These new Team Rocket Events are Frustrating

Hah. Frustrating. Like the move Frustration. Haha. Get it?

Okay but in all seriousness, Rocket Takeovers used to be my favourite seasonal event. You get a week where you get a Team Rocket Balloon every 2 hours, Team Rocket grunts appear constantly at Pokestops and you get a good shakeup of what Pokemon can be shadows. Sure, the Legendary Pokemon Giovanni has can sometimes be ass (looking at you, you three genies) and they often have crap stats (except you, hundo shadow Suicune my beloved) but you get a Legendary Pokemon you can use in Great League and you have a nice chance at a purified hundo. All you have to do is complete a 5 stage research quest which involves a little bit of battling and some purifying and that’s it. And if you don’t want this season’s Legendary, as long as you don’t go past stage 1 of the research, you can just hold onto it and use it for a Legendary you do like. My second account has been holding on to 2 of those researches for when Shadow Rayquaza comes out, and used 3 researches on shadow Groudon.

Well, you USED to be able to do that. Starting from last year, every damn event has switched from timed research or special research to… a GO Pass. A game pass which you slowly complete over the week of the event. The pass has 30 levels, you need 100 points per l level and, for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Monday, you are restricted to 500 points and a 100 point bonus task you can earn a day. And the GO Pass has little to do with the actual event. You can’t level it up much at all by playing the theme of the event, i.e. the Rocket Takeover, you complete it the same way you complete every other pass. Catch, hatch, raid.

Flying Taxi Taken Over was particular bad because there wasn’t anything really to catch. Sure, we got a new regional Pokemon, but it’s a boring route 1 normal/flying type that doesn’t even evolve everything else was Pidgey, Rookidee and Pidove, and we didn’t get any dark/poison/ghost types during the takeover part of the event. We DID get some great new shadow Pokemon (namely shadow Tyrunt) and dragon type grunts were boosted, but most of the new grunts were blocked by the same damn Flying Type grunt. I fought the Taillow/Gligar/Dragonite team, I kid you not, 10 times during the event. And while we did get more boosted dragon grunts, all mine just had Dratini, I didn’t get a chance at shadow Noibat or Deino.

But this most recent takeover, Flying Taxi (which is a shit name for an event), they made one other change: They made Giovanni super rare, and they removed him from the guaranteed balloons, meaning you HAVE to go out and look for him. I got my Super Rocket Radar at 1am on Saturday, and I had to go out and drive around to find him, because he wasn’t at any of the pokestops near me, nor was he at any of the massive collection of Pokestops at town hall. Considering town hall has about 40 Pokestops, and I can see a good 20 Pokestops from home, not to mention that I checked other hotspots like the little forest area and didn’t see him at work either, not seeing Giovanni at all is annoying. To the point that I posted Giovanni’s location in local group chats when I did find him. And I found him 10am on Sunday.

Normally, that’s workable, but considering you only have 7 days to do the event and only have 3 days to find Giovanni (you only get to rank 30 by Friday unless you buy the premium pass) and you need to get rid of Frustration before the event ends, if you can’t even FIND Giovanni, then the whole event is wasted. If you don’t have many pokestops nearby or are just unlucky, RNG can stop you from using your radar during the event entirely. Compared to Giovanni just appearing in a balloon, this is way worse. And the change doesn’t even solve the problem of people fighting Giovanni and him leaving without giving you the legendary encounter at the end.

And before you say “getting to rank 30 is easy!” well, it really depends. You only have 3 avenues of getting points to level up: catching (5pt), raiding (100pt) and hatching eggs (40pt), plus the bonus tasks, which reward 100 points. So the optimal strategy is to do one raid a day, hatch 1-2 eggs and catch as many Pokemon as possible. So many factors can mess that up though. What if you live in a place with not many spawns? Or you only have 7km-10km eggs? Or what if you don’t find a raid you can complete? Or what if you’re busy on the weekend where points are unrestricted? You can so easily fall behind, and if you don’t get to rank 30, that’s it, the rocket radar is gone forever and you have to wait 2-3 months until the next event and hope you can complete that one in time.

At the same time, they taunt you. Just pay €8 and you can get a super rocket radar at level 1 on the PREMIUM track only. So basically they are selling you the solution to a problem they are causing.

As for me? I only had Tuesday off during the event, which means I was working every other day, and had to fit in the entirety of the event between my work shifts. That meant I had to rush the whole event and didn’t get a chance to farm Arlo. In fact, I only saw Arlo twice, and the last time was 20 mins after the event ended, meaning I couldn’t remove Frustration off the 3* Tyrunt I caught.

Sure, the special researches were tedious (mostly because of having to purify Pokemon) but even if you missed most of the Rocket Takeover event, all you had to do was log in once during the event, get the special research and then you could complete it later on.

Niantic/Scopely no longer seem to tolerate playing when you want to. If you want the cool new shiny things, you gotta spend money and/or play when they tell you to.

It’s not so fun any more.