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

The Startling Truth About The Shiny Rate In Pokémon GO

For a long time, it has been thought in the Pokémon GO community that the Shiny rate for unboosted Pokémon is approximately one in 450. However, the same researchers that discovered that rate now believes it to be something different. Even though it has been some time since publishing their new finishings, the community at large has not adjusted, still widely believing the old rate. Here, we dive into what the Silph Road Researchers have to say about the Shiny rates now that they have had years to observe.

The researchers over at Silph Road, after publishing many pieces dissecting the Shiny rate, updated their findings:

Conspicuously absent from our previous overviews of event and other boosted rates was any discussion of the base rate. When the Silph Research Group estimated a base rate of 1 in 450 in 2018, we also speculated that this rate was biased compared to the true rate. We have never felt comfortable using our data to draw conclusions about the exact base rate for a simple reason: the base rate is small enough to be highly susceptible to errors in data. In this article, we present a dataset that provides evidence for a base shiny rate near 1 in 500 or 1 in 512.

They then concluded:

It seems that the 1 in 512 base rate hypothesis fits somewhat better for the Medium Event, Permaboost and Raid Event data, but the 1 in 500 base rate fits better for Legendary Raids. We also can't rule out some combination of the two hypotheses: computational efficiency in determining shiny status seems to be more critical for wild encounters than for less-frequent events such as Raids and Eggs.

What is important to understand about Shiny rates that many miss is that these rates are assigned to Pokémon, rather than how Pokémon is encountered. Pikachu, for example, is an unboosted Pokémon, which means that it has the standard rate that is now either thought to be one in 500 or one in 512. This means that if you encounter Pikachu in the wild, your chance of a Shiny encounter is approximately one in 500. If you encounter it in a raid, your chance of a Shiny encounter is approximately one in 500. Understanding this is essential to getting value out of your raid passes and avoiding spending it on species that you'd be better off hunting in the wild.

Silph researchers have dedicated themselves to researching the mysteries of Pokémon GO. As this information has never been published by Niantic, Silph observes, studies, and investigates this data for Pokémon GO players. We know that Raid Days have hyper boosted rates of approximately one in ten because of Silph. We know when species are boosted in an event because of Silph. We know the Legendary Raid rate and the Community Day rate because of Silph. So all of this is to signal boost their findings, promote understanding about this aspect of the game that so many Pokémon GO players value, and to give credit where it's due.

Thank you, Silph Road. The Pokémon GO community is in your debt.

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