The Feebas Community Research Three Hour Event Thing

Not every Pokemon is suitable for a community day. Many Pokemon either aren’t popular enough, don’t have enough evolution stages or simply have mediocre shiny forms. Other Pokemon evolve in too awkward a way to be able to give them a special move and flood areas with them for three hours. One of those Pokemon is Feebas, and Feebas was the recipient of a miniature community event.

Unlike other events, Feebas didn’t have a higher chance of spawning in the wild. For three hours on January 19th, from noon until 3pm depending on your time zone, all research tasks from Pokestops were replaced with Feebas Research. Completing that research would reward a guaranteed Feebas encounter with a chance to get a shiny one.

Sounds great in theory. Not so good in practice.

First off, there were only four different research tasks. You have a choice between Earn 1 Candy with your Buddy, Hatch 1 Egg, Make 15 Nice Throws or Make 10 Great Throws. Not a lot of variation. And honestly? Not particularly hard tasks…

Assuming you’re not on a time limit.

You see, the Feebas event doesn’t have any bonuses aside from the Feebas research. So if you just put a bunch of 10km eggs on to incubate or are walking an Eevee for the Celebi quest for example, it’s pretty shitty. The Nice and Great Throw challenges also don’t seem too bad but right now 99% of spawns are tiny, jumpy little Hoenn Pokemon which are a pain to get consistent throws on. Looking at you, Wurmple.

But to make matters worse, you need to keep moving. Unlike a Community Day, you need to spin Pokestops for your shiny tasks and once you’ve finished a task, that Pokestop won’t give you another. That’s fine if you live in a city, but fucking awful if you live in a rural area. There are probably about 40 Pokestops in the town where I live but many of them are too far away to walk to, or are locked away inside museums and closed archeological sites.

Basically, if you live in a rural area, yet again, you’re screwed.

But even if you don’t, it’s still awkward. Because 15 nice throws requires, at minimum, 15 Pokemon. Even if you have the Great Throws and Nice Throws research at the same time, you might run out of Pokemon. Or you’ll do what I did, and manage to catch even high CP Pokemon which are normally hard to catch with really shitty fluked throws. Things like high CP Volbeats and Roselias managed to get caught in crappy throws. Typical.

The research is very heavily time-gated and feels very restrictive. You have a choice between the easier but slower egg hatching and candy-earning research or the much faster but less guaranteed throw-based research.

It’s also not very interesting research with no real tactic. The fastest way to do the event would be to get super incubators, 3 hatch-an-egg research and hatch 2km eggs unless you have lots of Pokemon spawns around. My best tactic was to walk a 1km buddy (I picked Wailmer but Magikarp and Swablu also work) and do as many buddy candy research as possible. But all that is completely reliant on what research you get in the first place. And you might not be able to do that much research in 3 hours, especially if you don’t have many Pokestops around.

Sure, you could get a shiny Feebas, but you don’t get nearly as many chances as you would on a normal Community Day.

To put it simply, my brother, who completed every research task he got, only managed to get about 18 Feebas. He didn’t get any shinies either.

The thing is, the event is pretty good. It’s just repetitive and way too fucking short.