On January 19th, a Pokémon GO player posted on Pokémon GO subreddit "The Silph Road", showing off his latest discovery — he had traded 100 Pokémon with a friend and they all turned "Lucky".
"Lucky" is a rare, but much-desired type of buff in the game, which has about a 5% chance of happening during a trade, and gives the Pokémon higher IVs and makes it cost half the Stardust to powerup.
Unsurprisingly, this windfall was not what Niantic wanted to see, and they put trading on pause to investigate:
There are a few things that can increase the rate of getting Lucky Pokémon in a trade, like owning a Pokémon for more than a year, or trading with a "Lucky Friend" — a rare occurrence that guarantees your Pokémon will be lucky, with a 5% chance of happening when you interact with a Best Friend for the first time that day.
There was also a promotion that allowed players to get a 100% chance of a Lucky trade, but the circumstances were limited. It would only happen for Pokémon caught in the first two months of the game's existence, July and August 2016, and the trainer sending the Pokémon must have done 10 or fewer trades. In short, it was aimed at lapsed players who had given up the game after the first frantic months of Pokémon GO's success.
But all of these methods, even combined, do not result in 100 Lucky Pokémon trades, making this occurrence an unintended bug.
Unsurprisingly, players are not pleased at another instance of Niantic taking swift action when the bugs affect their bottom line, but not when the bugs benefit them:
https://twitter.com/DaikiryF/status/1484056746926739456
Does this trading hiatus affect you? How do you hope Niantic will make up for it? Let us know in the comments.
[source reddit.com, via eurogamer.net]
Comments 11
I guess you could call an Egg traded this way a.... Lucky Egg?
...
...
...
I'll see myself out.
LOL at the people who are so aggravated by a brief suspension of trading. I'm so glad I don't play Pokemon. Everyone who does seems so angry and disappointed. ... all the time.
I didn't even know this game was still going.
@Fizza
Unfortunately you can't trade eggs in Pokémon Go.
Niantic limit a lot of what you can do, whilst also not implementing commonly requested features like being able to discard eggs you don't want to hatch.
When they launched the Shadow Pokémon feature, you could trade Shadow Pokémon and could potentially get Lucky Shadow Pokémon. When that happened, purifying them would result in extremely good stats.
So naturally, they patched that out, and also imposed a limitation that you can only special trade one purified Pokémon a day for good measure.
That's Niantic for ya, they take more than they give.
@Burning_Spear well this happens in other games too so i cant blame them. Many issues in (online) games and devs ignore them, an exploit is found that gives players unlimited money/good items and the likes (etc.) and the devs push a update the hour or day after.
Pretty gross that a supposed "family friendly" game is rampant with monetization tactics to keep people playing and paying.
Pretty much never trade in pogo so not a issue for me!
@SuperCharr I've been playing on and off since launch and I've only spent maybe $50 over that 5+ year span. It's really not a cash grab at all compared to other mobile games - especially not when compared to newer Niantic games.
@SuperCharr I buy the community day ticket once a month (79p) and that is it. I don't find that I need to spend money apart from that. I never run out of balls, always do mega raids - sometimes even if I already have the legendary in question - always put Pokemon on gyms if I'm near one and this gives me 50 coins a day, which is more than enough. I think there are just over 700 Pokemon currently in the game, I'm on 660. You really don't need to spend a lot of money. That's my experience anyway. Both Community Days and Battling demand your time, but one is only once a month and the other I dip in and out of as I want.
One of the greatest things that upsets me about modern software development is that bugs that grant a small number of users unfair advantages are top priority, but bugs that disconvenience the majority of users tend to be ignored forever. I can think of countless immensely powerful applications (e.g. spotify, reddit) where this is the case.
I was going to make a joke about this maybe just being the luckiest player in the known universe, but after crunching the numbers, I can't begin to grasp how to even refer to what turn out to be roughly 1-in-10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (that's 130 zeros) odds .
Anyway, though, it's only natural for Niantic to give this bug top priority; bugs that hinder a handful of users are unfortunate, yes, but a bug that "helps" players bypass an online, connected game's rules and natural limitations can quickly and irreversibly upend the entire game's balance.
It sucks, but the asymmetrical logic that this stuff is subject to really is a case of what players want not being the same as what they actually need.
Show Comments
Leave A Comment
Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...