Pokemon Go

After a bit of confusion, it turns out that all tier 5 raids will be Articuno during the 3-hour window on Saturday, and you'll get your 5 free passes one at a time rather than all at once.

For the second anniversary, Pikachu (and Pichu from eggs) will be available in larger numbers for the rest of the month, this time wearing a straw hat and sunglasses. Also, getting the Pikachu Fan medal up to gold will now unlock special gear in the shop.

And then they announce that Celebi is coming soon almost as an afterthought.

Edited by Anura on Jul 5th 2018 at 8:52:18 PM

Oh gosh, will those of us who haven't completed the Mew research still be able to get Mew before they bring in Celebi?

The Special Research interface has multiple slots as of the last big update, so it looks like there's plans to let you work toward both simultaneously.

They're increasing the maximum Pokemon storage to 2000.

Summer Pikachu is live.

Just a quick heads-up: there are reports on Reddit that a research task awarding a shiny glasses Squirtle will be shiny for everyone, so coordinating with your local community to hunt down stops awarding them might be worthwhile.

Curiously, I got both Shiny and non-Shiny Sunglasses Squirtles from what I assume was the task ("Catch Five Squirtles") when I went out and did stuff today, so I guess it's just a heightened chance or something?

Also, there's just something so cool about a Blastoise wearing aviators and I don't know why.

Yeah, the task has a good chance of dropping a shiny. And like I posted, if a task results in a shiny, the stop it came from will give a shiny to everyone. There were tales of communities calling out the "shiny stops" for everyone.

That's pretty much what my raid chat was doing. I think we pinpointed about five of them in our downtown area, plus several errant reports from other, further parts of the city (really surprised anyone was hunting elsewhere, since downtown is the only place with remotely decent density of Pokestops).

Popping lucky eggs on Articuno Day, Squirtle Day, and this morning when I had a bunch of eggs about to hatch got me like 500K experience.

Feels good, man.

Yeah, Lucky Eggs on Articuno Day got me to level 39. Now, for the final slog. Well, thanks to bundles, I have around 25-30 more Lucky Eggs, so we shall see how it goes.

For this weekend, I'm going to deliberately go out on Friday and secure three easy research requests so that I can start hardcore quest clearing on Saturday. Granted, I usually keep at most just one "long-term" request (like if I find a Chansey request), but just going to maximize my request fulfills for Saturday (which is when I'm going to be able to maximize my play).

The hardcore raid group I'm a part of had this super-optimized route that let us hit 24 Articuno raids, which is rather impressive for a smaller city. Got one 76% shiny and a 98% regular for my efforts. Windy weather too, so they were all weather boosted. Random Bagon also spawned and let me claim my double Dratinis. This took me from the start of level 34 to practically level 35 (gained about 1.1 million XP). Then Squirtle Day pushed me well over the top and another 300k into level 35. Got an 80% shiny sunglasses Blastoise and a 98% regular sunglasses Blastoise. All of my regular Squirtle catches were total garbage, so I also evolved the 96% quest one I got during Water Week (special shout-outs to my 7% 1-1-1 pull). As a relatively new account (started in May), I've come to realize that my insane level gain has hit a point well past pointless for the time being. That is, I can't seriously take advantage of any of the perks because my raw life-time accumulation of Stardust is too low.

Oh, and Anura, your high-level Ditto inspired me to start trolling people in gyms with one because I found a weather-boosted level 33 one the other day.

@Kuro: The Yokosuka Safari Zone event will grant a week of bonus stardust for completing the global research challenges, so that'll be a good time to accumulate some.

But the next one is Go Fest, which gives a week of candy (even extra Rare Candy from raids!). If we can complete the research, since one of the days of the challenge is the World Cup final.

Edited by Anura on Jul 10th 2018 at 4:42:24 PM

Well, the US will probably be good for its part, given our comparative disinterest in it. That said, with the number of people I'd expect to be streaming the final, yeah, I can see bandwidth being a problem for players.

On the bright side, it's the second day of the challenge, and we beat the first challenge in its entirety on day one.

Yeah, I know the next Safari will unlock that stuff, but that's not until late August, right? Regardless, I'm holding on to a bunch of Star Pieces, so I'm totally ready for when that rolls around.

Also definitely looking forward to the double candy. I need so much of it for most of my projects, even if it's gonna take a while to have enough dust to utilize it. Should be nice if the legendary birds keep coming back, since I only started soon enough to get one Zapdos and missed Moltres entirely. Whichever of them gets the double candy may find me working on them relatively quickly, so either covers a types that my bench has weak coverage of (low-IV Flareon and Jolteon, with a Raichu that's only half powered up), whereas Articuno is less priority due to me having a level 30 Alolan Ninetails (seriously, she's awesome—when she was still level 20, she took on a level 30 Dragonite 1v1 and won quite handily).

Smeargle, Nincada and Clamperl have all been found in the network traffic, which usually means imminent release.

About time, lol. Glad they seemed to figure out how to make Smeargle and Ninjask work.

Still not sure why they held up the Clamperl line, though.

There's two ways I see them dealing with Clamperl. Yet another stupid random evolution outcome or implement the Deep Sea Tooth/Scale as evo items.

Edited by GreatT on Jul 10th 2018 at 8:48:07 AM

They haven't found Gorebyss, only Huntail. We get both of Nincada's evolutions though.

They've also seen Celebi, Jirachi and Deoxys (all four forms). There's a theory that the reward for beating all 3 research challenges is Mewtwo getting a raid day like Articuno (and presumably the rest of the birds), followed by Deoxys replacing it in EX-raids. It's a pity Celebi didn't come sooner, because then we could have gotten Jirachi on Tanabata.

Edited by Anura on Jul 10th 2018 at 2:56:15 PM

So I got a newish phone that can actually play this game again. So much has changed and I'm still limited in terms of transportation stuff, but research missions are interesting so far.

Oh, hey, Gen 3 stragglers!

For the easy part - given that Deapseatooth and Deepseascale have been in the game for a bit, I think we know they're just going to require item and candy for Huntail and Gorebyss, similar to how one has to level the Gen 2 item users. The menu will probably look similar to what it looks like if you go to evolve Slowpoke and Poliwhirl - it'll show both options, but it'll wash out the one or ones that you don't have the materials for.

The fact that Huntail alone is in the traffic, though, makes me think that either they just forgot to put in Gorebyss and are going to get around to it iminently, or they're going to slowly phase them in by only offering Deepseatooth at first from spins.

Nincada, I'm curious as to how they're going to handle Shedinja - if it were me, I'd have it evolve into a Ninjask and immediately thereafter initiate an encounter with a Shedinja that's functionally similar to a research request encounter (i.e. it won't run) but with identical IVs as the evolved-out Ninjask.

Smeargle, I think is going to be functionally similar to Mew, in that it's just going to have a much larger (but not everything) list of moves that it can have in its two move slots. It's also going to be mostly moot, because pretty much all of the moves that would make Smeargle usable aren't in PoGo.

I'm somewhat surprised that Spinda is still being held back; if the Game Boy and DS could handle its random spot generation, I wonder what's the issue with cell phones?

As for Celebi, Jirachi, and Deoxys... well, the hypothesis that Celebi will be the next special research request is pretty logical; I personally assume that it's going to come in a month or two. Jirachi... I figure that will similarly be special research, but I bet that's much further down the line. As for Deoxys, I suspect that it's going to be the next EX Raid member, but given how spotty getting those passes can be (I still haven't gotten a second, and my first was back during the beta test for those - and yes, I know others who have gotten over a dozen), I'm suspecting that Mewtwo won't be totally cycled out, at least not yet.

Zapdos Day will be on Monday, July 16th, if the global research challenge is completed. Zapdos captured in that time will know Thundershock, which is much better than Charge Beam.

Really, really hoping they have a good Premium Pass box for when that rolls around.

Regardless, looking forward to getting more Zapdos, since my Electric bench is weak and I'm so burned out on Regice right now.

Fun weird thing I noticed: powering up my six Smackdown Tyranitars (of which all finally have Stone Edge now, yay!) has been such a long-term goal for me that I've apparently walked 344 km with my current Larviatar. That's something like 60% or so of my total distance walked.