That didn’t appear to strain anyone too much. Over the weekend, developer Niantic Labs set a goal for Pokémon trainers playing Pokémon GO all around the world: to complete a total of 15 million research tasks to unlock a bunch of special rewards: the goal was to complete 5 million tasks each for Asia/Pacific, the Americas and Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Research tasks are a new addition to the game, and completing them is a little more complicated than last year’s relatively straightforward Global Catch Challenge. Still, worldwide trainers handled their mission with aplomb, particularly the Asia/Pacific region, which managed its goal before those in the Americas had much of a chance to wake up. And now we’ve unlocked the final reward for this stage of Pokémon GO’s summer tour: a chance at a Shiny Articuno next Saturday, June 7.
Articuno Day might seem like sort of a lame reward for top-level players that have had an Articuno in their Pokédexes for just about a year now–the Ice-type isn’t a particularly useful Legendary, even. But there are a few things that will make this fun. For one thing, everyone gets five free Raid Passes, which means that even free-to-play trainers that don’t usually get the chance to go out and hammer a big day of Raids will be able to join a roving pack of players to knock out some raids. For another we’ve got double lucky egg duration and double raid XP, meaning that completing said raids with a lucky egg on could grab you somewhere in the vicinity of 200,000 XP, which isn’t too shabby for those of us that have yet to hit up to level 40. And then, of course, we’ve got the fact that the thing will be showing up shiny, all of which should be enough to ensure solid enough numbers out on the street. That’s mostly all I ask out of an event like this: that the rewards are enticing enough to bring people out to play.
It’s not entirely the event that I was expecting, but that’s alright. Next up it appears we’ll be getting the Celebi unlock quest, though I’ve still got to catch my Ditto for my Mew quest. Which is good news going forward, mostly because it indicates that we’ll be getting something more valuable at the end of all this. Gen 4, perhaps? Or maybe even a prize applicable to the upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite? We’ll see. It’s been a perfectly pleasing event so far.
