Since summer 2016, Pokémon GO has been on the market and delights thousands of fans. Here are 10 things that only players from the early days will remember.
It’s about things like this: Pokémon GO has changed a lot in the last 3 years and various new features have been added. Players are now much more familiar with the game and know what matters.
If you weren’t active in the first months of the game, you probably don’t know most of these things. However, if you have been there since day one, you will remember some of the elements.
1. Pokémon like Entoron or Ultrigaria were faithful companions
The old gym system in Pokémon GO allowed you to train your own gym. You had to battle the Pokémon in the gym for that. The further the CP of your attacker and defender were apart, the more points you got and you could join in.
Since most Pokémon in the gym had about 2500 to 3000 CP, your monsters were best with about 1000-1500 CP. That’s when Pokémon like Entoron, Ultrigaria, or Tangela were used. All Pokémon that have little value today and probably won’t see much use again.
2. Endless fighting in gyms
If you didn’t want to train a gym but wanted to take over a foreign one, you had to plan significantly more time than is required today. Back then, instead of 6, a total of 10 Pokémon could sit in a gym, and the battle was significantly more prolonged.
The Pokémon did not lose motivation either, so you sometimes had to battle the same strong monster three times before it finally got knocked out of the gym. A full gym could easily take 15 minutes of time.
Today, after just a few hours, the hearts of the Pokémon are already at the bottom, and if no one feeds them, you can kick all the Pokémon out in one round.
3. Activate Lucky Egg and evolve Pokémon
In the days of 200,000 XP for a friendship, it’s hard to imagine, but previously the best way to quickly accumulate XP was to evolve Pokémon.
Therefore, you would often throw in a Lucky Egg and mindlessly evolve some Pidgeys and Caterpies for half an hour. In the end, you would receive about 70,000 experience points and be a step closer to leveling up.
By now, evolving for XP is almost worthless. You simply open a few gifts and you already receive significantly more XP, or you complete 4 raids and gain even more experience points along the way.
4. Great joy with rare Pokémon
When Snorlax or Lapras were suddenly nearby, masses of players flocked to the rare monsters. The excitement was immense when the rare Pokémon stayed in the ball.
Sometimes you would sprint to the Pokémon. You never knew when they would suddenly disappear. Or even better: You had no idea where the Pokémon were, as there was no PokéStop tracker yet. So you would just run along every street wildly, hoping for the desired monster.
Now, there are entire events focused on rare Pokémon. There have even been days when sleeping Snorlax were hanging around every corner and Community Days brought hundreds of candies for Pokémon like Dratini or Larvitar.
5. Filling up balls before playing
If you didn’t live in a PokéStop mecca, you constantly had problems with balls. So, before you could really hunt, you had to first do rounds and fill up on balls. You couldn’t actually catch Pokémon during that time; you had to collect balls first.
PokéStops simply gave fewer items back then, and many cities gradually got more and more stops. No wonder there were even events back then where more items came from the stops.
6. The tracking of footprints
This feature comes from the first months of Pokémon GO and was quickly removed. At the beginning, there were 1-3 footprints among the Pokémon in the Nearby list.
The fewer footprints you could see, the closer the Pokémon was supposed to be. At least that was the theory, as it never really worked. Therefore, the idea was quickly discarded.
But that’s exactly why people wandered around for minutes trying to narrow down the area of the sought-after Pokémon. With a bit of luck, they eventually found it.
7. Spending endless useless stardust
In the beginning, nobody knew how strong a Pokémon really was and what you actually needed which monsters for. Even IV was initially unimportant and people leveled up various Pokémon happily.
Even today, there are countless account corpses in your box that you might have leveled up three years ago, but which are actually totally useless or weak. You often wish you had that stardust back.
8. Hoping for the right attacks
When you finally had enough candies and a strong Pokémon to evolve, there was still a reason not to use that Pokémon: It learned the wrong attack.
Back then, there were no TMs, and you had to hope for the right moveset. If it didn’t learn that, it was often useless. One of the biggest hate objects: Gyarados with Hyper Beam, as that made the otherwise strong Pokémon totally useless.
9. Events were not normal, but special
Nowadays, there are more days when events take place than days when there aren’t. In the beginning, it was quite different, as these events were still special and not normality.
The first event didn’t take place until October 2016 for Halloween. For months, there was only the classic catching. After Halloween, there was around an event every month. That was it, and you would be happy when a new event was announced a month later.
10. Setting out at fixed times to get the most out of it
Admittedly, this was more for players who took playing Pokémon GO a bit more seriously from the start. The spawns weren’t very abundant, so you made a fixed route and knew exactly when and where a Pokémon would appear.
So you would set out exactly when the most Pokémon were sitting outside your door to make the most out of a round.
Today, that’s unimaginable, and since the latest spawn change, there’s almost always a Pokémon at every corner. Searching has become much easier.
Do you recognize yourself in some of these points? Do you miss any of it, or is the game better for you now?
