The Problem With The Blazing Trails Event

The Blazing Trails event ended on the 23rd, marking the end of probably one of the worst events in Pokemon GO for a long time. In this event, most players couldn’t even take part. The Blazing Trails event was supposed to introduce a new mechanic. But that mechanic didn’t even work. The new mechanic is the Route.

Routes are player-made paths that you can follow, which give some sort of reward at the end and have Pokemon spawn among said routes. At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. Many players found that following routes was tedious and were prone to errors. You have to stick to the route in its entirety, and the route pauses if you wander too far away from the route. The reward for doing so is extra Pokemon spawns and a chance to find Zygarde cells. However, many players have reported dodgy GPS issues, routes randomly pausing and not recognizing that you’re on a route still and, worst of all, people are experiencing crashes while doing routes.

That’s assuming you even have routes.

Many places don’t have any routes what so ever. But why? A selection of players were given early access to the whole routes feature, and were capable of making routes for other players to follow. But this number of players is so small that there are hardly any routes available at all! And to make matters even worse, just like walking routes, creating routes also caused various crashes. So no wonder people didn’t really do them. As of writing, there are no routes in my city and potentially no routes at all in the whole country.

To slow things down even further, Niantic have to approve routes. Manually, it seems. So it takes ages for routes to even end up in Pokemon GO. There’s also a chance for routes to be declined, and there’s no real criteria which explain why. It’s a bit like nominating waypoints to become Pokestops, but the information is even more vague.

I suppose at least we got Zygarde in a special research, but even then, that’s not exactly good. Zygarde is the third of the X/Y trio, but unlike Xerneas and Yveltal, Zygarde has an odd evolution thing where it starts off as a single cell, then it turns into a dog, then it turns into a dragon snake thing, then it turns into a more humanoid figure. And to do this, you need Zygarde Cells. Which currently only spawn on routes.

Yeah.

At least we’re starting with a 10% Zygarde, but it’s along trot in order to ‘evolve’ our Zygardes. And with routes unavailable to many, there’s no way to get started. Even worse, the special research that gives Zygarde can’t be finished, as the last two stages require following routes. I suppose we should be grateful that Zygarde is giving to you before the research requiring routes, but that’s the smallest of consolation prizes.

And on top of everything? During the Blazing Trails event, we had some of the worst spawns around, and also some of the most boring raid rotations as well. So, even if you do have routes to follow, there was nothing worth catching.

So basically, it all sucked. And it makes me worried about future events. Because I bet routes will be a thing in future events, even if they don’t work.