Things in Pokemon GO that Still Annoy Me
Pokemon GO is a good, simple game, with some hidden complexities for those who want to find them. However, there are LOTS of annoying features as well. Things that are simply really annoying. Here are the ones that are currently annoying me.
Waiting for Raids
Raids, for some reason, spend more time as eggs than they do as actual battles. An egg appears on a gym with a 1 hour countdown. But when that egg hatches into a raid, it only appears for 45 minutes. So you spend most of your time waiting.
There are times where this doesn’t happen. Raid Hour has eggs that appear 20 minutes before it starts, and if there are multiple Legendaries in the raid pool, then the timer drops down to 15 minutes. However, you only ever at most have 1 hour to do a raid. Most of the time, you only have 45 minutes. We need more time to actually do raids, and less time waiting for them to actually hatch.
Eeveelutions
For the Winter Collection Challenge over Christmas, one of the challenges involved evolving a Vaporeon, Flareon and Jolteon. The thing is, these evolutions are completely random. There’s a 1 in 3 chance of getting a specific one, and you have no choice in the matter. To the point that I actually failed to complete that Christmas challenge on my alt account. I evolved, I kid you not, 17 Vaporeon and 1 Jolteon. I didn’t get a Flareon until 10 minutes after the challenge ended.
There should be some way to be able to choose which evolution you want. Even if it means putting in some work. We have choices for the other Eeveelutions. Sure, there’s the name trick, but that only ever works ONCE per account. And most people have already used it.
Being unable to ready up solo
Back in September 2023, we got a small feature that allowed us to Ready Up in raids. If all players present readied up for the raid, the countdown timer would jump down to 10 seconds, instead of having to wait the full time. This came in very useful in the Wyrdeer Raid Day, which was a very easy raid and didn’t need a 120 second countdown. However, you can’t use this ready up feature at all if you are the only person in a raid lobby! If you tap the Ready button, it just says you have to wait for other players.
There IS a way around this. You can invite someone into the raid, both of you hit Ready and the other person leaves. But that’s a fucking stupid solution to a problem that shouldn’t even exist. Especially on 1* raids. Pretty much anyone with a decent counter can do a 1* raid (except me at level 7 with no fire types against a weather-boosted Roselia), you should be able to ready up straight away.
Getting eggs you don’t want
Over the Christmas break, we actually had some very nice eggs. The 2km eggs for the Winter Wonderland event contained a small pool of event Pokemon which could have been shiny. But good fucking luck getting one. Every time I hatched an egg, I’d end up getting yet another shitty 5km egg. Of course, there’s no way to delete these eggs either. It’s something I’ve complained about a lot, and I hate it.
I don’t see why we can’t get rid of eggs. We can get rid of any other Pokemon. Even Pokemon like Mew and Celebi. But an egg with a Tyrogue in it? Nope, too precious, have to keep that.
Attacks and taps not being recognized
Sometimes, Pokemon GO decides to ignore your tapping and your use of charge attacks. This can be any sort of attack, in both raids and Pvp or Team Rocket battles. At first, I thought this was because I have an older phone. But no, it happens all the time, even on modern phones. You’ll just keep on fast attacking and your charge attack goes unused. Or, weirdly, the game just stops recognizing your finger taps overall, and your Pokemon stands there like an idiot, taking damage.
I have noticed though, sometimes this is caused by the game thinking you want to do a fast attack. Of course, you need to finish the fast attack animation before you can do the charge attack. But this wastes precious time and it HAS gotten Pokemon killed. Really, charge attacks should have more priority over fast attacks.
400-candy Pokemon being so rare.
There are a lot of 400-candy Pokemon these days. It’s one per generation, but there are plenty of them. Unfortunately though, they are all now exceedingly rare. Even Magikarp. I’ve seen the odd Swablu and Stuffel, about a Stuffel every couple of days and one Swablu a week, but the others are complete no-shows. I haven’t seen a wild Magikarp in about 2 months, and Noibat only appeared briefly on its Community Weekend, alongside all the other Community Day Pokemon for the year. And then there’s Larvesta, a Pokemon so rare that I still only have one and my brother still has none, despite it being in 2km, 5km and 10km eggs.
I wouldn’t mind, but none of these Pokemon are particularly amazing. Sure, Gyarados has a mega evolution, but it’s not a great one (getting beaten out by Blastoise, Swampert, Kyogre, Houndoom and Tyranitar) and so does Altaria (but Rayquaza, Salamence, Garchomp and Gardevoir all beat it, handily) but Noivern is completely useless, Stuffel is barely usable unless you got a glitched one with Drain Punch as a fast move and Larvesta was outclassed before it was even released.
Even if you just want the Pokedex entry, it’s a huge amount of work for very little reward.
So yeah, those are just some of the things that annoy me in Pokemon GO.