This weekend saw the debut of Gigantamax Pokémon in Pokémon GO, starting with Venusaur, Charizard and Blastoise. Initially I was hyped, the designs are amazing, it is something new in game to grind and work towards. Having something more difficult to do in game that requires strategy? Awesome! As I woke up on Saturday morning to see what social media thought, hype turned to hesitance. It looked like the initial estimates of 10-40 trainers were undersold, with much more than 10 trainers needed, and even with 20+ trainers communities were struggling.
I joined a Campfire group which was 14 marked as attending in my local community, and shared the information on when to meet in a variety of other local group chats I am in that don’t use Campfire, hoping we could recruit more. So how did it turn out? In one word: Disastrous.
It might seem a dramatic word to use, but of those 14 who had marked themselves as attending, only 8 people turned up. That’s the first problem. It started to pour with rain (thanks UK weather!) just as it got towards the meet up time which may have put some folks off. We decided to give a Gigantamax Battle a go anyway, and with varying reports on which is more difficult, Charizard seemed to be the favoured pick by the actual organiser of the meet up, so I went along with it. Charizard has been noted by some as the easiest (ZoeTwoDots and her community), whereas others said it was the most difficult due to the high attack stat.
With our small group we wondered if someone of the 14 attending were ‘air support’ types who might suddenly appear once we started, so we headed to Charizard not feeling particularly hopeful. And we were right not to be. Some technical issues meant trainers struggled to get in the Max Battle, and then… it became clear within seconds of the fight starting that we were destined for failure.
We had zero successful attempts, and ultimately gave up fairly quickly once it became clear we didn’t have enough people, and were not prepared for battle. I would have loved to have added just one of each of these G-Max Pokémon to my collection, but alas it was not meant to be.
So, what went wrong? I’m going to split this into two parts.
Firstly, I think the difficulty of these Max Battles is simply way too high. Seeing groups of 40 fail on twitter is absolutely wild, and our group of 10 barely made a dent in damaging Charizard at all. Most raids these days can be done by 5 well prepared trainers, these six-star Max Battles still need many more than that. Trying to get a group of 10 people together can be tricky at the best of times, but 20+? For many areas that is absolutely impossible.
I had hoped when I initially saw the lobby for 4 trainers, that potentially these harder Max Battles would require strategy and planning, and might take some time, but be do-able with smaller groups. In the main series games Dynamax and Gigantamax Battles are done in raid dens of 4 trainers, and need major planning and specific moves, abilities and more. Strategy is key, and there was an opportunity for Max Battles in GO to be similar, but the difficulty leap from 3-star to 6-star is enormous.
I would love to see some tweaks done to these Max Battles to make them more friendly for rural communities, and smaller groups, because expecting groups of 20 to get together and still struggle, is going to put people off Gigantamax in a major way.
I also think that potentially Gigantamax has released too soon, we’ve had two three-star Dynamax raids, and that’s it. Beldum and Falinks, and arguably Falinks is just a dex-entry as it has no use in PvE. That difficulty jump was too steep, too quick, and didn’t give people much time to invest in D-Max Pokémon that they felt were worth investing in. No one wants to be forced to power up a 10-10-10 Blastoise because it’s all they have available, knowing they still might fail. Stardust is a valuable resource, and Max Particles have a very strict daily limit on them which means levelling up your moves is even more expensive.
I know the easy ask is making these Max Battles remote-able, but I cannot see Niantic giving us that option. If they would, it would help!
Secondly, there is a portion of blame to put on us, the players. Don’t leap down my throat just yet, here me out!
I am semi-rural, so I’d made a trip to the nearest town to me, and we still struggled to get a group together. The group chat for the next town over also reported that no one was raiding. Dynamax hasn’t exactly taken the community by storm, and as such people haven’t invested in any D-Max Pokémon to take into these raids, so why try? The towns near me are pretty active when it comes to big events and raids, but it just wasn’t happening in the same way for these.
The other thing that I think is impacting all communities, is that we’ve all gotten a little lazy, and massively under-estimated what we needed to get these Max Battles done. We’re used to tapping away on raids and not even really needing to look to get them done, so suddenly needing to invest in a whole new set of Pokémon from a new system didn’t really click for people. With fairly short notice for these Gigantamax Battles, suddenly there wasn’t enough time to invest in your D-Max Pokémon to be prepared. People haven’t really been that interested in doing those one-star battles, which were an absolute must to prepare for the higher level battles.
Powering up your Pokémon to higher levels wasn’t enough, you needed to have Max Guard and Max Spirit unlocked, and ideally levelled up too. If you didn’t want to buy Max Particles, you didn’t have a real chance to upgrade your teams.
We’ve become complacent, not realising that we needed to put effort and resources into a new set of Pokémon left us unprepared. Too often we all go into raids with the recommended and are successful, this was clear from the people I attempted (and failed) my own Max Battle with. In my group of 4 I saw multiple Grookey and Wooloo. Clearly those sort of unevolved Pokémon weren’t going to help in such a hard battle, but people don’t want to invest in D-Max Pokémon.
While I absolutely think we needed a smoother learning curve for Max Battles, with more 3-star to get us prepared and better armed for these six-star, we do also have to put the work in ourselves to actually work on our teams, and invest in our Pokémon.
Gone are the days of just tapping and being successful with the Pokémon we powered up years ago, now is the time to re-learn how to play again. We have to grind something new, we have to invest, and we have to improve our D-Max Pokémon, and we have to work together. We lost a lot of how to work together in-person with the pandemic, and have never quite gotten it back, but if we want to be successful in Gigantamax Battles, we are going to have to find those communities again and revive them.
Next weekend is Gigantamax Gengar, and I don’t know if I can see my community trying again so soon to be quite honest. I hope we do, but I won’t be holding my breath.
Let us know on social media how your local community faired! Hopefully better than mine. I at least got a lucky trade in with a trainer friend I don’t see often, thanks for the shiny costume Spheal Metin!
