I wish Daily Pokemon Were More Interesting
A while back, during the height of the Covid pandemic, Niantic added a couple of little features to Pokemon GO, namely the Daily Pokemon Spawn, a daily research task (the green one) and a ton of extra incense. Later on, they added the Daily Incense, which lasts 15 minutes. These are all little daily addons that all players receive, and allowed players to keep up with weekly breakthroughs. However, all these daily things are a bit… dull.
Let’s start off with the free daily Pokemon that everyone gets. Denoted with a white circle, you get one spawn a day guaranteed, starting at midnight. Sometimes the daily Pokemon can be a bit temperamental, and you may need to close and reopen the game in case it doesn’t spawn. The spawn of the daily Pokemon also coincides with the arrival of a Team Rocket balloon. However, the daily Pokemon can be very boring. The spawn is typically just something from the seasonal spawns, and doesn’t seem to be affected by events or anything like that. It also doesn’t get affected by community days, and will spawn as a generic Pokemon.
These daily spawns though could be a lot more interesting. We have over 600 Pokemon, and even if you narrow it down to just basic forms, you still get a lot of choice. So why are half my spawns something dreadful, like Mareep or Bunnelby? I swear those two are by far the most common for me. In fact, I haven’t had a good daily spawn in months.
Speaking of months, the daily incense isn’t much better. When it was released, it seemed to have a larger spawning pool. Getting evolved Pokemon was very common, and we’d get all sorts of Pokemon. These days though, the spawns are much more predictable. They mostly contain Pokemon from the current event, or whatever the seasonal spawns are. You do still get the odd evolved Pokemon from time to time (for me, it’s stuff like Sealo and Ivysaur) but these aren’t that common.
Yes, we do have the Galarian Legendary Birds in daily incense, but it’s been a month since I’ve seen any of them, let alone had a chance to catch them. They normally flee 100% of the time anyway. So the only interesting things in incense are insanely rare and nigh impossible to catch.
However, the daily research tasks are still pretty good. They are rarely complicated and are easy to do. The tasks are things like “catch 5 Pokemon” or “use three berries”, although you do get the odd “walk 1km” for 15 Pokeballs. The rewards for these tasks aren’t too bad either. 5 Pinaps for catching 5 Pokemon is an easy way to stack up on berries, and the “feed berries” task rewards you with a surplus of 2 berries. Not amazing, but at least you’re not going into negatives. The only downside to these tasks is that you need to have at least one spawn near you, meaning rural players have a chance to miss out. At least you get the daily Pokemon.
While I get having seasons and events and stuff like that, I just wish that the daily spawn Pokemon and the daily incense were a little more wild and random with what they can give you.