While there are a lot of reports these days about the interest in Pokémon Go being in decline, there are still a lot of players out there monitoring the game and noticing subtle changes. Changes within builds of the app itself are, of course, easy to spot, however things that happen on the server side – for instance things relating to the spawning of Pokémon – tend to only become apparent when they start being discussed in the player community. From players who are interested in finding out hacks and cheats from sites like iwantcheats.net through to people who have done intense statistical analyses on Pokémon Go data, this is a game with a huge internet community, and once changes are noticed they tend to get discussed. Here, we look at the speculation around one thing that seems to be happening in the game:
Where Have All the Zubats Gone?
One thing that at least anecdotally appears to have happened for many users is a significant decrease in the number of zubats that are spawning. Zubats, in case you have never played a Pokémon franchise game, are these irritating screechy bat things that were previously popping up all the time. The problem most people had with them compared with other very common Pokémon like pidgey or caterpie, is that zubats seem to have lower catch rates – dodging or escaping pokéballs far more than the other common types. This meant you’d see them almost constantly but if you already had a decent golbat (the thing zubats evolve into), you probably wouldn’t want to try and catch them because it would often waste a lot of balls. This meant a lot of frustrating encounters where a Pokémon was there but you just didn’t want to catch it. The frustration at zubats became a feature of Pokémon Go player culture, with all kinds of jokes and memes going around about them, however at some point in August, zubat spawnings seemed to decrease dramatically for many people.
Are Niantic Responding to the Community?
Niantic may be making tweaks to spawn rates in response to the user community. While many of the things users are crying out for like trading and P2P battling require complicated new releases to implement, something like ‘give us less of these stupid zubats’ is a simple server side tweak. Could it be that they are changing the way Pokémon spawn to try and give the users a better time and keep them playing?
The Crobat Theory
Another reason why they may have set zubats to be less ubiquitous concerns the possibility that they will introduce second generation Pokémon in the near future. In generation II the zubat line gets another evolution after golbat called crobat. Because players will need a lot of zubat candy to evolve to crobat, it may just be that they want to make it less likely that everyone will have been able to stockpile zubat candy in advance and get crobat on the first day the generation is released, making it a less interesting and desirable Pokémon.
Have you noticed a change in the frequency of zubats or any other Pokémon? Let us know in the comments.
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