Niantic and Night
Editor’s note: Several days after writing, Niantic decided to change everything so that night time spawns start at 6pm and end at 6am. However it’s not clear whether this is a permanent change or if it’s just for the Summer Solstice event. And it’s also curious that they had to make this change in the first place.
As of writing, there is a Summer Solstice event going on in Pokemon GO. But for some reason, we have both day and night spawns, with specific Pokemon spawning based on the time of day. While the daytime Pokemon are pretty obvious, the night time Pokemon come out really late at night. Rather than having day and night at 6am/6pm, they’ve gone with the actual day and night cycle. In the northern hemisphere, daytime lasts for a very long time because it’s summer. But in the southern hemisphere, they’re currently in winter, with far longer nights and days. In fact, if you are far enough north, it’s possible to not have complete darkness, and the darkest it gets is astronomical twilight, which isn’t the same as true night. So, basically, the northern hemisphere isn’t seeing nighttime spawns until stupidly late.
Why is this the case? Because Niantic have decided that nighttime spawns in-game are 2 hours after the sun sets. But what with it being summer in the northern hemisphere, the sun doesn’t set until 11pm or even later, meaning you have to go out really late in order to catch night time Pokemon. Heck, here in Cyprus, the nighttime spawns don’t start until about 10pm. On the flip side, anyone in the southern hemisphere at least gets plenty of time to catch the nighttime spawns. But for them, it’s the winter solstice, so the whole event makes little sense.
But none of this makes much sense. Niantic has kinda always been against playing at night. They actively discourage it. Well, they do normally. The biggest clue about not playing at night is when it comes to raids. Raids can only spawn between 6am and 9pm, regardless of time of year and regardless of hemisphere. Sometimes a raid may happen past 9pm, they don’t all automatically disappear after 9pm, but you definitely don’t get new raids appearing after 9pm.
You know what else stops appearing after 9pm? Team Rocket Leader battles. After 9pm, any Team Rocket leaders spawning in the wild will disappear, as will any Giovanni Pokestops. Spark, Candela and Blanche all have specific dialogue whenever you activate a Rocket Radar, stating that it’s getting late and that we should look again in the morning.
However, weirdly, you can still get Team Rocket Leaders via the 6-hourly Team Rocket balloons. If you stay up late, you can happily battle a Leader or Giovanni via the midnight balloon that appears when the day resets.
But why is this the case? If Niantic is claiming that true night only happens 2 hours after sunset, why can’t we do raids after 9pm? And why specifically 2 hours, rather than when the sun has mostly set? Yes, sure, during either hemisphere’s summer solstice, there are places where the sun doesn’t set at all, but this is a video game we’re talking about, it doesn’t have to be completely accurate. Heck, they could have made four zones for Pokemon spawns, day, night and sunrise or sunset, which would have a combination of both day and night spawns! That would make much more sense.
Or, at the very least, if Niantic doesn’t care about going out late at night, then they should allow raids and Team Rocket Leaders to spawn past 9pm as well. But that would make too much sense, I guess…