What led to the shorter C-Days?

Here’s what you need to know:

Before the Corona bonuses, Community Days in Pokémon GO already only ran for a duration of 3 hours. At the start of the pandemic, the event time was doubled. Players who started with Pokémon GO during the last 2 years know it no differently.

These are the new details:

After the interview with Michael Steranka was published and he stated “One of the reasons that made us re-evaluate the Community Day format was the requests from trainers to reset it to three hours” and “only less than 5% of players participate in a Community Day for more than 3 hours”, trainers wanted more info about it. On Twitter, user JreSeawolf, who is well known in the community of TheSilphroad, writes as the voice of the community towards Niantic and directly to Steranka.

JreSeawolf thoroughly addresses all of the concerns mentioned, including saying that they are completely misinterpreting the “5%” data. “The 5% are probably the players who only want to play for 3 hours” (via Twitter.com). He asks the Pokémon GO team to reconsider this decision.

To this, Michael Steranka responds in several tweets, explaining:

Hey @JreSeawolf – thanks for the tag and for the honest feedback on this article. There were a few things I shared in this interview that unfortunately didn’t make it into the final story, but I’m happy to share them here to give full context.

One of the reasons that prompted us to rethink the Community Day format was the coaches’ desire to shorten it to 3 hours. After receiving that feedback, we looked at our data and found that less than 5 percent of players played longer than 3 hours on Community Days.

This number drops to less than 2 percent for sessions of 4 hours or more. In addition, we were shocked when we compared the 6-hour Community Days to the 3-hour Community Day Classic and found that participation was nearly identical.

It became clear that while it is less convenient, if you announce it well in advance, trainers can schedule the 3-hour Community Days and participate just as often as they do for the 6-hour.

We really want to make this event as good as it can be, and we’re really excited to create a more focused experience where coaches can meet in the real world while earning as many rewards in half the time.

This is a test to see how things play out, but we hope that trainers will agree that these changes are for the best when they attend the upcoming Community Day in April.

Also, I’d love to meet you for a drink sometime and chat a bit! But until then, I’d love to talk to you on the phone to discuss more if you’d like. Send me a DM if you’re interested.

“You don’t open a fast food restaurant for just 20 minutes a day”

That’s the problem with trainers: The rationale for shortening Community Day again is not palatable to coaches. They can’t find their way through the logic.

In a reddit thread centered around Steranka’s recent tweets, user mason240 writes, “I think I need to state the obvious here first. I’m not buying it and it doesn’t make any sense at all.” He is referring to the statement that coaches are said to have requested the shorter community days. “Let’s say you’ve always played Community Days from 11:00 to 12:00. Why would you mind if they ran for 6 hours?”

To that end, coaches, in emphasizing that Community Day in April is now just a test for now, consider the special circumstances of the test.

• Past Community Days have featured Sandan, Hoppspross, and Seemops. Pokémon that have long been available in the game
• April’s Community Day brings a brand new Pokémon, Velursi, which debuts at the event. In addition, the development is quite expensive with 400 candies and you have to catch a lot of Pokémon for it.

Now trainers believe that these special circumstances distort test results and cause participation to shoot up unnaturally due to the release of the new Pokémon.

“This is a poorly designed test (which may even be intentional). Velursi is already a far more desirable CD candidate than previous ones and a perfect FOMO machine [FOMO steht für Fear of missing Out – also die Angst, etwas zu verpassen]. The introduction of a brand new Pokemon family (the first time ever for CDs) – with 400 candies to evolve – will already have many players playing the full 3 hours, even though they don’t normally do so, so they can evolve one or more Kosturso. A better test would be to play a 3-hour CD with a similar candidate as a base, such as Kleinstein or Sleima,” writes Teban 54 on reddit.

User milo4206 shows why Niantic’s reasoning is so incomprehensible with two brilliant examples.

• Example 1: Gym owner: “We found out that only 5% of our members do their workout for more than one hour. That’s why we now only open the gym for one hour per day.”
• Example 2: Fast food chain owner: “We found out that only 5% of our customers spend more than 20 minutes in the store, so we now only open our dining area for 20 minutes per day”

What are your thoughts on the Community Days changes? Do you think it’s a good idea to compress the event into a few hours so you have a chance to meet multiple trainers again, or do you think the 6 hours for the event was appropriate? Write us here on MyMMO in the comments what you think about the changes and vote in our poll here in the article which format suits you best.