If functional is the bar for Pokemon Go players, Niantic almost cleared it for Go Fest 2024, but damn if that isn’t a depressing sentence to write for the umpteenth time.
That isn’t to say that this past weekend’s Go Fest was awful – because it wasn’t – but it was unnecessarily expensive for a global event. While that 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’re cool and probably one of my favorite parts of Gen 7 outside of the introduction of regional variants, like Alola Exeggcutor. Having them be non-regionals and have a chance at being shiny was cool, and getting Beast Balls, which practically guarantees the catch, was icing on the cake.
In a way, it felt like Go Fest 2022, which also relied heavily on Ultra Beasts, though not all of them were out at the time, and none were shiny. What’s nice is that they’re 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’re casually accessible, especially for raiding and especially now that remote raiding is a very premium part of the game.
We also didn’t have any major game-breaking bugs, plus there were lots of Dragon pokemon for new/returning players who needed them. Longer parties were convenient, rotating quests on Saturday were appreciated (heck, this should be an all-day feature all year round), and the paid research that once again tried to help with shinies was appreciated (even though I didn’t get the line I wanted).
Routes were a mixed bag. While they offered potential extra shinies of featured ‘mon, I’d wager most players don’t know to game the system: find or make a loop route and simply never complete it so the spawns keep flowing. It’s kind of boring to stay in the same area, and Routes are still buggy enough to randomly pause/break, but I appreciated and even benefitted from the gesture.
That’s all. That’s truly the best I can muster up in terms staying positive. To note, this is by far not the worst Go Fest, but it was both a paint-by-numbers experience and frustratingly premium.
Stacking premiums
Raids were the main talk of this year’s Go Fest, perhaps more so than usual. While a few shinies were discussed, especially Corsola as it’s usually regionally restricted, the very bulk of the action was raids, to the point that most of the pokestops in my area would go un-lured for long stretches of time, particularly 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 do get ignored, but that atmosphere made itself felt more keenly than usual, particularly since we knew there were Dragons with Community Day moves available.
The fact of the matter is that most of ‘mon featured have had multiple CD move opportunities already, and especially for heavy raiders, there are far better options at this point in the game’s life unless we’re talking Shadows, and even then, the key ‘mon either don’t have Shadows (like Haxorus) or benefit more from their non-CD move (Dragonite). Shiny Jangmo-o is nice in theory, but the spawns seemed quite rare, and compared to the raid options, essentially it was rare shiny garbage.
Now, that alone wouldn’t make the event bad, but it did feel particularly premium this year. Even though the community I was with is filled with big spenders, more than one person I spoke to was perturbed about the lead-up research (which was free) being impossible to complete without premium items. The fact that Go Fest proper also highly focused on premium items/content (basically running raids all day) just left a bad taste in some people’s mouths.
But even people who wanted to raid had issues. For example, one person had a previous engagement and was unable to make it Saturday, but wanted to raid for one of the best Ultra Beasts. Outside of this event, it’s a ‘mon I raid more. In fact, during the lead-up raid events, it was one of two ‘mon I did more than one raid of. However, when our group was asked if the UBs were even spawning 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 I couldn’t remember because, as everyone else also said, they’re basically nothing compared to the Necrozma fusions. Even if they were around, you’d struggle to find a group, as I did on Saturday with a few Xurkitree raids. And that’s a very useful one for raids!
Admittedly, there were people who wanted Ultra Beasts, even where I was. Around the web, player feedback particularly shows collectors were disappointed not only with the limited hours for the UBs but also with the heavy push for Necrozma and its fusions. For those of us who love power, it made sense, but for the collectors, less so. Without the UBs, I saw a lot of people raiding Jangmo-o 1-star raids, which felt scummy to me since it was supposed to be spawning in the wild. I mean, it did, but it felt rarer than Axew or Goomy did at past Go Fests, and I saw that having gotten their shinies but barely seeing Jangmo this year.
To complicate the UB matters, shiny hunters or collectors were looking for the location card backgrounds too. They did seem like the minority, as Niantic is practically running collectors off by limiting them to roughly two pokemon of each variant (such as shiny, shadow, shiny shadow) and releasing only three new pokemon families in roughly seven months. I’d wager at this point that there’s some background factor limiting Niantic from simply selling us more storage, and it’s probably an issue that affects the core of the game – that or Niantic (as usual) had poor foresight and continues to bungle the present by not properly addressing the past.
While powerful pokemon are fun, what’s not fun is when most of the day’s content comes from a premium event that’s quite limited and asks you to still drop even 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 make heavy use of remote raiders. Again, outside of new players, the spawns really don’t offer a lot compared to past years.
The event may have functioned for the most part (beyond the yet-solved raid crash bugs), but the joke of the day was how Niantic announced a makeup for its terrible Elite Raid Day. While it was reasonably functional as far as the raids themselves went (again, beyond those outstanding raid crash bugs…), the prep time being cut broke many communities, not to mention post-raid spawns at Elite Raids almost never work. This was all a joke because the locals were hitting raids hard for Go Fest, proving that Niantic’s attempts to shove Elite Raids down players’ throats comes at a literal price: people not paying to participate. And again, this is a community that often pays.
Sunday seemed to almost embrace the premium-ness of the event. Again, while Go Fest 2022 did push raids quite a bit too, it also had a number of fun shinies, which could be tied to tasks. Go Fest 2024 didn’t feel like it had that to keep non-raiders onboard.
One-third of the tasks were essentially limited to raids (gyms were almost always shut due to raid bosses blocking the defenders), another third to egg hatching, and two to catching. One, however, required you to complete other tasks, which not only were impossible to stack but also meant 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 top of a piece of cake, and much like sprinkles, the value really varies from person to person. The fact that the quests didn’t even renew just further made it feel as if Sunday was basically just raid day without any additional raid passes.
While I tried to talk to other players and even non-players during the event, I must admit that without raiding or knowing that I’d have to write this article, I would have gone home after the first hour or so. We didn’t get nearly enough passes to keep us entertained for six hours of just raiding, or at least, I didn’t feel that way as a daily player. I’m no streamer or hardcore PvPer, but my collection is pretty strong in terms of at least raiding ‘mon, and the PvPers I talked to seemed pretty relaxed about everything except chasing that perfect Necrozma. Sunday was raid day, and no one seemed to even pretend it could be otherwise.
Niantic knows what it’s doing, though. Again, my local community is well plugged in and wise to the ways of Niantic, but it also spends deeply. My casual crew couldn’t be bothered to hang out, but they did spend on remote raids. And one person I don’t often see complained about the overall event being so heavy on premium items, yet the player still bought some on the webstore to “complete” the event. What this means is Niantic’s data most likely show these kinds of events make money despite what players say.
If there’s one silver lining to all this, it’s that some of the non-players I know who have friends who play are fully committed to staying as non-players. I haven’t recommended the game to people since COVID, but someone surrendered an account to me ages ago. I don’t want to maintain 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’s getting into the game. So far, it’s had no takers, and in a way, I’m gratified knowing that at least some people can clearly see the game behind the game these days – and can maintain the strength to stay away.
Massively OP’s Andrew Ross is an admitted Pokemon geek and expert ARG-watcher. Nobody knows Niantic and Nintendo like he does! His Massively on the Go column covers Pokemon Go as well as other mobile MMOs and augmented reality titles!
