Hi there trainers,
We are fresh off the back of Pokémon GO’s first Wild Area featuring the release of Toxtricity in regular, Dynamax and Gigantamax raids, alternating habitats and the debut of Mighty Pokémon and Safari balls! There was a long lead-up to this event and with so much going on and different things to chase we wanted to share our thoughts on how we played, what we thought of the event and what (if anything) we would like to see different if it is run all over again…
Player opinions
TudorVII writes – “So I purchased the event ticket and the additional hatch ticket, the latter of which I made more use of during the week hatching for Toxel of which I got two. The event itself seemed really good for what I could play, I had plans with non-GO players so was limited in how much I could get out of the event. Was mostly hoping for shiny Toxtricity, caught just over 50 between local, remote and Dynamax raids, but no shiny. On the subject of raids, there were just too many different options and we should have had either the Origin forms or Primals, not both. Wild spawns were good, though a few too many that have been heavily featured recently or had community days. I loved the concept of the Mighty spawns, and never ignored the opportunity to catch one. I would have liked to see a higher spawn rate for them, didn’t see any in the apparently boosted ends to each day.”
Professor Glaw says – “For context: I play in a fairly large city, we had 80+ in the park at any given time. The community ambassador check-in had 200+ last I looked. Overall I thought the event was pretty good. I thought the raids were good, Dialga and Palkia coming back was nice. I heard a lot of people talking about needing to replenish their Dialga and Palkia candies so they could use the special effect moves. I saw a lot of griping online about the moves being hard to get, but I didn’t think it was terrible. It took me 15 raids to get a Palkia with the move, then I got 3 in a row. I went 3 for 5 with Dialga, and 3 for 16 with Palkia. The spawns for me weren’t all that interesting, most had previous Community Days or have been out for a while so pretty much every shiny I got I already had a ton of. The Mighty Pokémon were cool, and an interesting gimmick. Most of them weren’t meta relevant so I honestly saved my GO Safari Balls for shinies lol … Which, I ended up with way more GO Safari Balls than I ever could have used. Overall, 7/10”
MeteorAsh15 shared his view – “I bought all the tickets and I found the overall event sort of underwhelming though there were some major positives as well. Other than completing the Collection Challenges, the spawns felt stale. Mighty Pokémon should have been a little more common, considering the sheer number of Safari Balls obtained. Love the concept of Mighty Pokémon though… got a Hundo Tyrantrum I always wanted. Raids were perhaps the best part, with the Primals and Origin forms being pivotal to the meta. Toxtricity is a fun Pokémon and it was dealt with nicely for the event. So, while the event has its highlights, it didn’t really feel grand. Quality of spawns was perhaps the biggest issue. I’ll give it 6/10”
Kiki_the_tiki had a lot to say on the event – “I played the event with the ticket. Overall I thought the event was pretty good. I played a bit solo but mostly with a small group of friends. I thought the mighty Pokémon were such a fun idea. Definitely brings you back to the summer of 2016, hunting down rare fully evolved spawns. That’s probably what they were going for. I wish they were a bit more common, I live in a heavily metropolitan area and still didn’t even encounter some of them. Would love to see them make a return in future events! The raids were a big one for me. I ended up buying some remote passes and got an extra day of raiding in through the new feature they were testing, allowing us to jump into any raids a friend was in. While it was fun to be able to raid as much as we used to be able to remotely, but made even easier, but my wallet is much happier with the raid cap to be certain. I do think that this new friends list feature can stay though. With the same daily remote raid cap, it may actually get more people playing, as they can raid for exactly what they want without needing to find a group, and it’s amazing for rural players. Definitely a positive QOL update!
While I personally had a great time with the event, I do admit that it felt like a toned down GO fest, with pretty mid wild spawns and a heavy focus on raids. The mighty Pokémon were the real highlight, which I mentioned before. However, I felt that the ticket was fairly essential to really enjoy this aspect of the event, as the access to superfluous GO safari balls made catching the mighty Pokémon much more reasonable. Without it, the chance of catching them were slim to none. Additionally, having access to the GO safari balls for raids was a nice bonus. One of my friends I played the event with did so without the ticket, and while he still had a good time raiding and doing GMAX battles, he was definitely a bit bored with the event before we were, since he was never able to catch any of the mighty Pokémon. GMAX battles were fine, definitely doable but still needed 25+ people to win. I’m sure some were using unoptimized counters but I feel like a fair number were using Excadrill. Definitely needed coordination though, only place we were ever able to win was at our local community meetup, which is wild since, again, I live in an urban area. 7/10 for me, definitely above average – good, nothing insane though and needs some improvements. Also forgot to add that there were so many crashes from joining raids from friends list, and no way to re-encounter the raid without friends list. Lost a frustrating number of passes from that”
Dextrous “thought the event was poor, mighty spawns were nowhere in Bicester, no new shiny released in the wild just in eggs & raids, poor shiny rate considering purchase of ticket with boosted shiny odds, all they were focused on were people splashing out on remote raids with no good offers on, was just a glorified raid event”
Kitty says “Storm Bert put a literal dampener on a lot of my plans for the Wild Area event. With constant rain and horrendous winds, our usual sea front spot was not going to cut it. We did manage two meet ups to take down a Gigantamax Toxtricity each day which made me quite proud of our local community, because it really was just the worst weather to play in! I ended up convincing my husband that he wanted to chauffeur me around while I played for us both (thank you my love!) and we had great fun, even if we couldn’t play in our usual ways. I ended the weekend with 52 shinies and 4 hundos, my husband got 43 shinies. My absolute best catch was a shiny Galarian Zapdos!
My favourite part of the event was the addition of Mighty Pokémon, seeing evolved forms in the wild is always fun, but knowing they can potentially be shiny and have amazing IVs?!! I hope we see them again in future events because they were the best part. I also loved the (hopefully not temporary) raid update that meant you could piggy back on your friends raids without needing an invite. Dangerous for my wallet, but with the weather so bad raiding in person for the bigger raids wasn’t viable, so it was a great alternative!”
EpicBookworm shared her thoughts – “I have my nine-month-old son to look after, so all my play is worked around him. I bought the main ticket and the hatch ticket, and then a friend gifted me the raid ticket, which was very kind. I mostly played solo at home, with my husband helping me out with some raids on his old account. I managed a walk of about 20-30 minutes each day – the local area is okay for stops but not amazing. I played the same way for GO Fest and I would say the experience for the two events was very different, though that was partly down to luck because I did very well with the raid shinies for Wild Area and really poorly for Go Fest. I’m sure I’m echoing others when I say the “raid with” feature in the friends list was by far the best part of the event. It made it easy to get help for Dialga and Palkia and it really felt like a digital version of in-person community raiding – I got to raid alongside a lot of old friends. So big tick for that feature. I think the spawns were a bit lacklustre, both because there were too many Community Day Pokémon in the mix and in terms of actual numbers. It would have been a good time to switch on the Spotlight Hour spawn rates, but maybe it was better for people who could spend more time on the move. I didn’t do a single D-Max or G-Max Toxtricity because I simply didn’t have the numbers. And though I know there were some other players around, I didn’t see the “people are battling” symbol pop up on any of the Power Spots. I really think Niantic’s got to retune the feature to make it more accessible. Finally, the description talked about exploring a wild area, and honestly I don’t think the event felt like much more than a very watered down Sinnoh Tour or GO Fest. If this event types come back it needs something to make it more unique. Some decorations on the map to make things look wild could have been cool. All that said, I had a good time and got quite a few new shinies. I just think the whole thing was missing a bit of “big event day” flair!”
Personal Thoughts
I bought the £11.99 ticket and the £1.99 ticket for additional Safari balls as I was worried about running out but actually I had huge stockpile at the end of each day as mighty spawns were not as common as I had hoped. The raid update of joining from friends list was inspired and is already missed… I attempted a Gigantamax Toxtricity, there were 10 of us but it very quickly became obvious we didn’t stand a chance and abandoned ship. Shout out to my friend Alek I was with on Sunday for his shundo dex entry Poliwrath and my friend Dan for his shiny mighty (shmighty?) Venusaur! I did have bigger hopes for the event but as others have said, it was a little raid heavy and the spawns weren’t that inspiring. I liked the idea in principle and with a couple of tweaks it could be a real highlight on the annual calendar – boost the Mighty pokémon spawn rate and balance it a little more between spawns and raids. Niantic cannot be blamed for the weather but it was absolutely miserable out and put a bit of a dampener (pun intended) on the event so I was not out playing as long as I would normally for a weekend long event.
Online there is a lot of opinion that covers most of the points raised above by myself and others, what do you think Niantic could have done and what did you like about the event? Let us know in the comments below!
