"Egg Events, Stat Events, and Wild Events"

#PokemonGO: Let me preface this by saying the Water Festival Event may have been my favorite Pokemon GO event thus far. I liked Halloween a lot too, but I can't even remember which event gave us double star dust, and I remember being really frustrated with half of the New Year's event. I feel like many other players have voiced similar opinions, so it got me thinking about why.Egg events (meaning the content is limited to hatching eggs) feel like gambling. I've had no problem with this in old school MMOs where you couldn't (easily) buy in-game money with real world cash, but in games where you can, it feels cheap.Stat events (meaning double xp, candy, or dust or longer timers, such as on lures) don't exactly feel "fun," but the effects are. I hadn't realized just how much dust and candy I'd gotten from certain events until I compared my roster with another long time player who'd skipped them. Being able to power up some favorite Pokemon rather than just high tier ones is cool, even if at the time it felt a bit mundane.Wild events (where there's a change in the local variety) are the most salient though, since most of the game revolves around catching and battling. A good wild event gives everyone something cool to hunt for and helps shake-up stale meta scenes.I think this is why a lot of people enjoyed the Halloween event and Water festivals. Even though I live near a water biome, the new variety was great. Compared to Valentine's Day, which had part of it's featured Pokemon limited to eggs, Halloween and the Water festival had more of an immediate impact on what we visually saw. However, Valentine's Day also gave many people (who were lucky enough to be in the right biomes) access to more Chanseys, which probably is part of the reason Gen 2's launch made the gym scene kind of painful (in addition to Niantic making combat much slower for a time).That being said, we're seeing that this egg event is also getting more people to pay for the game: http://ift.tt/2pnVrkY does need to make money, but I really wish there was another method, like dyes to color our Pokemon. Those who may remember the Stadium/Coliseum games may recall that, before shinies, there were other color variants: http://ift.tt/2oCJTw1, I think what Niantic could do in the future is focus more on events where players can CATCH special/unique Pokemon instead of just hatching them. However, if Niantic can't monetize customization/skins instead of incubators, the company could just try to replicate Valentine's Day and New Years' events by introducing egg based rewards in addition to wild Pokemon. While stat increases lead to "long term" fun, they don't seem quite as effective at capturing player imagination as ones where we interact with new 'mon in the field. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2oJuydu