These Seasonal Catch Challenges are Lame

One of the biggest parts of Pokemon GO is research and research challenges. These challenges challenge you to catch certain amounts of Pokemon. Some challenges are strict, requiring you to catch very specific Pokemon. Others are more open-ended and want you to catch various types of Pokemon. But the most common challenge of all is just a generic “Catch X Pokemon”. Something that, as of writing, exists two-fold in the Today tab. Because, for some reason, the Season of Heritage has two collect-a-thons currently,

There’s nothing wrong with some catch challenges.

Now, I normally don’t have a problem with collecting Pokemon, including catching huge amounts of them. After all, catching Pokemon is, well, the main point of Pokemon. It’s in their tag line, “Gotta catch ’em all”. Except there’s generally no real way to do that without a lot of work. In Pokemon GO especially, catching is like 90% of the game. We constantly catch Pokemon and grind them up for candy to feed our better Pokemon. When we’re not catching Pokemon for candy, we catch them for stardust.

If anything, catch challenges are basically rewarding you for something you were going to do anyway. It’s always nice to have a goal and the promise of a reward. However…

The rewards mostly suck

The problem though is that the rewards for catching Pokemon can be incredibly lame. I came across a research task at a nearby Pokestop that offered me one single Pinap for catching 10 Pokemon. At the same time, I had already obtained a Pinap from spinning the Pokestop. On top of that, the green daily task “catch 5 Pokemon” ALSO rewards you with Pinaps and offers 5 of them. One Pinap per Pokemon caught. There are similar tasks for catching grass, water and fire types, that give you 500 stardust. Except, if we catch 10 Pokemon, we already get 1000 stardust.

Some tasks on the other hand really do take the piss.

Just look at this one. In fact, 3 berries for 50 Pokemon is exactly why I am writing this article. Catching 50 Pokemon for the equivalent of one single raid is ludicrous. Rather than 3 things we get in raids anyway, why don’t we get something interesting, like an Incense or maybe some lure modules. Or even more encounters. The step before that task gave me a Pupitar encounter, so this just seems strange.

Honestly I wouldn’t mind longer catch challenges if they were a tad more interesting

For example, the special research for Shiny Mew included some very long catch tasks, namely catching 30 of every type of Pokemon. With these though, we were clear from the start what the end reward would be – the shiny Mew itself. The Season of Heritage catch challenges only have sporadic good rewards, especially since you have to catch a TON of Pokemon to finish them.

Basically, what I am trying to say is that, if Niantic wants us to catch so many Pokemon, at least dangle something fancy in front of us. 50 Pokemon for 3 berries is fucking stupid, we should at least get a nice encounter or something.

Although, to be fair, I could just not do these challenges. But sometimes there are actually decent rewards in all these catch challenges, and it’d be a shame to miss out on them.