The Pokemon Go GBL Marill Event was Bad

I’m going to be blunt, the event we had on April 12th, an event where you could get a chance at shiny Marill, was awful. It was all-round bad in a lot of different ways. To the point that I actually didn’t manage to get a single Marill. That’s how bad this event was.

The event was too short and hard to do

You get 3 hours, from 11am to 2pm, to get your Marills. An event on Easter Sunday while most people are having lunch. On the Free path, the chance to get an encounter was made into the 3rd and 5th wins. Using a premium pass would get you a Marill for every win. But unless you’re willing to spend 20 passes (for a maximum of 20 sets of 5 matches), your chances aren’t that great. Assuming you win 50% of your matches, that means you’d get an encounter every 10 battles.

But battles can take a long time, especially since most PvP Pokemon are pretty tanky. So unless you dedicate your time the same way you would a community day, you won’t see many rewards. Assuming you can even win matches.

Master League makes no sense

For some reason, this event came in the middle of Master League. You know, the league where you can have everything from a 2600cp Machamp to a 4000CP Kyogre. The Master League is by far the worst league when it comes to investment and availability. The Pokemon you can use are limited and expensive. The meta Pokemon are uncommon Legendaries like Giratina and Dialga. Or you require getting one Pokemon up to level 35-40 to make it viable. Which requires players themselves to be level 38 minimum.

Simply put, Master League is hard to do well in. So why the hell are we releasing a shiny of a Pokemon that’s only good in Great League? It boggles the mind.

The event didn’t work

For a lot of players though, the event just didn’t work. And I’m not even talking about the 40 minutes where the GBL didn’t even work for players in Europe. Yep, the GBL actually went down in the middle of the event.

There’s a bigger problem though. Loads of people couldn’t even CLAIM their Marills. Someone I know used some premium passes, won 10 matches and could only claim 4 of those Marills. I only played one set and although I did get an encounter, I COULDN’T OPEN IT. Of course, as soon as the event ended, the reward paths changed and my Marill encounter turned into some stardust. Which I could then claim. So I didn’t even get one Marill.

I’m not alone in this. There were tons of reports on r/TheSilphRoad that people were getting errors. Apparently it is partly due to reaching rank 2/4 (where you’d normally get a Metagross or Scraggy) but that wasn’t the case for me since I already had my Scraggy.

Marill Spawns were disabled during the event

What makes it worse though is that YOU COULDN’T GET MARILLS IN THE WILD.

Marill in the wild were disabled during this event. So the only way to make the most of the Community Day level of shiny chances was to play the GBL.

Which is fucking bullshit. Marill are only semi-common during the Easter event, so why couldn’t they spawn in the wild? Or why not put its baby form in eggs during this event? Or stick the Marill family in raids maybe? There is a continuing trend of Pokemon being locked away behind GBL and it’s no longer fun. Scraggy and Rufflet are GBL rewards only for basically no reason, so you HAVE to play it. On the other hand, Pokemon like Shinx, Klink and Timburr appear in eggs and raids, so you have at least two options to obtain them!

But what’s the fucking point if you can just tank?

If you play properly, you are actually getting less rewards and you are not always facing people of your skill level. You see, a lot of players will purposefully lose matches to “tank” their score. This makes the matchmaking system pair these players against people not of the same skill level. So, after purposefully losing, a tanking player is then matched with less skilled players for a bunch of easy wins.

But this completely fucks up matchmaking, which is supposed to be based on skill. When you have people purposefully throwing games and intentionally lowering their rank to get more rewards, then something is hideously wrong!

Really, why should you even TRY to be good? When you can just intentionally lose and then steamroll a bunch of people who are genuinely trying their best?

It’s all so fucking stupid. There’s been bad events in the past, but this Marill event was by FAR the worst I’ve played.