Pokémon GO Holidays Event Adds Special Costumes And A Not-Yet-Released Pokémon

Well that Pikachu is adorable!

Really need boxes added to Go, trying to scroll through all my Pokemon when I need to make space takes ages, especially when I get to the pages and pages of special Pikachu. Would be super handy to have the option to move them out of that list into boxes to keep them organised.

Woot woot Vanillite!

This is what you guys talk about? Not the 2 day long community weekend, shiny Celebi event for the movie or the upcoming controversial paywall shiny mew event?

I mean it's news but not the PoGo topic I would have expected to see talked about.

@Heavyarms55, whilst the community weekend was lovely, it wasn't that different from a standard CD so not too much to say there.

As for the shiny Celebi event, it's getting some negative reactions from a wider-than-usual segment of the player base (that is, not just the usual whiners, it seems), so I'm quite frankly happy it's not being covered here. The complaints may have some legitimacy to them, but they're already getting plenty of attention and I for one am always happy to not have to encounter that kind of negativity when I log onto NL. I make enough negativity of my own, and don't need others to help with that.

@Northwind Are you sure it's the Celebi event? I hadn't heard of anyone mad about that. The Mew event and the paywall for it make much more sense.

I Googled it and all I can find are people upset about Jessie and James spawning so rarely - and, I mean they are. But it doesn't say we have a limited time to complete this. So what if it takes a couple days or even a couple weeks?

@Heavyarms55, yeah. From what I've heard, the complaints include:

• A dearth of grass-type spawns (including many people reporting that their 'usual' grass spawns in Sunny weather have disappeared)
• A lack of balloon spawns, with some people reporting that their balloon spawns have disappeared entirely (a known issue during balloon events, which in fact happened to me during the second day of GoFest) and many others reporting that Meowth balloons specifically are rare - some reporting having gone two days without seeing a single one.

The J&J balloons were ostensibly only scheduled to be available for 4 days, and then a fifth day on Christmas Day with enhanced spawn rate - but as the event was originally advertised it would have become impossible to complete if not completed by Christmas Day (ETA: until such time as the J&J balloons reappeared, which could be months) since the Meowth balloons aren't part of the non-event spawn pool. Earlier today Niantic issued a tweet stating that the Meowth balloons will remain around for longer - which'll hopefully put a lot of people's minds at ease. (FULL DISCLOSURE: It did mine.)

Basically, a lot of players felt like they were spinning their wheels, like they were ready to complete the event but couldn't because the things they needed weren't spawning - and this was exacerbated by the fact that many people were unable to complete the Kalos timed questline on account of spawns of the Kalos starters being near-nonexistent in many places. IMHO, it probably would not have been so bad if we weren't just coming off that fiasco.

Check our r/TheSilphRoad on Reddit if you want to see some of the complaints.

@Northwind Sounds like the typical issues people whine about. I can't imagine the balloons being gone forever. The worst case is people have to wait until the next event where they pop up. Annoying, but not like you would lose access to the Celebi, you'd just have to wait.

I'm much more annoyed about the Mew event being locked behind a paywall. If they made it unlockable with cash or coins, I would be okay with it. Even if it were like, 2000 coins, I'd just start saving and worst case, spend less money. But it seems you have so spend real money directly or you just can't play it. That's the kind of stuff I really hate about so-called "free to play" games.

Again, I think it had a lot to do with the fact that we're just coming off the Kalos timed questline - which was not something that could be completed later, and which I've heard several players report was the first timed questline they'd ever failed, simply because the things they needed to complete it were just not there .Heck, even Joe Merrick, aka Serebii, was tweeting for a while that he thought it would be the first-ever he failed to complete, and that reached a lot of people. (FWIW, Mr Merrick is one of the most universally-positive people I know of regarding Pokemon as a broad franchise, and even he has recently taken the rare-for-him step of being critical of the aggressive monetisation and increasing FOMO-events in both PoGO and Pokemon Masters). I think to some extent that created a perception of frustration, of many players feeling like they'd been set up for failure, and that mentality probably spilled over into this questline since they were so close to each other temporally.

Again, that's just speculation on my part. I feel it's fairly reasonable, though.