The Community Day events in Pokémon GO will only be active for 3 hours starting in April. Niantic stated that players wanted this change. The Game Director explained the decision in more detail on Twitter, and the community isn’t quite buying the reasons.
This is the current situation in Pokémon GO:
- On March 23, Niantic announced the Community Day in April
- They stated that they are reverting the duration from 6 hours back to 3 hours
- In an interview, Niantic’s Game Director, Michael Steranka, explained: The C-Days are getting shorter again because trainers are asking for it
- This raised many questions in the community, which is why Michael Steranka addressed it again on Twitter and revealed more details about the decision
- Players say they simply can’t believe the reasoning
We show you here what new statements there are from the developers and what discussions this leads to.
What led to the shorter C-Days?
What you need to know: Before the COVID-19 bonuses, Community Days in Pokémon GO already lasted only 3 hours. At the beginning of the pandemic, the event time was doubled. Players who started with Pokémon GO in the last 2 years do not know it differently.
These are the new details: After the interview with Michael Steranka was published, he explained, “One of the reasons that prompted us to reassess the format of Community Day was the requests from trainers to revert to three hours” and “less than 5% of players participate in a Community Day for longer than 3 hours”, trainers wanted more information on this. On Twitter, user JreSeawolf, who is well known in the community of TheSilphroad, speaks to Niantic and directly to Steranka as the voice of the community.
JreSeawolf thoroughly addresses all the mentioned concerns and states, among other things, that the “5%” data is being misinterpreted. “The 5% are probably the players who only want to play for 3 hours” (via Twitter.com). He asks the Pokémon GO team to reconsider this decision.
In response, Michael Steranka explains in several tweets:
Hey @JreSeawolf – thanks for the day and for the honest feedback on this article. There were a few things I mentioned in this interview that unfortunately did not make it into the final story, but I’m happy to share them here to provide full context:
One of the reasons that prompted us to rethink the format of Community Day was the request of the trainers to shorten it to 3 hours. After we received this feedback, we looked at our data and found that less than 5 percent of players participated in Community Days for longer than 3 hours.
This number drops to less than 2 percent for sessions of 4 hours or more. Furthermore, we were shocked when we compared the 6-hour Community Days with the 3-hour Community Day Classic and found the participations to be almost identical.
It became clear that while it is less convenient, if announced in time, trainers can plan for the 3-hour Community Days and participate just as often as with the 6-hour ones.
We really want to make this event as good as possible, and we are very much looking forward to creating a more focused experience where trainers can meet in the real world while still earning the same amount of rewards in half the time.
This is a test to see how things develop, but we hope that trainers will agree that these changes are for the best when they participate in the upcoming Community Day in April.
Also, I would love to meet up with you for a drink and chat a bit! But until then, I would like to have a call with you to discuss more about it if you’d like. Send me a DM if you’re interested.
Source: Twitter.com
“You don’t open up a fast food restaurant for only 20 minutes a day”
This is the problem for trainers: The reasoning behind the shortening of Community Day does not sit well with trainers. They cannot get past the logic.
In a reddit thread discussing Steranka’s recent tweets, user mason240 writes: “I think I need to state the obvious first. I don’t buy this and it makes no sense at all.” He refers to the statement that trainers supposedly requested the shorter Community Days. “Let’s say you always played the Community Days from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM. Why would it bother you if they run for 6 hours?”
Moreover, trainers keep in mind that the Community Day in April is currently just a test, along with the special circumstances of the test.
- Past Community Days featured Sandan, Hoppspross, and Seemops. Pokémon that have been available in the game for a long time
- The Community Day in April features Velursi, a brand new Pokémon that will debut at the event. Furthermore, evolving it requires 400 candies, which means many Pokémon need to be caught
Now trainers believe that these special circumstances will distort the test results and that the release of the new Pokémon will artificially inflate participation.
“This is a poorly designed test (that might even be intentional). Velursi is already a far more desirable CD candidate than the previous ones and a perfect FOMO machine [FOMO stands for Fear of Missing Out]. The introduction of a brand new Pokémon family (for CDs for the very first time) – requiring 400 candies to evolve – will already lead many players to play the full 3 hours, even though they usually wouldn’t, in order to develop one or more Kosturso. A better test would be to play a 3-hour CD with a similar candidate as a basis, such as Kleinstein or Sleima,” writes Teban 54 on reddit.
User milo4206 shows with two brilliant examples why Niantic’s reasoning is so incomprehensible.
- Example 1: Gym owner: “We found that only 5% of our members spend longer than an hour working out. Therefore, we will now open the gym for only one hour per day.”
- Example 2: Fast food chain owner: “We found that only 5% of our customers spend longer than 20 minutes in the store, so we will only open our dining area for 20 minutes a day.”
What do you think about the changes to Community Days? Do you think it’s good to compress the event into a few hours so that you have the chance to meet more trainers, or do you think that the 6 hours for the event were appropriate? Let us know here on MeinMMO in the comments how you feel about the changes, and choose in our survey here in the article which format you prefer.
