Oddish Research Day

Oddish isn’t one of my favourite Pokemon. It’s a weird ball on legs with leaves coming out of its head. Pretty standard for a grass type Pokemon. And for some reason, it got a special research day. Not sure why, but this is Niantic and a Kanto Pokemon we’re talking about. But yeah, it was a pretty standard research day.

Research Days are generally a bit annoying. Unlike Community Days and Egg-hatching days, Research Days are very limited and are completely restricted to where you are. If you only have 1-2 pokestops nearby, you get two attempts at a shiny and that’s it. I’m fortunate that I do have pokestops nearby, but the weather has been incredibly hot, and wandering around in the heat at 2pm is a bad idea. And even then, I am still limited by Pokestops – there are only so many in walking distance.

The bonuses weren’t amazing either. Aside from increased shiny chances for Oddish, we didn’t get much. Sure, we got double stardust, but we recently finished ten days of x4 stardust, so it feels pretty damn lame. There was also a chance for Oddish to be holding a Sun Stone too. The event spawns were pretty good, we got Shroomish and Paras, which give you 500 stardust if you catch them (doubled to 1000 for the event), but, again, we just had that x4 stardust event and it simply doesn’t compare at all.

We also had a chance to get more XXS and XXL Oddishes, but that’s mostly cosmetic. Sure, you could stick XXL Oddishes into Showcases, but you can only enter so many showcases. Assuming you even have any in the area. I only know of three Showcase pokestops nearby.

And I’m just lucky to be in a good time zone. New Zealand and Australian players suffered through a lot of bugs at the start of the event. They didn’t get the extra stardust and half the pokestops were giving non-event research. Which completely defeats the whole point of the event. These did get corrected towards the end of the event, but these bugs shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

As for me? Well, I ended up only playing for 5 minutes, about 30 minutes before the event ended. I spun one pokestop, did the research and got an XXL shiny Oddish on my first try. After that, I decided to not continue, because, well, I got my shiny Oddish and immediately stuck it in a nearby Showcase. I did spin some Pokestops for research for tomorrow, but I haven’t opened them or anything. One of them wasn’t even an Oddish task, so I got rid of it. I did intend to play more, to make progress towards the 150 research tasks for my Master Ball research, but frankly it was hot and horrible today and I didn’t want to spend time in the heat.

So yeah, I lucked out and got my shiny on my first try. I can’t complain about the event. But even if I managed to have absurdly good luck, doesn’t mean everyone else was as lucky. This wasn’t a particularly fun event, and, like all research events, is limited by your local area – great if you are in a city, awful if you live somewhere rural. And even if you’re not somewhere rural, too many pokestops didn’t even have the right research.