12km Eggs Are Stupid

I’ve mentioned in the past how eggs in Pokemon Go are stupid. You can’t delete them, you can’t do much with them and they give shit rewards. In fact, the only time they are vaguely worth walking is during events with halved distances. No one wants to walk 10km and be rewarded with a Feebas. But now we have a new type of egg! And they’re even worse.

They’re worse in 3 ways.

Problem 1: These eggs are rare as fuck.

Shadow eggs or red eggs are hard to get. To get a chance to get a red egg, you need to defeat a Team Rocket Leader. That means fighting Cliff, Arlo or Sierra. Preferably Sierra, as she’s the most smug of the trio and the easiest to beat. Arlo is clearly a teenager with emo problems and Cliff was clearly going through hard times before he was saved by Team Rocket. Sierra’s just a bitch who’s probably just pissed that Spark is dating Professor Willow and not her.

Sorry, got sidetracked there. Anyway, you need to beat one of those three. But how do you do that? By defeating six grunts, of course! However this means that it takes ages to get an egg. With the current Season Changes event, we have a Grunt spawning on balloons every 3 hours. If those are your only source of Grunts, then it takes half a day of grunts to get a Rocket Radar. Without an event, it would a lot longer.

But you ALSO need to have en egg slot free. So before you fight your Team Rocket Leader, you need to make sure you’re at 8/9 eggs or lower. And if you’re using a balloon to fight a Leader, then it’s unlikely you’ll be able to clear an egg slot in the 20 minutes that a balloon sticks around for. So it’s really easy to miss out on one of these eggs.

Problem 2: The Pokemon these eggs contain are crap.

That’s actually a weird thing to say, because there’s 3 new Pokemon in these eggs, all new Dark types. Pawniard and Sandile are popular Pokemon and Vullaby’s line is threatening to shake up PvP with its tankiness. Red eggs also contain Deino and Scraggy, which are both very, very rare.

That’s assuming you get them though. The other three Pokemon, the Pokemon that take up the majority of the egg chances, are Larvitar, Absol and… Trubbish. It’s clear as day that Trubbish is the Feebas of red 12km eggs. Worse, Trubbish is actually more useless than Feebas. Feebas has the potential to be shiny and evolves into Milotic, which is basically a cheaper, weaker Kyogre in PvP and a tank for gyms. Trubbish has none of that. And if it did have a shiny, it’d be stupidly rare as well

Problem 3: They require 12km of walking to hatch.

Now, this currently isn’t a problem, because of the current event. A distance of 3km is perfectly reasonable for an egg that is hard to obtain. But walking 3km to get a Trubbish is already rather disheartening. So why would people want to walk 12km for the same thing?

To make matters worse, most of the Pokemon in these eggs are available in other eggs or locations too. Scraggy and Deino are in 10km eggs, Trubbish regularly appears in 5km eggs and Larvitar is semi-regularly in raids and one of the Pokemon in the 10km Adventure Sync egg (rewarded for walking 50km in a week). People want these eggs for the three new Pokemon that are only available in this egg. But there’s tons of crap in the way that you’re more likely to get, to make these things rarer than they are and have to work extra hard for a tiny chance at getting the new stuff.

Because, of course, these new Pokemon don’t spawn in the wild at all. That’d be too easy.

Problem 4: These eggs could be fixed so easily!

The idea of a rare egg that requires more work wouldn’t be that bad if it wasn’t as bad as these 12km eggs. The first thing you need to do is remove Trubbish from the egg pool, since everything else is alright. Maybe remove Absol as well since that is both a common raid boss and a common 10km reward. And maybe Larvitar as well? I don’t know.

The other fix is for needing to have an egg slot free while also fucking around with Team Rocket Leaders. Rather than being a reward from them, these eggs should be guaranteed rewards from Pokestops liberated from Grunts, and dropped from balloon Grunts if you have an egg slot free. That way you have a chance to better prepare for an egg, rather than wasting time getting Mysterious Components and battling a leader.

Maybe then it might be worth walking 12km to hatch them. Or you could reduce that too, since eggs overall are crap…