Earlier this week, Niantic released Pokémon from the Unova region for the first time in Pokémon GO. However, the developers are being awfully stingy with spawn rates, and it’s killing hype for the new update.
The new Pokémon GO update was released on Monday and included a subset of the Pokémon from the 5th generation of the main series. Players were mostly happy with the first day of the new update, but it seems that after the initial release, Niantic lowered the spawn rate of the new Pokémon. Players have reported not encountering any Unova Pokémon whatsoever after the first day of the event. In addition, Niantic has lowered the shiny encounter rate. This will affect the ability to encounter shinies of any Pokémon, but this especially affects these new Pokémon that players haven’t gotten as much of a chance to find yet.
Of course, players are upset by these changes. Multiple reddit users on the Pokémon GO subreddit have expressed disappointment in their inability to find any of the new Pokémon in the wild, especially after the spawn rate drop at the end of the first day of the update.
Two factors make this problem worse. One is the fact that there just aren’t that many Unova Pokémon to be found in the wild. Add to that the fact that some of the Pokémon are regional only and some can only be hatched from eggs, that means that very few Pokémon can be encountered in the wild. There’s also an issue with the growing number of Pokémon currently in the game. Even assuming that Niantic has only reduced the spawn rate of the new Unova Pokémon to make them comparable to Pokémon of other generations, that means that they have to compete with hundreds of other Pokémon to get a chance to spawn at any given location.
There’s an easy solution for this: Niantic should set the Unova Pokémon spawn rates at a higher percentage for a few weeks to allow players to get a chance to encounter some of them – at least some of the more common ones. Hopefully Niantic implements some solution, or they risk losing player interest in future Unova updates.