Posted in: Games, Mobile Games, Niantic, Pokémon GO | Tagged: Community Day, Niantic, Niantic Labs, pokemon, pokemon go

Pokémon GO December 2020 Recap Community Day Review

December 2020 Recap Community Day Weekend is winding down in Pokémon GO. This was the first year that certain key features were excluded from this highly anticipated event, so let's look back at the full experience and examine if this weekend lived up to the hype set by previous years.

The Good:

• Double Catch Stardust is always welcome, as is half hatch distance. However, since previous Community Days in Pokémon GO offered triple Dust and 1/4 distance, this can't quite go in the "Great" section.

The Bad:

• The entire game's spawns seemed fully replaced by Community Day Pokémon. Throughout a day of grinding, I saw one Pidgey… and that's the only non-event spawn of the whole day after encountering thousands of spawns. Because hardcore trainers would have been set on most 2020 Community Day species, the spawn pool could have been enriched with more variant. 2019 Pokémon on Saturday and 2020 Pokémon on Sunday, for example, could have helped. Alternately, switching to the normal Community Day standard of roughly 50 – 75% of spawn pointed being event species with the remainder as random spawns could've stopped the event from being monotonous.
• Not including pre-2019 Community Day species was a flat out bad move. Niantic has made good on their promise to unlock the special moves for the Generation One starters during the Pokémon GO Tour: Kanto, but the lack of love more coveted species like Larvitar and Beldum got was a shame. Having a chance to catch up on old Community Days is the biggest appeal of the event, so limiting the weekend to the spawns trainers are most likely to already have made this unfortunately the most skippable Recap Community Day so far.

The Great:

• The super-effective Incense is always nice. While the spawns were only Community Day species, Pokémon GO players hoping to grind Stardust were certainly able to do so.
• Elite TMs! The free Timed Research offered an Elite Charged TM for the first time. Also, those who paid for the Special Research received both an Elite Charged TM and an Elite Fast TM. This enriched the experience of these questlines far beyond what was previously offered, though it's likely because this was a special event. I wouldn't advise trainers to expect this to become the norm moving forward.

Overall, while this wasn't a bad event, it would serve both Niantic and the Pokémon GO community well if future December Recap Community Days went back to what made these so popular to begin with.

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