"How I got a level 11, 33-42% Celebi."

#PokemonGO: TL;DR: Lost my Go Fest Celebi encounter when the storage cap was prematurely enacted. Followed the instructions to submit a report with the tag #ResearchRewards, but never received it back even after the issue was marked resolved. Contacted support again and was told that Niantic is unable to recover the lost Celebi, so they simply added a Celebi to my account along with 20 candy and a premium raid pass. The Celebi is level 11, 33-42% IV, which is not supposed to be possible for a research encounter.https://ift.tt/2R4rmEc one of those people who stacked research rewards. What's that, you ask? It's when you run away from your field research bonus encounters to save them for later. It's like having free pokebox/berry storage. It's also useful to save up a lot of encounters and then catch them all at once on a starpiece during a double stardust event. Most of the time though, I would send things to the queue just to save time while grinding. This would come up when playing as a passenger in a car or bus. I don't want to miss spinning stops for more research tasks because I have to stop and catch a research reward right away.In August, when I first found out that stored research encounters were going to be capped at 100, I did my best to clear them out. I knew I was well over the limit.To complicate things, I had pre-pinap'd many of the encounters, and at the time there was a new update with a bug that caused the game to crash when loading an encounter that had been previously berried. So I knew that I had to catch all of my field research before that update was forced, or pray that the bug would be fixed prior the date that the cap was scheduled to start, or pray that the cap would be delayed until after a fix was found. At this point I was not so concerned about not being able to catch the encounters during double stardust; I wanted to make sure I didn't lose the perfects, high IV Chansey, and shiny that I had in my queue.So, I tried to catch and trade my field research rewards as fast as I could, but trading is slow. I didn't have the heart to just transfer my rewards because I had a lot of good stuff that I wanted to reroll in there, including lots of gen 1 starters which are my boyfriend's favorite. When I heard the update was released for iOS, I knew there was a high chance the update would be forced before the end of the work day. So, I made plans to meet with my boyfriend for lunch to finish getting through my queue. And that's when it happened - the update was forced in the middle of our trading session. I was crushed.So, I updated and went through some more of my rewards until I reached one with a pinap. I was then forced to wait for a fix. Niantic tweeted that they would be delaying the start of the 100 stored rewards cap because of the bug, and I had hopes that the bug would be fixed before this new date and I would be able to catch all of my rewards. But you all know what happened next: the cap was mistakenly applied early.Now this is the tragic part: not only did I lose my field research rewards, I also lost my Celebi from the Go Fest special research. I had saved my Celebi so I could have it to take cool AR pictures during my travels. (I wish I could share some cool AR photos now to make this worth it, but alas I cannot.) This really confused me, because for one thing, I didn't think that special research encounters were lumped together with field research stored encounters. For another, I had cleared my queue through the end of July (after GO Fest, which was on July 15). So, shouldn't Celebi have been at the top of my queue? I'm assuming that the cap should prevent any more pokemon from being added to the queue after a limit of 100 has been reached, so since my Celebi was my oldest saved encounter, it shouldn't have been deleted.I immediately submitted a ticket explaining the issue saying premium item didn't work (I did, after all, pay for a Go Fest Ticket). Then, when Niantic tweeted that they could restore deleted stacks if users submit a bug report using the tag #ResearchRewards, I did this. (I actually submitted two bug reports because I accidentally wrote #ReserachReward for my first report without the "s", and I really wanted to make sure they got my report.) In each of my reports, I specifically mentioned my Celebi was lost.When A Ripple In Time was released, I stopped at Step 5 and contacted support again to ask them what I should do. Because I had completed the Go Fest Special Research, I was supposed to get my Go Fest Celebi and then 20 candy from completing A Ripple In Time. So I wasn't sure what would happen if I completed A Ripple In Time: would I get a new Celebi? Or would I get the 20 candy and lose my Celebi forever? I got silence from Niantic, but I didn't stress I because figured they had many reports to process.Finallly, on October 4, I received this email:Hi there,Hang tight- we are currently in the process of restoring lost stacked Research Reward encounters. This process may take several days before you see the changes reflected in your account.Thanks for your continued patience!Regards, Abram Niantic SupportI then waited patiently for my encounters to be restored. And.. it never happened, even after the lost stored encounters bug was officially marked resolved by Niantic last week. I may have gotten some encounters back, it's hard to tell, but what I know for sure is I never got my Celebi encounter back.So, I replied to the above email explaining the situation. Yesterday, I received this email:Hi Trainer,Thanks so much for your patience and so sorry about the inconvenience. We were unable to restore the encounter for Celebi. However, we have gone ahead and added Celebi to your party with the 20 candies, and added 1 premium raid pass to your backpack.Best of luck on your journeys! Astrid Niantic SupportExcited, I checked my box, it was there! CP was covered by the "GPS signal not found (11)" bar but I couldn't wait to see its stats so I did the in-game appraisal, and there it was: not likely to make much headway in battle. I couldn't believe it. Once my signal returned I confirmed: I had an 888 CP, level 11, IV 33-42% Celebi with no location or catch date. Now, I had heard of people getting two Mew, two Celebi, research rewards that belonged to someone else, and research rewards that were a different IV than what they had originally received, but I had never heard of someone getting something below Level 15 and below 10/10/10 IV. So in the end, I got myself possibly the most rare Pokemon in the game.What I've learned from this experience is: if you get a field research encounter you really want, catch it right away! You never know what's going to happen so the safest thing to do is to catch it. Hopefully we will also be given some kind of indication of how close we are to the cap when it is enacted again. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2Ezbnwj