Where Have All The Good Research Tasks Gone?

Research tasks are integral to Pokemon GO. In exchange for a simple task, you are rewarded with useful items and Pokemon. At midnight, every day, every Pokestop gives a new research task when spun. However, some tasks are less useful than others. Since all the research tasks are limited to 3, you have to pick and choose somewhat carefully, or deleting some and keeping others.

Not every task is equal.

There are a lot of tasks available. While we do occasionally get new tasks, there’s always a collection of normal research tasks available all the time. These include basic tasks that one normally does anyway. Tasks like “Make 3 great throws” and “Make 5 nice throws” are among the most common of these, but there are research tasks for sending gifts, catching weather-boosted Pokemon and catching certain types of Pokemon.

Tasks can also be incredibly rare. There is a research task, “Make 2/3 excellent throws in a row” that I’ve only ever seen a handful of times. It’s a great task if you can find it, since it rewards a Gible. On the other hand, tasks like “use x berries to catch Pokemon” are very common, but nowhere near as desirable.

Many of these tasks are trash though.

However, the rewards for these tasks are what separates good tasks from bad tasks. For every task that rewards a Pokemon for completion, there are many more that give only scant resources. If you get the “Make 5 great curveball throws in a row” then the Pokemon encounter is generally a Spinda. But I’ve seen the exact same task only give you a handful of pokeballs or berries. One of the most insulting tasks is “catch 10 normal types” for, wait for it, 200 stardust. That’s nothing. You get 200 stardust for catching 2 Pokemon! Unfortunately, a lot of the Pokemon encounter tasks have an item-based twin research, and the items given are almost always far worse than the Pokemon encounters.

Heck, the random, green daily tasks are generally better compared to standard research tasks. Why catch 10 Weather-boosted Pokemon for 2 Pinaps when you can get a daily task of catching 5 Pokemon for 5 Pinaps?

Worse, even event research tasks are like this.

What makes everything worse is that event research tasks also have a bunch of mediocre rewards. Event tasks generally give out rarer Pokemon, but the last few events we’ve had, they’ve also given out, well, Pokeballs. Getting an event research task and seeing that the rewards is just items you already have is such a let down.

The worst of these has been the “Spin 5/10 Pokestops for 5/10 Pokeballs” task, which is, well, literally a rip-off. In the effort that it takes to spin 5 or 10 Pokestops, you’ll have gotten more Pokeballs than the research task gives you. But for some reason, it was an insanely common task. To the point that it was the ONLY event research task I got in the Sword and Shield event! On top of all that, there used to be a far, far better research task of the same name. Last year, we had a rare “Spin 10 Pokestops for 10 Pokeballs” task that rewarded Silver Pinaps, by FAR one of the rarer rewards.

I get it, not every task is going to be amazing. But it’s very easy to make bad tasks into good tasks, just by upping some numbers. One rare candy for catching a Ditto? Lame. Five rare candy? That’s a lot better. Pretty much every research task that offers items instead of Pokemon encounters should have way, way higher numbers of rewards.

But I don’t think Niantic are listening. They want to make good rewards rare so that we’ll buy raid passes and incubators instead. So, for now, we’ll be stuck with a lot of mediocre research tasks…