my little town got our first level 40 on the last day of this event. was pretty cool. he avoided all actions for most of the day and showed up at an evening raid with 999,950 or whatever so the ho oh raid put him over the top. we've got 2 other 39s, and maybe 5 38s me included.

he created the town x 40s club and proclaimed that all future members would have to do an edward 40 hands as part of their induction ceremony. he is exempt as founding member. sounds fair.

we're all happy for him and proud that our rural town finally got someone over the finish.

to whoever mentioned above about how to possibly make 40 or spending thousands of dollars or whatever, i think theres 2 large factors. location - being in a city is huge. being rural like us is a struggle. somebody up there was talking about doing 5 legendary raids in an hour. lol, my town doesn't get 5 legendary raids in a whole day. so when comparing you shouldnt necessarily compare yourself against randos on the internet, try to compare against people in similar situation as you.

the other is team. our first 40 is team valor, which in our area dominates. that means for the entire fall/winter/spring he had a guaranteed 100 coins every day for very little work. thats 3000 coins a month, like 20k coins for free before the gym rework happened. team instinct and mystic (me) had to take down 10deep towers just to get 10 coins, so during that time period where he got 20k coins, i probably got 2000.

that buys a TON of lucky eggs, incubators, everything. every time we'd do a raid, he's always popping a lucky egg. whenever we've got our downtown area with 6 pokestops lured and are hangin out, he pops a lucky egg. he's often got all 9 eggs in incubators. and he's never spent a dime on the game. he's just on the right team.

for getting xp fast - location is huge. then within a single location, which team you are on is huge for how much free stuff you get.

I'm on that Animal Crossing life now: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/7...-camp-1697373/

I had no idea that shiny Shuppets were out. I knew that shiny duskull and sableye were out so i guess i should have known. Still it took me by surprise when i found this guy this morning

Halfway home on level 39. Haven’t spent too much and can confirm being in a city helps

**** y'all and your shinies.

Yeah, one thing that still eludes me is a shiny. I'm a little miffed given that my wife has 2 and somewhat more miffed about the fact that I have seen casuals on our local Facebook group with like 5. And I only really care out having a red Gyrados, don't care all that much about any other shiny.

Somebody posted this on Discord. GPS told me it was 26m away with ~27m left on the spawn. It was in the parking lot of some random office building and I saw at least a dozen cars there lol. Apparently there is a medal for catching 3/10/26 which I didn’t know about until now lol.

Agreed. Have enough candies for a 3rd Gyrados but I’m holding off till I get a shiny. I’d probably like a shiny Pikachu too. Not super concerned with the Gen3 shinies.

At least 50 Gen III Pokemon being released this week (possibly as soon as today), in case anyone missed it. Also new weather effects which seem cool.

https://pokemongolive.com/en/post/hoenn-pokemon

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEE

all of the lucky eggs being popped

Is there a new way of earning candy for pokemon? I only had1 blissy with 1 candy but now she has 2. I haven't caught any or used any rare candy so it wasn't from that. And she's a low enough level that 2 candies powers her up. I would have already powered her up. I use her in gyms a lot can you get candy from extended gym defense?

Also this new update is fantastic.

You can walk her as a buddy, but I don't think you can use your buddy as a defender.

When you feed a berry to one in a gym there's a small chance of getting a candy with your stardust.

Sorry my bad posting made that really confusing. I meant to say I found I had an extra candy I didn't have before. But after some googling I see you can get candy if you feed berries to pokemon at gyms on rare occasions. Which makes sense cuz I've been mass feeding berries at all my regular gyms, trying to turn them gold.
I knew you got item bonuses for being in a gym but I just recently learned about the extra items and extra CP after turning the gyms gold.

Little something the local trainers did to send Ho-Oh off (used only Sudowoodo to battle it down):
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoa...t_fire_turkey/

Also, a link to my video of the battle (longer and not as nicely formatted as the Silph Road post):
https://youtu.be/qxMw_ByyETY

My wife and I are able to duo Absol (and Tyranitar under the right weather now) so we took a video of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_A8rB5iYf8

Also, caught 15 of 19 attempted Groudon already. Local group is planning to raid on whatever our local sunny day will be to get weather boosted Groudon later this week. I did have one Groudon run on me with 9 golden curve excellent throws in a row.

Yeah, sunny days are a dime a dozen here, but today, just as we wrapped up errands and went to raid, it switched to windy. Getting the level 25 critter instead of 20 from a raid is amazing. I thankfully got a Ho-oh boosted this way, too, and now it's awesome against boosted Groudons.

Meh, getting pretty jaded with these "legendary" raids. I was happy for a day when there was no tier 5 raids whatsoever and secretly hoped that some change would be introduced to the raid system. But no, the same old boring show must go on.

For once, I am a bit on the same side of this as you. I was looking forward to getting some Absol raids in, perhaps grinding my first shiny poke out.

That said, I get the raid-system and the new weather system. The strongest players were getting significantly stronger than average and a massive multiplayer game like this survives by leveling the playing field for casual players.

I think the system is at the point where you can't make it all that much easier for weak players though. I mean raids made it easy for people to get meta-relevant pokemon at L20 like Tyranitar and Machamp, along with candy (and rare candy!) so that these could be powered up. Now if people don't want to put in the work on improving these guys, they can catch up to L35 outright with weather bonuses involved (my current mission is to grab L30+ Machops so that I might have the strongest Machamp). Want a strong Gyarados? Wait until it is raining and go to your local water biome.

I just hope all this means that the features I really want, which would be PvP occur.

Last thing, I am getting to the point where I hope they NEVER introduce trading unless they severely limit it, like force the pokemon to L1 with random IVs in order to trade it. I mean I have a L40 100 IV Mewtwo. Can you imagine what hardcore players would pay to have that beast in their dex? Not so attractive though if you aren't all that likely to keep something nearly as awesome and you have to power it up all over again. Again, it is already too easy for casual players to catch up in strength, and outright trades would exaggerate this problem uncontrollably.

I may not have an ex raid pass yet but i just hatched my 2nd 100% dratini

Niantic doesn't look to be too creative or distributive with which gyms get ex raids. The best plan I think is to find gyms that had ex raids a week ago and raid them once during the next week. Gyms with ex raids seem to get them every other week or so, and they give out passes to a subset of players who had raided that gym within the past week before the passes go out.

Did 20 Groudon raids on Wednesday since it was the only day that was forcast as sunny for the entire 10-day weather calendar. I missed catching ONLY one of the twenty attempted Groudon for a 95% catch-rate on the day (85% overall). I caught two 98 IV Groudon, one at 15/14/15 (2905 CP) and the other at 14/15/15 (2900 CP). Great day.

We had TWO so far in our city. We don't have any sponsored stops, but a active pokemon community. I raided at one place like two days before the invitation was given out and still didn't get in.

Weather boosts are awesome. Picked up a 100% IV level 35 machop yesterday. Instantly one of my best critters for 124 candy, one charge TM, and zero stardust.