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This past weekend, Pokémon GO offered a special event-within-an-event during the Lush Jungle week. This Park Spotlight event was meant to get players out walking at parks in order to catch Cottonee, which was set to appear more frequently in parks. Since this is a first for this kind of event, I’d like to talk about it more outside of my normal What worked for this event and what didn’t work for this event format. Let’s get into it.
Conceptually, this is exactly the kind of event that Pokémon GO should be doing to get people playing and walking in the real world. Niantic makes a big deal of how exploration and exercise is their goal, and I think that’s great. That’s my goal for playing Pokémon GO, too, but I realize it isn’t a goal that is consistent across the playerbase. As Niantic makes changes and pulls back on bonuses, my philosophy has always been that it is better to enrich the wild and make outdoor exploration attractive with new ideas rather than to completely rescind bonuses. As such, an event that makes it so we want to go to the park? Terrific.
In execution, I do feel that the event ended up being too basic. There was some confusion over what constitutes a park, with Pokémon GO content creator ZöeTwoDots offering a better explanation as a player than Niantic did as the creators of the event. She noted in her video that it seemed as if Cottonee was simply taking over nests. So wherever you can find nests, Cottonee should have been spawning. Now, the major draw of nests is that you can hunt a nesting species effectively by revisiting a location while that nest is active. Some of my best memories were hitting a Skitty nest every day in an effort to catch a Shiny at my local trail, and then hitting the nearby park where Sableye was nesting. I was able to do that multiple times in a week with fresh spawns every time. With a limited two-day event, a nest replacement for Cottonee just didn’t seem to be enough. Worse still, the Cottonee feature during the weekend was at the expense of its appearance during the full event, where it was about as rare as it’d be during a non-event day.
How could this have changed? Yes, keep the park and nest idea, but also potentially make Cottonee the only spawn responding to Incense while walking. That way, we’d see an actual reason to use Incense again. Make it so Mossy Lures put up at parks create an insane amount of Cottonee spawns. Creative ideas like that which would prevent the “Welp… caught all the Cottonee” moment many of us had this weekend could’ve enriched this event.
Overall, this is the best post-COVID idea I’ve seen Niantic introduce into Pokémon GO as they attempt to get players back out in the world but as someone who is very eager to get back to outdoor gameplay myself, the execution needs work.
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