Go Fest 2020 was Niantic's way of bringing the Go Fest experience to all of us at home during the pandemic. The event was a great success for Niantic raking in around $17.5 million in ticket sales; making it the largest one day profit since 2016. I'm here to talk about my likes and dislikes and to see if the event overall met my expectations set from past Go Fests and the at-home Safari Zones.
What I Liked
Traditional Go Fest had set habitats which held certain species of Pokemon, thus making it easier to hunt down a particular shiny. The rotating hours were Niantic's way of replicating that idea and I was satisfied with how it turned out. Of course, it would have been nice to sit in one spot until you got that shiny Gible but having the five different hours rotating throughout day one was the best they could do for us. I also thought each hour was exciting and worth grinding and I never felt like I was counting down the minutes waiting to get on to the next hour.
The surprise raid bosses for both days were amazing. Most of them had shiny potentials and were some of the most powerful Pokemon in the game. Everyone at my Go Fest gathering was binge raiding the entire weekend and it was a fantastic component to the weekend.
Niantic kept the awesome legendary Pokemon coming with the shadow legendaries on day two. Being able to get extra shadow Zapdos, Moltres, and Articuno with boosted IV's was wonderful. I saw a couple of people get close to perfects and it definitely added some hype to the event. Shadow Mewtwo was incredible with that totally badass lightning animation around its shadow form.
The overall execution of the Rocket Takeover on day two was outstanding. I loved the reduced difficulty of the battles and the doubled component collection. I would love to see all of the Rocket Takeovers be exactly like this in the future.
Niantic was extremely generous with rewards during the event. The two hundred great balls, free remote raid passes, and the ten incense were a godsend for new players who didn't have the time to grind for a couple of weeks leading up to the event.
Niantic has done a great job over the past couple of months by looking out for us players with free bundles and doing whatever else they can to keep us playing the game we love during these hard times.
What I disliked
As much as I loved the things I just spoke about, Go Fest 2020 had some serious issues. We'll start off with the obvious and talk about the crashes we experienced throughout the event. Fire hour day one was almost unplayable and was still having some problems day two. Remote raiding wasn't working for us at all for an hour or two on day one and the friend's list was unavailable if we needed to open gifts. I'm not sure if this was a common issue but I had to restart the app two or three times per hour during each day. With that out of the way, the rest of my criticisms are of things I disliked even if the game was working at one hundred percent.
Going off of vlogs by other content creators from in-person Go Fests and especially the at-home Safari Zone events, the spawn rates seemed to be decreased. Watching vlogs by Billy over at the Trainer Club they had community day volumes of spawns at Safari Zone St. Louis. A majority of the community had an underwhelming number of shiny encounters and my guess is that they lowered the spawn rates to help out their struggling servers. The lack of shinnies was incredibly disappointing especially with us here at Fellowship Games dramatically increasing our Pokemon storage space in preparation for the event. We even considered transferring extra shinnies. We were all expecting around fifty shinnies a day and that was a general consensus from other content creators such as The Trainer Club and JTGily.
Although I was a massive fan of the five-star raid bosses, I was very disappointed with how rare Gible raids were. This was only compounded by Alolan Exeggutor raids popping up constantly which was a slap in the face considering it is a staple of the regular raid pool and was spawning in the wild like crazy. Another major disappointment was the 7km egg pool. It was straight up the same Galarian Pokemon we had already plus the baby Pokemon we had awhile back with Riolu being the only Pokemon worth hatching. I was expecting a spicy 2km egg pool with the Pokemon we had to unlock and Gible. Not being able to hatch Gible was a serious buzzkill. What I found even more frustrating, however, was the Pokemon like Houndour and the other common Pokemon spawning off of the incense. Having these Pokemon take way from our Zangoose and other regional Pokemon was a letdown. I understand that these rare Pokemon needed to be exclusively incense spawns so that only ticket holders had access to them but I really disliked having these other Pokemon spawning off of them. I was dumbfounded with the total lack of Dratini on day two even though we had to earn it. Shiny Dratini was one of the selling points for me personally and having it taken away on day two was a letdown.
Perhaps my biggest complaint about the event was the Rocket Takeover on day two. In my opinion, it pulled our focus into too many directions with us having to sacrifice potential shiny encounters if we wanted to go after shadow Pokemon. I'm a player with a Gotcha and even I thought this was annoying and I found myself wondering how much more annoyed would I have been if I didn't have a way to have to be catching mons in the background. This is especially frustrating considering all of the rare Pokemon we had to unlock were exclusively spawning off of the incense meaning we had to keep staying on the map a priority. Ultimately the low number of shinnies and having the rare Pokemon that we earned exclusive to incenses while being encouraged to battle for powerful shadow Pokemon created the perfect storm of frustration. We just had a Rocket Takeover event and as I said earlier I loved the idea and execution of the Rocket Takeover but it was too much for a Go Fest.
Go Fest 2020 was the first of its kind and Niantic's attempt at bringing an event of this scale to us virtually. I really enjoyed the aspects that I liked but unfortunately really disliked the aspects that I thought were lacking. Having surprise raid bosses and awesome shadow Pokemon was exciting but the chaotic nature of day two really left a bad taste in my mouth. I can forgive the crashes and reduced spawns if the make up day on August 16 truly delivers. I'm hoping that they increase the spawns because the event is only three hours long and that we all get more shiny encounters like we had initially expected.
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