Last weekend was a celebration of more than just Queen Elizabeth’s 70 years on the throne, as players around the world also marked Pokémon Go Fest 2022 — this year’s weekend event focussed on catching, raiding and hanging out with your local community.
We’ve covered Go Fest for a few years, and the round-up is mostly the same: a fun-filled weekend that is the absolute pinnacle of the events that regularly occur in the game. Last year I wrote the following about Go Fest 2021:
“Niantic is clearly moving in the right direction … come the next one in 2022, you can bet I’ll be eagerly handing over my hard-earned cash.”
So, did Niantic pull it off? And if not, how and where did it fall down compared to last year’s excellent celebration of all things Go?
What happened?
Personally, I had a great time. I met a pillar of our local (and international) Pokémon Go community, grabbed a beer and walked around the park playing a game with my mates. The company was excellent, and that is the main memory that I will take away from this weekend.
As always, Go Fest 2022 was a ticketed event, and this year the cost of entry was £15. You can technically still play for free, but you don’t get any of the good stuff: the quest line, the collection challenges, the ‘free’ items and other bonuses, the rarest and most sought-after Pokémon, or the increased odds of finding an elusive shiny Pokémon.
Sticking with a familiar template, Day One was all about catching Pokémon in the four rotating biomes, trying to snag the two regional monsters not usually available here in the UK locked behind the event’s paywall.
Day Two was focussed on raids, but — and I’ll keep repeating this until I’m Swablu in the face — Niantic’s attempt at communication was simply bloody awful. The event kicked off at 10:00 local time on Sunday, but news of what we were raiding didn’t break until around 8:00 in New Zealand. The poor Kiwis — Niantic’s beta testers, as we affectionately call them — were left in the dark for the cardinal sin of not being from the US.
As it happens, what we were raiding was fairly cool, if less exciting than last year, as it brought out the first Ultra Beast in the game, Nihilego. However, even putting my usual drum of poor communication to one side, it is the rest of the event that has left a sour taste in players’ mouths.
Why does it matter?
The issue here is value for money. Was Go Fest 2022 worth £15? Absolutely not, and fans who were affected by issues this weekend both have a right and are right to be angry.
Go Fest 2022 was very similar to 2021 in some ways – a new Mythic (Shaymin instead of Meloetta) and a bunch of collection challenges to set your sights on – but skipped a lot of other things that made last year special. 2021 had multiple costumed Pikachus (Rockstar, Popstar and Hat) vs just one this year (Gracidea flowers); a new and unique soundtrack (usual music this year); and a bunch of Legendary Pokemon to raid (literally all of the released Legendaries last year vs Kyogre, Groudon and Nihilego on Day 2).
Even at its absolute best, the event felt a little uninspired after the compelling event that Niantic put on last year.
That would have been fine… except that Niantic charged three times as much for the event this year, returning to the old £15 ticket price. Even if you view last year’s price as a one-off discount, you should still expect a similar level of quality, which Niantic failed to deliver. You should also demand what was advertised, and Niantic appears to have failed in that regard too.
Case in point are two major issues: Incense and shiny rates.
The two regional exclusive Pokémon Torkoal and Tropius were kicking about for those who bought into the event and used an in-game item called Incense. However, due to an issue in the game announced at 19:01 on Twitter (an hour after the event had ended here in the UK, along with most of the rest of the world), Pokémon were hanging around on the map after despawing, meaning you’d go to click on your ultra-rare spawn only to see it disappear before your eyes. For some people this happened to every Incense spawn they clicked.
Sadly, this issue persisted into Day Two, when you could still technically get the Incense-locked Pokémon, but a huge chunk of the community missed out on what they had paid for all the same.
Shiny rates, on the other hand, present a slightly different issue — albeit one we have addressed before. Given how low the shiny rates were last year, and despite the usual promise from Niantic that “During event hours, you’ll have an increased chance of encountering a Shiny Pokémon in the wild and when using Incense”, the community was horrified to learn that the odds this year were somehow worse.
A cursory glance at Twitter and Reddit, or conversations in the community all say the same thing: countless players who spent all weekend playing and got zero shinies. For many players, this is the primary motivation for paying up for a Go Fest weekend.
Niantic does not announce the odds of these shinies, so certain corners of the community took it upon themselves to crunch the numbers and investigate whether the odds were truly boosted. The Japanese site 9bd.jp calculated a shiny rate for the Pokémon Unown of just 0.53% (based on a sample size of more than 8600 encounters). Granted that’s a limited sample size, but given that most of the Unowns for the day will have fled as it was affected by the aforementioned bug, it’s likely a fair representation.
Still, the fact that you could spend £15, play for eight hours straight and not see a single shiny is gutting; it’s bad luck when it’s just one person in your community, but when it’s multiple people getting 0-3 shinies in that length of time, that’s not bad luck, that’s bad coding.
How can Niantic make it right?
For some players there was nothing wrong with Go Fest 22. If you don’t care about shinies and you were just there to see your friends, then happy days, but for those who do care and were affected by this weekend’s mishaps, I don’t know if, let alone how, Niantic can fix this.
Several disenfranchised players I know have sworn off ever buying tickets to these events again. Whether they stick to their guns remains to be seen, but the sentiment — and resentment — is certainly strong. Niantic has dealt itself a huge blow here, and what should have been a celebration of the game has left players feeling scammed.
Niantic will no doubt roll out a make-up event — something they do whenever they “forget” to increase shiny odds, or when other events have gone wrong in the past – but I’m not sure that makes up for either the cost of the ticket, or the lost emotional investment that comes with feeling your wasted weekend on a broken event.
The crux of this is that shiny hunting is all based on RNG — you roll the virtual dice and hope for the best – but Niantic needs to be honest about what the odds are and how they’re boosting them. Either tell us the odds up front, like a slot machine, or implement mechanisms to guarantee a certain number of wins.
One possible solution is to give out guaranteed shinies, like with Ditto after the Kanto Tour in February 2021. Perhaps Niantic’s make-up event could run like this: every 100 Pokémon you catch unlocks a random shiny from within the pool. Every 500 Pokémon unlocks a random rarer shiny, like Unown or Kyogre. This would work within the mechanics of the game, it would cost them nothing and would genuinely get people out catching everything they could get their hands on. It’s not a perfect solution, but it would be a damn good start.
Should you buy in to Go Fest 2023?
My ticket this year was generously supplied by Niantic, but I would have probably been just about as happy had I spent the full ticket price. I had a great weekend hanging out with friends, marching up and down, hunting for the Pokémon we were after, and all excitedly sharing in each others’ shiny successes.
However, when you know that a person in your group isn’t having the same amount of fun as everyone else because they are being excluded from the shiny hunt, it does affect the group as a whole. I can’t help but feel bad for those who put in the amount of effort as I did for little to no reward.
So, my feelings are very split on this. There is fun to be had here, but without Niantic taking major steps to improve on the quality of these events, and remedy what happened last weekend, I genuinely don’t see a future where I recommend anyone buys such an overpriced ticket again without certain guarantees in place.
