How Community Days SHOULD Work in Pokemon GO

April’s Community Day was also a debut for a brand new Pokemon. However, it was also a day of change, with many of the Community Day features we got slowly being eroded away. But Communities can be so much better. Here are some features that would make a Community Day more awesome.

Bring back the buddies giving Pokeballs

For some of the earlier Community Days done during the start of the pandemic, we actually got quite a nice feature. Throughout the day, our buddy Pokemon would give us gifts which contained Pokeballs. Not a small number of them either. When things got locked down, our Pokemon would bring us a bag of 50 normal Pokeballs, which is huge. This number did however get reduced, where your buddy brings only 10 or so Pokeballs, but those balls are still very handy.

Unfortunately, the buddies bringing gifts thing has been mostly disabled. The feature reappeared before the Johto Tour as a “get ready to catch stuff!” event, but that’s it.

Nowadays, the whole buddy feature has been replaced with a free box of 30 Ultra Balls in the shop. Sure, it’s handy, but it just feels cold and empty, and you need to have 31 item space to actually buy. Buddy gifts allowed you to temporarily go over your backpack space.

Bring back the fast incense too

While we’re at it, let’s bring back the Covid-times incense. Incenses have been nerfed back into their original 5-spawns-an-hour ways, how they used to be. Incense basically became useless again overnight.

Sure, one could argue that maybe the boosted incense was too much. It’s easy to miss some spawns while you try and catch more jumpy Pokemon. But the current nerfs are way, way over the top. Just make it once every 2 minutes or something. There’s a massive amount of middle ground here.

Stick the Pokemon everywhere, including raids and team rocket battles

I mean, why not? Alternate ways of catching Pokemon can get a little tiring, but a raid is a nice way to cool off, do something a tad different and still feel like part of a Community Day. The “catch 3 x for x” research tasks are always great. In fact, this task should be way more common. Getting a Community Day Pokemon with decent IVs is almost entirely luck based. But at least the research task or doing a raid guarantees at minimum a high 2-star Pokemon.

There’s also the $1 special research tasks, but these can be very hit or miss. It’s generally best to look up what the tasks are before you buy them.

More than one special trade

Another thing that holds us back are special trades. For Community Days, we just get one, single special trade. However, in the spirit of the community and helping each other, having more special trades would make these days far more social.

Make the community day actually last all day

This is the biggest problem of all. Community Days really just aren’t entire days. They are now three hours long, reduced from the six hour events of 2021. But the thing is, six hours also isn’t long enough. The old/new three hour events are a joke, really. It’s one eighth of a day, a blip in time. Six hours isn’t much better, but at least you have more time to plan, and the event ends up being more accessible. It fits much more nicely in players’ diaries, but it still doesn’t feel like an actual day.

The way I see it, a Pokemon with a Community Day should be available all day, from midnight to midnight, with the six hour main event in the middle, and increasing an decreasing spawns all day. Sure, we’d have the main six hours to catch shinies, but having some spawn before and after the main event means that even less people miss out.

Either way, Community Days need to be more Community-y and more day-y.