If the bar is functional Pokemon Go players, Niantic almost cleared it for Go Fest 2024, but damn if that’s not a depressing sentence to write for the umpteenth time.
That’s not to say that last weekend’s Go Fest was terrible — because it wasn’t — but it was unnecessarily expensive for a global event. While this may sound like a red flag, from what I’m seeing, the community really isn’t treating it as such.
So for this edition of Massively on the Go, we’ll talk about what went right at Go Fest 2024, what went wrong, and what players did (or didn’t) do to send a message to Niantic.
Taking the good with the bad
Let’s try to start with some good points. The first would be Ultra Beasts. They are cool and probably one of my favorite parts of Gen 7 outside of introducing regional variants like the Alola Exeggcutor. Having them go non-regional and have a chance to be great was cool, and getting Beast Balls, which practically guarantees capture, was icing on the cake.
In a way, it felt like Go Fest 2022, which also leaned heavily on Ultra Beasts, though not all of them were out at the time and none of them were shiny. What is nice is that they are mostly easy and at least a third of them are also useful. I know most games are about challenging content but POGO’s events are best when they are randomly accessible, ESPECIALLY for raiding and ESPECIALLY now that ranged raiding is a LOT premium part of the game.
We also didn’t have any major game breaking bugs, plus there were plenty of Dragon pokemon for new/returning players who needed them. Longer holidays were convenient, next Saturday quests were appreciated (damn, that should be a function all day throughout the year), and the paid search that once again tried to help with the gloss was appreciated (although I didn’t get the line I wanted).
The roads were a mixed bag. While they offered possible additional highlights of the featured Monday, I’ll bet most players don’t know how to game the system: find or make a loop route and just never complete it so the eggs keep spawning. flow. It’s kind of boring to stay in the same area and the Roads are still busy enough to stop/interrupt randomly, but I appreciated and even took advantage of the gesture.
This is all. That’s really the best I can muster in terms of a positive attitude. It’s worth noting that this isn’t the worst Go Fest by far, but it was a unique and disappointing premium experience.
Stacking premiums
Raids were the talk of this year’s Go Fest, perhaps more so than usual. While there were some flashes discussed, especially Corsola as it is usually region limited, most of the action was raiding, to the point where most of the shots in my zone would not be lured for long periods of time, especially after the first half of the event on Saturday, and they were essentially non-existent on Sunday. My play area is generally raid-heavy and some stops are ignored, but that atmosphere made itself felt stronger than usual, especially since we knew there were Dragons with Community Day moves available.
The fact of the matter is that most ‘featured mounts’ have already had multiple CD move options, and especially for heavy hitters, there are much better options at this point in the game’s life unless we’re talking about Shadows, and even then, the key ‘mon either doesn’t have Shadows (like Haxorus) or takes more advantage of their non-CD move (Dragonite). Shiny Jangmo-o is nice in theory, but the eggs seemed pretty rare, and compared to the raid options, they were basically shiny rare junk.
Now, that alone wouldn’t make the event bad, but it felt especially premium this year. Although the community I was with is filled with big spenders, more than one person I spoke to was concerned that the main quest (which was free) was impossible to complete without premium items. The fact that Go Fest is right also too much focus on premium items/content (basically all-day raids) just left a bad taste in some people’s mouths.
But even the people who wanted to raid had problems. For example, a person had a previous engagement and was unable to make it on Saturday, but wanted to bet on one of the best Ultra Beasts. Outside of this event, it is a ‘mon The raid more. In fact, during the main raid events, it was one of two months that I did more than one raid. However, when our group asked if the UBs were even producing on sunday, we collectively didn’t know and had to read on reddit that they weren’t. I wrote a guide on it and even The couldn’t remember because like everyone else said they are basically nothing compared to Necrozma fusions. Even if they Were around, you’ll struggle to find a group, as I did on Saturday with some Xurkitree raids. And this is one LOT useful for raiding!
Admittedly, there were people who loved Ultra Beasts, even where I was. Across the web, player feedback specifically indicates that collectors were disappointed not only by the limited hours for UBs, but also by the heavy push for Necrozma and her fusions. For us power lovers, it made sense, but for collectors, less so. Without the UBs, I saw one LOT of people raiding Jangmo-o’s 1-star raids, which I found cheesy since it was supposed to spawn in the wild. I mean, yeah, but it felt rarer than Axew or Goomy at past Go Fests, and I saw that they got their shine, but barely seeing Jangmo this year.
To complicate matters for UB, shiny hunters or collectors were also looking for location card backgrounds. They seemed to be in the minority, as Niantic is practically driving away collectors by limiting them to roughly two pokemon of each variant (such as shiny, shadow, shiny shadow) and only releasing three new pokemon families in roughly seven months. I’d bet at this point that there’s a background factor limiting Niantic from simply selling more storage, and it’s probably an issue that touches the core of the game – that either Niantic (as usual) had poor foresight and continues to ruin the present by not properly addressing the past.
While powerful pokemon are fun, so what NO fun is when most of the day’s content comes from a premium event that’s pretty limited and still requires you to drop more money, as Sunday was definitely that: ten passes for six hours of content is nothing even in my local area, at least because I use ranged attackers a lot. Again, outside of the new players, the spawn really doesn’t offer much compared to years past.
The event may have worked for the most part (beyond the still-to-be-worked-out raid crash bugs), but the joke of the day was how Niantic announced a makeover for its dreaded Elite Raid Day. While it was pretty functional in terms of the raids themselves (again, beyond those awesome raid clash bugs…), the build time that was cut ruined a lot of communities, not to mention the post-raid spawns in Elite Raids almost never work. It was all a joke because the locals were raiding TOUGH for Go Fest, proving that Niantic’s efforts to shove Elite Raids down players’ throats come at a real price: people aren’t paying to participate. And again, this is a community that often pays.
Sunday seemed to almost embrace the premiumness of the event. Again, while Go Fest 2022 did quite a few raids, it also had a good number of great quests. Go Fest 2024 didn’t seem to have it to keep the non-strikers on board.
A third of the tasks were essentially limited to raiding (gyms were almost always closed due to raid bosses blocking defenders), another third to hatching eggs, and two to capture. One, however, required you to complete other tasks, which were not only impossible to collect, but also meant that you most likely had to complete a task that required premium content to achieve it.
What really hurt was that most of these rewards weren’t worth the effort. They were like sprinkles on a piece of cake, and like sprinkles, the value really varies from person to person. The fact that the quests weren’t even renewed any further made it feel like Sunday was basically just a day of raiding with no additional raiding permits.
While I tried talking to other players and even non-players during the event, I have to admit that without attacking or knowing that I would have to write this article, I would have gone home after the first hour or so. more. We didn’t get nearly enough passes to keep us entertained for six hours of just raiding, or at least, it didn’t feel that way to me as a daily player. I’m not a streamer or hardcore PvPer, but my collection is pretty strong as far as at least Monday raiding goes, and the PvPers I talked to seemed pretty cool about everything except following that perfect Necrozma. Sunday was raid day and no one seemed to pretend it could be any other way.
However, Niantic knows what it’s doing. Again, my local community is well-connected and savvy to Niantic’s ways, but it also spends deeply. My casual crew couldn’t be bothered to hang out, but they spent on long range raids. And one person I don’t often see complain that the overall event was so heavy on premium items, yet the player still bought some in the webshop to “complete” the event. What this means is that Niantic’s data will most likely show that these types of events make money regardless of what players say.
If all of this has a single point, it’s that some of the non-gamers I know who have friends who play are totally committed to staying non-gamers. I haven’t recommended the game to people since COVID, but someone handed me an account a long time ago. I don’t want to keep a second account, but I do offer it to people from time to time in case they want to hang out with a friend who is getting into the game. So far, there haven’t been any players, and in a way, I’m glad to know that at least some people can clearly see the game behind the game these days – and can muster the strength to stay away.
Massively OP’s Andrew Ross is an admitted Pokemon watcher and ARG expert. No one knows Niantic and Nintendo like him! His Massively on the Go column covers Pokemon Go, as well as other mobile MMOs and augmented reality titles!Advertising
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