Niantic
Pokemon GO's evolution items
There’s “unlucky,” and there’s designing a system so poorly that it
has the potential to break players’ spirits and sap their interest in
the game. For me, that’s been how Pokémon GO has handled its evolution items with the release of Gen 2.
I have already written about this before, back when it was revealed that these new evolution items, which are the only
way to evolve eight Pokémon into new forms, had a drop rate that was
somewhere between 0.3-0.4%. At that point, I was avidly playing during
the launch of Gen 2, and even after a few hundred new spins, I hadn’t
gotten an item. I did manage to get an Up-grade from my first seven day streak in Gen 2, but that was all.
At the time, I thought that the drop percentages seemed low, but I
was willing to put in the work to get streaks and spin a lot of stops
and hope for lucky drops. The items seemed a bit too rare, but perhaps
it was too early to judge.
Fast-forward to today, and boy, am I in a much worse mood.
I just got my third seven day streak in a row, and guess what I got
for the last two? Nothing. No evolution items at all. And in the last
two weeks, spinning a few hundred more PokeStops, guess how many
evolution items I got from those? Again, zero. It has been almost a full
month, I have been playing more than I have at any time since launch,
and what do I have to show for it? Literally just that single Up-grade,
and nothing else.
It is absolutely inexcusable to seemingly promise these evolution
items for something as involved as a seven day streak that allows for a
week of build-up and anticipation, and have there be a significant
chance that players will not get an item anyway. It should absolutely
be a guarantee, and while I know many players have gotten an item every
week, I also know many others who only have one or actually have gotten
zero from multiple streaks. This is not some freak chance that you will
not get a reward, for many people, it happens consistently.
Niantic
Pokemon GO
As for getting items from spins? I don’t really know what’s going on
here. Any time I write a post like this I have people saying how they’ve
gotten 12 items already and I must be doing something wrong. But I am
probably at 500-600 spins since launch without a randomly dropped item,
and I am either the unluckiest person on earth, or something else is
going on here.
My theory? I’ve heard this passed around, but I don’t think there’s
any way to confirm it’s true. Certain PokeStops may be more likely to
give out these items than others. Possibly even specific items. This
would explain that perhaps the 20-30 PokeStops near me, and the 10-12 I
spin all the time may just not be engineered to give out these
items, the way some PokeStops don’t spawn Pokémon on nearby. That would
actually make some amount of sense as to how my luck could be this bad.
These two things combined, streaks having a good chance to give you
nothing at all, and PokeStop randomness being insanely stingy with
rewards, severely diminish my interest in playing this game. At this
rate, even being really, really dedicated, playing the game every day, I
am literally no closer to those seven item-dependent evolutions. Sure,
there’s other stuff to do, but this aspect of the game has been very defeating, making sure that no matter what you get those streaks and spin stops as often as you can and you just…get…nothing.
The solutions for this are easy. Make streaks a guaranteed item. Increase the drop percentages from PokeStops, and let all
stops drop them if that’s a restriction in place right now. But trying
to hunt for these items the last three weeks is the most frustrated I’ve
ever been in Pokémon GO, and I can’t tell if I am just the
unluckiest person on the planet, or if this entire system was poorly
designed and is screwing over a lot of other players as well. From those
I’ve talked to, I think it’s the latter, but let me know your own
experience in the comments.
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