So many have complained for so many years the dire condition of Pokémon Go‘s monthly Community Days. What should have been events designed to encourage players to fill local parks for a series of fun challenges have become repetitive, fleeting events that can be completed with almost no effort. And now the price has doubled!

The only thing you can say about a community day is that it’s cheap. Each month, developer Niantic chose a Pokemon to evolve twice and then had it take over the game on a Saturday or Sunday. (It used to last six hours; then in June 2022 it was reduced to just three hours in an act that appeared to be purely self-sabotage.) Players are given three task phases, upon which almost all of them are based – or inevitably completed by – catching 15 of the specified Pokémon. Along the way you’ll be rewarded with more Pokemon to catch and eventually a fully evolved version with a good chance of getting decent stats. And not much else. But it was only 99 cents.

Apparently these were plot twists, the most peppy and effortless nonsense of the character my son just calls “Professor Blah-Blah” and whose statements, full of vague language and overly long words, are incomprehensible to children, but even those are gone now! Also recently lost is the raid hour that followed the three-hour event, once added as a tranquilizer when Niantic thoughtlessly cut the length of the day in half. The challenges never change, the rewards are never new, and the only reason anyone joins in at all – the motivation to beat it on the day you meet other players – is the increased chance of getting shiny versions of the Catch Pokémon. A successful Community Day is a day where you catch at least three Shinies, so you can have one of each development.

It was announced back in December that the starter Pokémon of the generation would be released at Community Day in January As Eurogamer spottedIt now costs $1.99 to join, a 100 percent increase, for almost nothing new.

The only additional reward revealed for this price doubling is a single Premium Battle Pass – a ticket that allows you to participate in online battles light better rewards than what you’d get with the regular Battle Pass, and something the game constantly gives out for free anyway. For example, you can currently get two per day for free. I have nine of them in my inventory right now, and even though the in-game store requires the equivalent of a dollar to purchase one, it would be foolish to ever do that.

It may prove that Niantic has some surprises in store, new changes to the Community Day format, or other better rewards that it is keeping quiet about, but more importantly, we don’t know about it yet and yet tickets for the event are already being sold at the new price . Everything will become clear late on Saturday, when New Zealand enters Sunday’s event first. But given Everything that has happened since the game was improved because of CovidI won’t hold my breath.

I don’t have any data, but it’s very unlikely that Community Days can be anywhere near as popular as they once were, given how much worse they’ve become and how little effort is put into making them more varied or interesting. So presumably this is an attempt to recoup losses in the hope that people desperate for better chances at a shiny sprigatito will pay up anyway. Maybe it would also be a better idea to double the rewards, quests and fun to match the price?

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