"How raids have affected the egg meta: a shoddy analysis"

#PokemonGO: TL:DR - the introduction and popularity of raids has diminished the reward of exploring our neighborhoods and exercising while incubating eggs for candy and Stardust. Could a reward/content shakeup in the egg meta help revitalize that facet of the game?With raids now being the biggest focus of a lot of players lately, it's my personal opinion that eggs are now much less impactful. Let's dive into the main points, shall we?before the introduction of raids the main selling point of the game was exploration and exercise mingled with the experience of AR pokemon. Very exciting and enjoyable for the majority of players. I've seen this point brought up in other threads regarding the current meta. We seem to have lost the exercise/exploration aspect. At that time, the egg Meta was at its peak, offering chances to hatch new pokemon to add to your pokedex. The hatch animation gave us anticipation after the work we put in while walking. It was fun, and put the enjoyment of the game right in our own hands. The sell of incubators aided those who spent money, and the gym meta at the time gave active F2P individuals a solid option for adding an incubator to their free ones.Cool, the game is good for now but eventually eggs won't be as exciting. We see that. Fine.now we'll jump to December 2016 and the introduction of baby pokemon and a couple of holiday pikachu variants. Eggs remain relevant with the addition of new content.February 2017, GEN II LAUNCHES. fantastic. The player base is revitalized and people jump back in, exploring their neighborhoods and likely incubating eggs while they do so. Content addition keeps eggs relevant. Seeing a theme?a couple other events happen after this time that help keep eggs relevant. Eggstravaganza, Valentine's, grass event, adventure week, etc.June 2017, the end of Pokemon Go as we know it and the beginning of something new. The gym shakeup. With it, Raids become the new meta, totally and completely. The game changes in such a way that excites many players, but larger implications hide in the shadows. We now have the opportunity to battle and catch some highly coveted monsters, but mostly only with the help of our fellow trainers. The game becomes less about exploration and exercise and more about forced social interaction and teamwork. New content is added in the form of legendary birds and beasts and kind of mewtwo (I wont speak to that nonsense here).Before these major updates, new content helped keep eggs relevant. But these changes exemplified a major change in philosophy from Niantic and The Pokemon Company. Maybe their thinking was that We'd developed a strong community amongst the remaining playerbase and social gameplay was now more important than continuing to explore the same old neighborhoods.So let's get to the point. Eggs remain a part of the game, i suspect especially for [rural] players without a full 'dex or high concentration of gyms available. Niantic acknowledges this with the incorporation of the super incubator. My main gripe as a player who is tiring of the Raid game, is that I want to walk my dog and play casually and hatch some eggs, but the eggs aren't offering nearly the same type of return as a raid. We have raid rewards, fully evolved monsters to catch, and high XP being doled out for a quick 5 minute social interaction. Meanwhile, walking our eggs and getting some exercise takes much longer to reap any rewards, and those rewards are uninspiring and largely out of our control (I just hatched a sudowoodo from a 10k after missing out on a Ttar raid because I couldn't make it in time).The Proposal: shake up the egg Meta to make walking and exploring more enjoyable and bring rural or solo players more opportunities to enjoy the game and earn rewards for their walking. If we got similar rewards for hatching an egg as we did for raids, incubator sales would once again rival those of the premium raid pass. Maybe shake up the contents of the eggs or offer an "incubatable" raid egg as part of our daily streaks (which are also more or less meaningless now). Maybe pull the incubating distance down to make the egg hatching rewards more accessible. I love casually playing this game but I also want to be competitive at solo tier 3 raids and the like. The game is separated by these two facets, heavily skewed towards raids, and I would like to see the facets brought together by a seemingly simple tweak to the egg Meta. We're nearing an endpoint in the Raid/gym meta and the egg meta is near dead. Hopefully we'll see a major change here soon.I would love to hear ideas about how we casually competitive players can shake up the way we play in order to make the game more enjoyable. Unfortunately throwing these ideas out amongst ourselves has proven to be mostly meaningless, but Niantic has had 2 main focal points for PoGo and combining them instead of further separating them could help make the game great again.Let me know what you think and hopefully we can get a good conversation going. Happy Traveling! via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2zIEbhQ