Trapinch Community Day? More Like Weather Boosted Day!

Well, Trapinch Community Day was… a thing. I like Trapinch, it’s fucking adorable and Vibrava is pretty cool as well. Flygon’s alright too. But the Trapinch Community Day was a bit of a bloody mess. Why? Because there was a severe lack of Trapinch spawns. Reports everywhere in Asia and Europe are all saying the same thing, that the presence of Trapinches was very hit and miss, with some places with lots of normal spawns having nothing, some new areas having loads of spawns and other places having spawns overrun with other Pokemon.

Cyprus, it seems, did alright for itself. At first. For the first hour and a half of the event, the weather, according to Pokemon Go, was sunny, meaning Ground Types were weather-boosted, meaning that Trapniches weren’t fighting too hard to spawn alongside the normal crap that spawns here, Numels, Vulpixes, Cacturnes and Growlithes. Yes, Vulpix is an insanely common spawn in Cyprus. The spawns weren’t amazing and they were definitely worse than both Ralts and Turtwig, but there were enough for me to get about 500 candy, using lots and lots of Pinaps.

Then again, we had every Pokestop lured for most of the event, and while the Pokestop lures did do a lot of work, if you strayed too far away, then the chances of seeing a Trapinch was reduced to about 1 in every 4 Pokemon. Still, the spawns weren’t too bad, aside from the lulls between waiting for new spawns.

That was… until Pokemon Go decided that the weather was partly cloudy. There hadn’t been a single cloud in the sky all day, but Pokemon Go was clearly under the belief that the local players had caught enough Trapinches and changed the spawns. So all of a sudden we were flooded with Pokemon boosted by Partly Cloudy, i.e. crap like Zigzagoon, Pidove, Starly and Meowth. This also meant we got far, far fewer Trapinch spawns. Despite it being clear and sunny, Pokemon Go remained with the partly cloudy weather until long after the event, and also dropped down the CPs of any Trapinches we could find. Trapinches with CPs of 600-1000 were pretty common and then boom, the few remaining Trapinches that dared spawn were all below 900CP.

There were some good things about the event. Despite the lack of spawns, the shiny chances seemed to be alright and there were a lot of people wandering around catching Pokemon. We also didn’t get guaranteed Trapinches from 2km eggs, which is both a good and a bad thing – while eggs would provide guaranteed 2-3 star Trapinches, no one wants to be getting them over the next few weeks the same way we got Ralts from eggs.

What tickled me the most though was that there was a new research task added to the normal pool of Community Day Only tasks: Catch 3 Trapinch, with a Pokemon Encounter as a reward. This encounter… gives you another Trapinch.

That’s fucking hilarious.

Overall, I did alright for a community day – I caught 5 shiny Trapinches total and also got a Lucky Trapinch too. But results definitely varied across the planet.