May 6 – Careful What You Wish For?

Today is a big day in Pokemon Go… though not everything is rosy.

At 6 PM local time, Raid Hour is back since “Remote Raid Passes” are available. Only a part of the problem is solved though with the “Remote Raid Passes”. We can still only raid anywhere on our current screen. It’s nice to be able to raid at a dangerous gym (on the side of a 50 MPH highway. However, there are not too many other people who can get to the same gym. I do not know who these people are, so it is virtually impossible to coordinate with players I do not know. (or at least how to get in contact with). For many other rural players, there are no gyms in their home screen. How fair is that? Until we are able to at least invite other people to raid with us and we can go anywhere we are invited, Raid Hour is not yet fun.

Also of note is that we may soon get coins from daily challenges. The powers that be are starting this in Australia as a test case. There are a few things about this that I am concerned about. First, hopefully these challenges will be things that can be done by ourselves without any need for outside help. Things like “play with your buddy” or “catch a certain type of Pokemon” or “make x nice throws”… not “win a raid” (which depends on where you live and if you have a raid pass) or anything else that requires you to be in a certain spot. We can get up to 5 coins in this way per day, which is helpful. The total is 55 that can be earned in a day… which is good. However, if the “balancing” change occurs from what I have seen, that blows everything out of the water. Control of a gym might be worth only 2 coins per hour (or 1 per 30 minutes) when this change occurs. This makes it so one would have to be in control of a gym for 25(!) hours in order to get max coins… or 2 for 12.5 hours… or 3 for 8 5 hours (pretty much tripling the amount of gyms needed to be in control for the same amount of coins as it is now), on down the line. In many places, especially the more rural they are, there are not enough gyms where anyone can control 3 or more gyms where we could have gym control enough to get the maximum number of coins in a day. In many places it is difficult to get maximum number of coins as it stands. It’s only 5 extra coins, a re-balance is not necessary!