"Mixed In-Game/IRL Scavenger Hunt"

#PokemonGO: Knowing that the time between Christmas and New Year was not likely to have a ton of activity we decided to create our own in-game/in-real-life event. It was a bit of a Scavenger Hunt mixed with Raids and grinding. We played yesterday with about 25 players and it was a lot of fun. For anyone who might want to run a similar event here is an overview of what we did:We anticipated bad weather, so we played inside a shopping area. It turned out that the weather was fantastic, but it wasn’t really feasible to change locations at the last minute.I will say that if you have a lot of trainers who usually play outdoors and in parks the marble floors of a shopping mall might wear them out a bit. 12,000 steps on a marble floor is way different than on a walking trail.We had 30 items on the task list. 20 were in-game such as spin a stop, catch a Pokémon, catch an ice type, etc. 10 were out of the game and selected based on the location of the event such as ‘take an AR picture of a Pokémon with an IRL version of the same Pokémon, get a picture of a Pokémon in a IRL Crown (2 places in the mall have paper crowns), get an AR picture with one of the moderators, etc. You could play in teams or solo, and it didn’t make a ton of difference which was you played.We used screen shots to capture statistics before the event to make calculating scores at the end easier. We only planned on checking the winners screen shots or if there was some crazy dispute – that has never been an issue for us in the past and was not this time either. Winners got 3D printed medals, we had enough for everyone with one special one for the real winnger.A few lessons we learned that we will adjust for next time, and you should consider if you run a similar event:Gotchas, Pluses, etc. - These devices have too much of an impact. For example, I managed to max out the points allowed for Pokestop spins and catching Pokémon with no real effort, so I was able to focus on other tasks. Most players didn’t have them, and it impacted their scores. We can either run 2 leagues for the next event of ask people not to use these devices.Pay-to-win. We were careful not to use items that were pay to win but a few of our tasks could be executed as pay to win. We didn’t do hatching eggs for example and mimimized the impact of raids. But we had some challenges. For example, we had one ‘obtain a movie ticket stub’ – the thinking was you would ask someone leaving the theatre or get one from the trash. A few people only considered purchasing a ticket. We also had a task ‘obtain a new piercing or tattoo’ which was totally a joke, but someone got a piercing.Feedback from the players – the people who participated liked the in-real-life stuff the best and we will add more content like that in future events. We usually play in parks with walking trails and will have to really think about what sort of things we can do there.I’d be interested in hearing from anyone else who has run events like this how theirs went and what advice they might have for us. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://bit.ly/2LDifJb