Two item per stop idiocy finished

After two weeks with resources from pokestops cut by a third it's back to normal again. As of now the affected minority of players is no longer discriminated.

Notably Niantic hasn't admitted that anything happened in the first place, so rather obviously they didn't confirm it has been fixed.

Counting on a large community of players to be incapable of noticing patterns, however, is a very dangerous thing to do for a company that relies on a single product for its survival.

With their latest stunt more or less any remnant of trust in Niantic customer transparency has gone out the window. It'll take a very long time, if ever, to regain that kind of lost goodwill.

To make things worse Niantic timed this idiocy with the release of a rip-off game. That market competitor couldn't possibly have created a better marketing event themselves.

Halloween event, package deals

This event comes with the three package deal boxes we've come to be accustomed to since summer.

Special Box:

• 480 coins
• 5 Incense
• 6 Premium raid pass
• 10 Pinab berry

Great Box:

• 780 coins
• 7 Incense
• 4 Super incubator
• 3 Premium raid pass
• 10 Razz berry

Ultra Box:

• 1480 coins
• 12 Incense
• 6 Super incubator
• 6 Lucky egg
• 6 Premium raid pass

These deals have different customers.

The Special Box is definitely for the boss raider. 600 coins' worth of value in raid passes for 480 coins mean's you're getting a good deal even if you chose to trash everything else in the box. The berries have zero value, but a rural area player should value five incense at better than zero value. For large city players incense is only useful for use with PoGo Plus when traveling with slow going mass transport.

The Great Box yields 300 coins' worth of raid passes. Add 600 coins' worth of incubators and you once again have a perfectly valid deal for a box that costs 780 coins. As usual the berries have zero value, and the usefulness of the seven incense depends on your playing environment.

The Ultra Box is more problematic. 600 coins' worth of raid passes and 900 coins' worth of incubators. The box comes at a 1480 coins cost. While it doesn't contain any pointless berries the value of the box is highly dependent on player context.

Six lucky egg -- do you want xp?

12 incense -- where do you live?

Depending on your answer this package deal is iffy at worst and a fantastic deal at best.

For the walking boss raider I'd recommend the Great Box unless you have good use for the incense.

If you plan to power evolve for XP during the event the the Ultra Box is a no brainer. Double candy enables you to evolve pidgeys over and over and over again.

Niantic, taking incompetence to the next level, part three

Eh...

As in, really? Are you for real?


Hello,
We'd love to hear what you think of our customer service. Please take a moment to answer one simple question by clicking either link below:

How would you rate the support you received?

Good, I'm satisfied

Bad, I'm unsatisfied

From a strictly semantic point of view I'm actually unable to respond. An automated canned reply doesn't constitute support, and hence I'm not qualified to rate the support I never received...

New event, Halloween

And another event is upon us.

I'll just refer to Pokemon Go Hub as reference.


October 20 to November 2. That's a pretty brutal stretch. And, yeah, it starts tomorrow.

What's the hype? Let's start with the big news.

We're getting a taste of Gen3. Five new ghost type pokemon to be hunted down. Good mons or not, they're at least new.


Then there's the usual fringe benefits. In this case:

• Buddy distance cut in half
• Double candy for catching pokeomn
• Double candy for hatching eggs
• Double candy from transferring pokemon

Halloween special pikachu, a new hat for your avatar and some kind package deals in the shop containing raid passes and super incubators.

Niantic, taking incompetence to the next level, part two

There is now a level zero...

Let's have a look at their support function:

Your request (25958693) has been updated. To add additional comments, reply to this email.

Blake (Pokémon GO) Oct 18, 4:28 AM IST Hello Trainer, Thanks for writing in. At times you may notice changes to existing features as well as the addition of new features. Please note that the items received at PokéStops may vary. We appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback. We'll be sure to pass it along to the team. Best Regards, Blake Niantic Support

Stenduring Oct 18, 1:42 AM IST Getting a baseline of two items from stops rather than the normal three. Also translates into ten stop streaks awarding four rather than six items. Gyms work as normal.

Whenever you're drowning in support requests concerning the same problem that you currently don't know how to handle, then returning a canned reply as your first contact with the customer is perfectly understandable.

However, no sane company creates an illusion of an escalation process and then blithely proceeds to send out canned replies. That's basically stating that 'sorry, but we can't find our arses in the dark, so you shouldn't expect us to actually read your support requests in the first place'.

Gym battles, autumn weather

As the temperatures drop the sudden influx of casual players become less visible. Most either outright leave the game or at least stay away from anything but legendary boss raids when the weather is bad.

For the high level, gym battling player it means we're back to maintaining some kind of territories again.

Apart from spoofers this game forces hard core players to accept whatever temperatures and cold rain is thrown at you. Those who are unwilling to do so will notice how their presence in gyms is diminished.

For the rest of us we'll see how attacks on gyms decline for two reasons:

• Piss poor weather keeps the casuals indoors to begin with
• If they brave the weather they're less inclined to do so when faced with a well built gym

Obviously high tarffic gyms will go down in the morning as defender motivation has gone down to nothing during the night, but you're more likely to stay in a gym you tore down during daytime provided that you slotted something nasty inside. Nasty currently defined as a big blissey. Big, in turn, starts at 2800 CP or so.

Note that berry feeding a gym works towards this goal Both when you walk past a friendly gym and use it as a trash can for standard berries, and when you defend a prime defender with golden razz berries.

The down side, if you want to see it as such, is that you're less likely to see friendly casuals drop defenders inside a gym you too mere minutes after the fact.

The up side is that you're less likely to see some crap in a friendly gym that you'll find somewhere in that players top five recent catches.

Niantic, taking incompetence to the next level

Pokemon Go displays not a few bugs. That is to be expected. Software tends to do that. However, in this case we're talking incompetence on an epic scale.

Epic scale here defined as the level at which a company normally would have valid reason to fire the culprits. At least if we were talking a decent company with at least a remnant of a quality policy.


Since the inception of boss raids the gym battling part of the game has been riddled by errors. Network error 2 and error 29. They disable you from succesfully attacking a gym, and the former is keyed to the fact that you won the last boss raid taking place at the gym.

We're not exactly talking rocket science when it comes to locating the bug. The same code that prevents you from joining a boss raid you have already won also prevents you from attacking the gym.

Niantic, however, have failed to do so since July.


Any software producer worth their salt tests their code before releasing it to the public. Any good software producer applies regression testing. It's just common sense. Basically it means that you make certain that what already worked before still works after you have made changes to the code. Changes normally meaning making the next release available to the public.

Let's have a look:

• Boss raid lobby allowed you to see everyone inside -- now broken
• Entering a gym didn't hang the game -- now broken
• Spinning a pokestop gave you a baseline of three items -- now (partially) broken
• Network error 2 left your failed attack with undamaged attackers -- now broken

When you hype up a new feature 'within the next few weeks', and have your customers spend extra money to take part of said feature, it usually a good habit to make the distinction between 'few weeks' and 'few months'. We're still waiting for Mewtwo.

When you utterly fail to create an event you're really not supposed to announce new events that have to be postponed just prior to the announced date. It does make you look like you're utterly unqualified to do events in the first place.

When applying balance tweaks to a game it's possible to apply changes that affect the game with less than a factor two to ten. Whenever you double or half an effect it's no longer called tweaking. We're not even going into cutting an effect by ten.

To summarize:

Niantic has access to a sales departement that works wonders. Some of that personel apparently do commersial programming as a hobby.

It shows.

Suicune, the line-up

I'm still getting questions about this raid boss, so here goes.

Suicune is weak against electric and grass type attacks.

If you're basically lacking just about everything, you still have jolteon. Give it Thunder Shock / Thunderbolt or Discharge, and you're ready to go. The main weakness with jolteon is that it's a squishy.


However, you really want an exeggutor. There's a lot of targets in the gyms that hate grass attacks anyway, and a Bullet Seed / Solar Beam exeggutor should be part of your offensive lineup.

Now there's a catch with exeggutor when it comes to taking down suicune. Your target comes with either Extrasensory or Snarl. The attacks are identical apart from typing. Psychic and dark. Snarl will inflict twice the damage that Extrasensory does due to that difference in typing.


Since we in Europe got to see raikou last there's a perfectly valid reason to build a zapdos. Charge Beam / Thunderbolt and start spamming super effective charge attacks.


I personally lead into the fights with my trusty victrebeel. Razor Leaf / Leaf Blade is an outright nasty combination for softening suicune up before it starts spamming charge attacks of its own. Now victrebeel isn't anything I suggest you investing your hardwon stardust into. I just happen to have a perfect IV one I maxed out a long time ago.


Suicune's charge attacks are all water, so they're ineffective against grass but deal neautral damage to electric type pokemon. It shows in staying power when you compare your electric type attackers with your grass type ones.


As usual, if you're short of a full team there's always dragonite as a backup. In this fight it comes with the added bonus that water attacks are ineffective against dragon type pokemon.

Gym battles, on temporality

In an old post I wrote about gym types. While everything about the old combat system is obsolete, the typing of gyms still holds true.

With the new gym system temporality becomes a lot more important than before. Basically just about every gym becomes a remote gym during night time to a lesser or greater degree.


Try to get an idea of at which times the gyms you're primarily interested in are trafficed. An easy way to create a presence and collect cheap coins is to tear it down and assign defenders just when the traffic goes down.

You can also increase that temporal envelope by pushing the gym into the high traffic time as long as you have good defenders available. It's likely to cost you a few golden razzberries to do that.


Don't forget that some events can turn a low traffic gym into a high traffic one. This will almost always coincide with an especially juicy boss raid.


While I agree that a low traffic gym can have just about anything assigned to it, the same is most definitely not true for the high traffic ones. At least not if you make even a small attempt at keeping it for some time.

The combination of maxed out blissey, chansey and snorlax in a gym still works as a deterrent. Add maxed out lapras, vaporeon and steelix to the equation and most rival trainers will refuse to solo it.

When you start berry feeding a high quality gym even pairs or small groups of rival trainers will simply give up the attack. This is especially true when the clock's ticking down to when a legendary boss spawns, after which the gym is raid locked for an hour.

Event finishing, get ready for the daily grind

So, in a couple of hours the equinox event will be history. Now comes the daily grind.

Especially in Europe we're most definitely talking the daily grind since the new doggie is a joke.

So, if we have a look at it from an eurocentric point of view. There's a bloody awful dog for your daily free pass. You're quite honestly better off with a tier four boss raid as soon as you've collected a passable suicune.

It's time to pour out all that stardust you collected unless you've already done so. For those who didn't, well save 205K dust for mewtwo. It'll be released sooner or later, and you're going to max at least one out.

Until then? Pump up another tyranitar unless you already have an ample supply of them. In the longer run the same goes for rhydon in preparation for raikou come November.

Did you get enough chansey and or snorlax to pump up another defender or two? You know my stance on this. Max out your defenders. If nothing else you get extra hit points on them.

A last note. 100 dust per mon caught was perfectly servicable before the event. It's slower, but you probably built most of your mons the hard way. It's not going to change.

Happy grinding.