, it's just a minor thing, was nice to get rainy weather in-game to catch some stuff that's not usually out during other times, without having to run through actual rain.
Your starting hypothesis is not very well formulated. Weather and Portals to the Rift are quite different concepts and totally unrelated. May Niantic have taken some inspiration from Draconius Go? Indeed, it's plausible that they uncapped the level of the wild pokemon based on the very same feature originally introduced in Draconius.
Other than that, I agree to certain degree that the weather system has its flaws. Niantic need to tweak it. But it's not as bad in my opinion. Night spawns still apply, as I have observed so far. I suppose that biome still applies as well. Weather effects add a lot more diversity to biomes. You are right, some combination of biome and weather don't stack very well. There is where they have to figure out how to balance to make it fair.
I also share your concerns about level 35 in the wild. I agree with you that it looks unbalanced. I caught a level 35 makuhita today. 91% IVs. Sounds broken. But I quite like it. I'm enjoying it so far. Let's see how everything goes on, it's still too soon!
I'm loving the new weather system! That being said, I live in Canada where we get all 4 seasons and pretty frequent/drastic weather changes. Just within the last few hours the in-game weather has been changing rapidly between cloudy and snowy, so I've been out catching a great variety of high CP ice, steel, fighting, poison, and fairy type pokemon. And I know it won't be long before we start getting rainy days and eventually hot and sunny again. I can see how it would be seriously annoying for people who live in places that are hot and sunny year round with little rain though. I agree that having high powered pokemon in the wild decreases the motivation for hatching eggs, but honestly I feel raids already did that. And as for people complaining about how you might not need to grind anymore, I say that's great! I feel for the people who put a lot of time (and God forbid, actual money) into powering up pokemon, but going forward I think I'll have a lot more fun catching strong pokemon in the wild than forcing myself to put up with the slow, tedious, boring and repetitive process of grinding.
Really only if the one thing you care about is a high level mon without being concerned about the not insignificant differences top percentage IVs bring. And it's not like the highly meta relevant mons are much more common anyway, as the OP was fairly vocal about, so does it really make ant tangible difference if people are finding lots of level 35 Paras?
There were leaks about six months ago with screen shots of weather effects. Trainer Tips and others covered that story. Plus, there is no way they could have rolled out the weather change in the short period between the launch of the other game and now. They have been working on this for a long time.
Please check your facts before making these unqualified statements.
I like it. I was disappointed that weather didn't play a role from the beginning. It is unfortunate that day/night doesn't make a difference as well. It would be better to have a 10% attack buff and 10% defense nerf system; but that's getting picky. There are also a few links to work out as far as accuracy goes; but that's to be expected.
1) Weather is almost certainly unrelated to DraGo, as it was in the original game.
2) It's been a little over a day since the launch of the mechanic. Be patient. Also there were plenty of Ghost/Dark spawns that were not weather-boosted in my area last night.
3) Wild L. 35 Pokemon are unnecessary, but it's not the end of the world. If they raise the level cap, would that make it better?
I would agree that this is flawed IF the regular spawning rate of different types of pokemon was altered by the weather.
For example, say you live in Arizona. Water pokemon are relatively rare, but they do spawn around ponds, fountains, rivers, etc. If these regular water type spawns were affected by the sunny weather every day and were replaced with all those paras as you said, then that's bogus. But if they just increased the number of spawn points (as they did in the most recent event) to accomodate the weather types, at least players wouldn't be losing anything that they already had. Sure, it would be dull to have a majority of the days of the year have the same weather, but that's how it is for now.
The only fix is to alter the thresholds to get different weather forecasts to vary things up more for people in more stable climates.
People complain about stardust then complain about catching mons that don't need much stardust. Complaining about the weather is something we do in the UK all the time so no change there, lol. If your weather hasn't changed much yet, give it chance guys, to me it's a neat new feature that has seen a refreshing change of spawns on a non event basis & I'm all for it. Coupled with gen 3, battle parties & increased Pokémon storage, this was definitely one of the better updates :)
Interesting insight. Here's my two cents on the matter:
1) I love the addition of weather conditions to the game. It adds a whole new layer of depth in this game. I like it even more that the weather in the game is a reflection of the weather in actuality. That makes it more realistic. I wouldn't enjoy choosing the kind of weather it should be in the game. If that was the case, we would already have virtually every Gen 3 Pokémon, and that alone would offer little effort and motivation for me to continue playing this game.
2) It is no surprise that the addition of weather came into fruition in the game, considering the weather system debuted in Gen 3 in the main Pokémon games. There's literally no better way to do it than to add it with Gen 3's release. So, Niantic's implementation of Dynamic Weather into PoGo is no coincidence. I don't think it had anything to do with the mechanics of Draconius Go. Also, I think Niantic needed to include the weather system in the game, anyways. Otherwise, how do you explain the functionality of Castform, a Pokémon who is absolutely dependent on the weather system?
3) I'm pretty indifferent with encountering high level Pokémon in the wild. Hypothetically, If I encounter a lvl 35 Abra in the wild with IVs greater than my lvl 30 Alakazam with IVs greater than 90%, great! It saves me stardust, and I'll have an Alakazam with higher IVs and a higher level. I don't think this will always happen, though. It's not exactly a guarantee you'll find a Pokémon affected by weather with high IVs. If the lvl 35 Abra had lower IVs, though, then regardless of a higher level, it's still getting transferred. I favor higher IVs. Plus, isn't this a thing in the main games, anyway? You progress through the storyline, and find Pokémon you already have that are higher levels with higher IVs.
Barrelrider13 The way you worded point number 3 makes it sound like you're under the impression that only the pokemon caught during and related to the current weather pattern gain the power boost to their moves and gain it permanently. If any of these things is an accurate representation of you're assumptions, you are wrong. The power bonuses apply to any pokemon that has a move with a type related to the current weather pattern (regardless of when it was caught) and only so long as that weather pattern is active.
The weather function does nothing to affect the meta.
