I Haven't Forgotten about Six-Hour Community Days

And no, those Raid Eggs after the three-hour Community Days are done don't count.

Sandshrew Community Day, which featured both the Kanto and Alolan forms of Sandshrew, was the last of the six-hour Community Days. A moment of silence for the fallen, please.

Incense Day is one of my favorite types of events in Pokémon GO. The emphasis is on catching Pokémon, and because you need to use Incense, an item that attracts Pokémon to your location, you have to walk around to extract the greatest utility from your Incense and maximize your spawns. In other words, it literally gets you going.

After the first ever Incense Day in April 2020, which featured Sentret, a monotype Normal Pokémon, every subsequent Incense Day has featured a Pokémon which is either dual-type or learns moves of a type different from its own. In line with the theme, additional spawns of those two types will also be attracted to Incense.

The combinations have been fun and varied. Carvanha Incense Day brought a mix of Dark- and Water-type Pokémon to the table. Beldum Incense Day saw an uptick in Psychic- and Steel-type Pokémon. Swinub Incense Day? Ground and Ice spawns. If you play Pokémon, you get the idea. These Incense-based events alternate between the two featured types across their duration. During the most recent Incense Day, which featured Ferroseed, the Thorn Seed Pokémon, there were rotating periods devoted to selected Grass-type and Steel-type spawns. If you missed the initial block of either, no need to worry—they’d come back around again.

Like I said, I enjoy Incense Days for the ability to simply walk around and catch Pokémon. All in all, they’re relaxing, and the stakes are low noting that this kind of event isn’t inherently competitive and is structured in a way to be forgiving to players, even if it requires the sacrifice of one or more Incenses to participate. One of the best elements of Incense Days, though, has nothing to do with the activity itself, but rather the scheduling parameters: they run for six hours.

“Six hours?” you say. “That sounds like a lot.” It does, dearest reader, but remember—the featured types alternate. Going back to Ferroseed Incense Day, Grass-type spawns were relegated to Hours One, Three, and Five, while Steel-type spawns occupied Hours Two, Four, and Six. If you were really determined, you could play all six hours. If you’re an old man like me, you could play the first two hours, have lunch, maybe take a nap, and go back out again if you really felt compelled. The world was your Cloyster.

So yeah, the flexibility of Incense Days appeals to my geriatric sensibilities, and with this in mind, I wish they were more frequent inclusions on the Pokémon GO docket. Alas, since its inception in spring of 2020, Incense Day has only occurred seven times. Its relative paucity frustrates me, quite frankly. Moreover, this scarcity only makes me think about when Community Days were six hours in length and how Niantic put the kibosh on that under—let’s call a spade a spade—shaky pretenses.

For the uninitiated and those new to the game, PoGO once upon a time held six-hour Community Days marked by near-ubiquitous spawns of one Pokémon species with boosted Shiny rates. This was not always the case, mind you. When it premiered in January 2018 with a special version of Pikachu that knows the move Surf, Community Day lasted three hours. Admittedly, I didn’t even have the event on my radar. I was strolling through the mall, carefree and maskless, when I noticed that there were curiously an awful lot of Pikachu around. And they were—Shiny? Multiple Shinies? I had to get on Discord and tell my friends about this!

Nowadays, I have Community Days circled on my calendar. As my comment about being carefree and maskless foreshadowed, though, there’s another difference since the inaugural Community Day: COVID-19.

When it began to dawn upon America and other parts of the world that the pandemic wasn’t just going to be over in a matter of days, weeks, or months, Niantic had to make some accommodations to try to keep the ship afloat. Amid lockdowns and closures of popular hangouts, indoors and outdoors alike, they had to come up with ways for people to play Pokémon GO with limited mobility and restricted access to established points of interest.

One part of the solution was for Community Days to last twice as long and offer Incense that spawned the featured Pokémon more often while stationary. In April 2020, Niantic marketed Abra Community Day, the first instance of the six-hour version of the event, as Community Day: Play at Home Edition. After a dark month when there was no Community Day (gasp!), the modified format proved there was light at the end of the tunnel.

This was the order of Community Day for about two years. To complement boosted Shiny rates, PoGO offered boosted Incense capabilities, Research tasks that could be completed from home, and—yes—a six-hour window to enjoy these benefits. Like other Trainers, would I have encouraged the existence of a deadly global pandemic to make these bonuses a reality? Certainly not. That said, metaphorically speaking, if Pandora’s Box were already open, there might as well be some good to come out of it. On that note, why shouldn’t these COVID-era perks continue indefinitely?

Naturally, Niantic agreed. And by “agreed,” I mean that they killed six-hour Community Days and tried to explain away the reversal. Welp—so much for that.

Why cut Community Days in half when the added length was a boon to players? If I’m Niantic, wouldn’t I want my user base, you know, using my product more? According to Michael Steranka, Pokémon GO Live Game Director, at the time of the change, less than 5% of Trainers played more than three hours on Community Days, and furthermore, it was Pokémon GO players who requested the change. Even if these notions were true, however, relying on them as justifications for making Community Day less convenient fails either a test of logical scrutiny or a matter of unverifiability.

On the former count, restricting Community Day’s window of availability because a majority of players only play for three hours is silly and nonsensical. Do the majority of, say, retail store patrons use the facility for more than four hours given an eight-hour day? No. But do the companies that own these stores therefore limit their time open to only four hours? Also no. Of course not. It’s an absurd concept. Granted, if individual stores struggle or the company at large struggles, they might limit hours or close altogether. The growth of e-commerce has also definitely impacted brick-and-mortar sales. This comparison is not a perfect analog. Still, assuming we’re not talking about an entity on the verge of closure, retailers offer a range of operating hours to accommodate different lifestyles and circumstances. Steranka’s explanation here rings hollow.

On the latter count, meanwhile, the claim that the push for a return to three-hour Community Days came from the PoGO community is hard to swallow. Sure—some players may have favored a rollback, but it was unlikely that large enough swaths of the fanbase were asking for a more restrictive Community Day schedule such that it would influence a decision in that direction. Regardless of whether Steranka and Co. have the stats to back up this assertion, unless they’re willing to share those figures, this all seems capricious on the company’s part. It’s even more dubious when considering that, at the time, COVID was still a very real concern. Mind you, the pandemic hasn’t ended, but circa spring 2022, the world was yet treating it as a global health emergency. The very name “Community Day” notwithstanding, if Trainers were apprehensive about socializing, it was more than understandable. Niantic appeared woefully indifferent to such qualms. Even then, I was disappointed. On the other hand, was I shocked? Not particularly.

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Would I have asked for a global pandemic to catch more of this thing? No, and those times were terrifying. But dang it if the bonuses weren’t tight.

As is evident if you’ve followed this blog for even a short span, we Pokémon GO players have long memories, especially when we have an ax to grind. Regarding nerfs of “COVID-era” bonuses, the switch back to three-hour Community Days isn’t even the most reviled change to stick in the fanbase’s proverbial craw. I mentioned earlier that the Play at Home Edition of Community Days made use of boosted Incense that spawned Pokémon more frequently while the player remained stationary. Niantic put an end to that as well, turning the item into something that would cause a Pokémon to appear roughly once a minute to a resource one-fifth as useful. Michael Steranka touched upon this when asked at large about the rollback of these bonuses, touting the company’s adherence to its principles of getting outside, getting exercise, and getting in touch with one’s world and community. They were committed to this mission despite what it meant for lost revenue—and despite people learning to enjoy it as a way to better engage with the game over the better part of two years.

Another feature brought about by the pandemic only to be throttled back by Niantic in devastating fashion is Remote Raid Passes, a reversal of which is yet more stinging in light of its recency plus the idea that whole online Raid communities sprang up amid lockdowns only to be kneecapped more or less overnight. As with Incense, this move is bad for business, but better for Niantic’s concept of what it wants PoGO to be about over the long term. Never mind that it, like stationary Incense, was a lifeline for players with limited mobility issues. Guess the game isn’t for you saps.

I used to put money into Pokémon GO, something I’m not particularly proud of. At the height of the pandemic, I was bored and depressed, so I bought the Community Day tickets and the Community Day boxes and packs of Remote Raid Passes. To be honest, I’m still frequently bored and depressed, but not enough to warrant going back on my decision to turn free-to-play. Since then, the only time I’ve spent money on the game is to return the favor when someone else has gifted me a Community Day ticket. I never was big on Incense or Raid Pass usage, and I don’t suffer from any serious mobility issues other than being overweight, so scaling back these features hasn’t negatively impacted me quite as much as other Trainers.

Still, when the calls came to boycott, I didn’t waste much time getting behind the cause—and I haven’t looked back. Hear that, Niantic? We can act on principle too. If you hadn’t moved to eliminate quality-of-life improvements that arguably should’ve been introduced to PoGO without the advent of a deadly pandemic, and if you weren’t evidently fixated on nickle-and-diming your players like so many other mobile game developers, I might still be a full-fledged spender. You lost a paying customer.

The death of the six-hour Community Day hits different for me not only because, alongside battling, Community Day is one of the few game modes I still remotely enjoy, but because it was a decision that was even less principled than the constraints placed upon Incense and Remote Raid Passes. It was based on a mix of faulty logic and questionable statistics, ushered in at a time when an ongoing pandemic was still considered a global health emergency. I haven’t forgotten about the six-hour Community Day—and every new six-hour event held in the wake of its removal rubs salt in the wound of its absence.