Timed Research Needs Better Rewards

We’ve had a lot of events lately, pretty much one after the other. As of writing, we are in a Luminous Legends event. There was one for Xerneas and one for Yveltal. Both these events and the ones before them came with timed research. This research worked the same way as special research except it’s, well, timed.

But despite the rush to complete them, the rewards are always… kinda lame.

Let’s look at the Luminous Legends X event as an example.

The only good rewards were at the end.

Luminous Legends X was a longer event than normal. It ran on for 2 weeks rather than the standard 1, so its research had more tasks to match. But the only particularly good rewards were a single Gible and a Rainy Lure at the very last stage. All other rewards in the timed research were either Pokeballs or Pokemon that, well, were already spawning. Do I really need a Spritzee, when I can find them in the wild or do the common “catch 10 fairy types” task? No, not really.

And don’t get me started on giving me a Clefable for catching 50 fairy types. I could have evolved a Clefable myself by catching all these fairy types!

But there was one Pokemon the research could have given, and that was Goomy. Goomy was the rarest spawn of the event by far, and putting it at the end of timed research would have made sense. It wasn’t in raids, nor was it really in eggs, so the only places you could find it were rare, wild spawns. Having a chance to find a guaranteed good Goomy would have been nice.

Luminous Legends X was a more generous event as well.

At least it gave out a rainy lure module and a Gible. Other events have been shorter. But because they’ve been shorter, they’ve also been far less generous. With the Rainy Castform event, Rainy Castform was basically impossible to find, so most people’s only shots at a shiny were the limited research tasks. But those tasks were filled with mediocre rewards of already-spawning Pokemon. And, on top of that, if you were lucky enough to get rainy weather, most Castforms that spawned were normal ones, which no one wanted.

It’s not just shiny hunting though. Previous dragon-themed events had research full of Trapinch and Swablu, which AREN’T Dragon types! A limited research a while back did give two Deinos, but you had to work hard for them. In fact, that research was only noteworthy because they had to release the research twice. The first time round, the limited research ended a day earlier than intended, screwing over a lot of players.

Pretty much every timed research is like this though. You do a bunch of tasks and are rewarded with a Pokemon that normally spawns everywhere. Generally after having wasted a bunch of Pokeballs, or battled a bunch of grunts or whatever. It’s so redundant.

What can be done to fix this?

Very simply, don’t give us Pokemon that are already spawning in large numbers around us! Let’s go back to that Luminous Legends X event. We don’t need Swirlix or Spritzee or Jigglypuff as rewards. We can get those elsewhere. The same could be said with Dratini and Bagon. Those two dragons were spawning in the wild as well. Instead, why not put other fairies and dragons in the research tasks? Throw in more than one Mawile, maybe give us a Cleffa or Igglybuff encounter. Galarian Ponyta isn’t a fairy type but they could have stuck three in the research since it doesn’t spawn in the wild. A single Noibat encounter would have been nice too.

Honestly, most other rewards are kinda okay. I mean, the game could give us more than 25 Pokeballs before asking us to catch 50 Pokemon. More stardust however is always nice, especially when we’ve been asked to power up Pokemon.

But the redundancy is really annoying and off-putting. If you do a task, you should be rewarded for it, right?

Guess not.