"The lucky trade economy is one of the most important in the game"

#PokemonGO: I haven't seen too much discussion of this, but if you want to maximize the quality of your Pokemon, friendship and lucky trades must now be central to your strategy, and players who live in small communities without access to large numbers of people who they can coordinate with to optimize their lucky trade activities are at yet another disadvantage relative to players in big cities.Lucky trades are the best way to get high IVsWhen you trade Pokemon, their IVs are rerolled. A standard trade with a best friend has an IV floor of 5/5/5. A raid, egg hatch or research reward will have an IV floor of 10/10/10. A lucky trade has an IV floor of 12/12/12.Think of Pokemon IVs as three dice rolls; one for each of the three stats: Attack, Defense and Stamina. The die that is being rolled for a raid or a hatch can roll a 10, 11, 12,13,14 or 15; it is like a 6 sided die.That means that there are 216 total stat combinations that can roll from a raid: 6x6x6. Of those 216, the perfect 15/15/15 roll is one possible combination and a 98% roll -- 15/15/14, 14/15/15 or 15/14/15 are three additional combinations. There are an additional 6 96% IV combinations and 10 93% IV combinations.That means 1 in 216 raids will yield a perfect IV Pokemon, 1 in 54 will yield a 98% or better, 1 in 22 will yield a 96% or better, and 1 in 11 will yield a 93% or better.Lucky trades are like rolling a 4-sided die for each stat instead of a 6. There is still the same one possible hundo, 3 possible 98 rolls, 6 possible 96 rolls and 10 possible 93 rolls, but the total set of possible stat rolls is only 64. That means that 1 in 16 lucky trades yields a 98% or better and 1 in 6.4 will yield a 96% or better.Lucky friend oddsSilph research has concluded that lucky friend odds, which makes your next trade with that friend a guaranteed lucky, are somewhere between 1 and 2%, with one chance to proc, per best friend per day on your first interaction. An interaction occurs if you open a gift from your friend, the friend opens a gift from you, you trade the friend, you raid with the friend, you and the friend attack a gym together, or you battle the friend.Each player can only open 20 gifts per day, and the gift caps are a sort of soft cap on easy friend interactions. If you are able to trade or battle with a lot of people each day, the number of chances at this are limited by the number of people you know and the amount of time you are willing to spend battling to get the interactions.If we assume the odds are 1%, and we assume you interact with 20 best friends each day, then you should get about 1.4 lucky friend procs per week. Just to be conservative, let's assume you get 1 lucky friend per week.You can also randomly proc lucky status on non-guaranteed trades. The odds of this are 1 in 20 for Pokemon caught in the last year, 1 in 10 for Pokemon caught more than one year ago, and 1 in 4 for Pokemon caught more than 2 years ago. If you raid a lot, you can gamble on a special-trade reroll of a Pokemon like Giratina or Kyogre everyday.How this works in practiceLet's say two players are free-to-play, but utilize every single free pass to do a legendary raid. One of them doesn't engage the friendship system while the other earns one lucky trade per week.Over the course of the year from raids, they can each expect 1-2 hundos, 4-5 98s, and 10-12 96s.From 52 annual lucky trades, the player who utilizes friendship will get an a likely additional hundo, a likely additional 3 98s, and probably 6 more 96s.But the difference is even more dramatic when you consider the fact that, for much of the year, the tier 5 raid is a relatively useless Pokemon, but all the lucky trades can be meta-relevant.Even more important for shiny huntersThe odds of a legendary shiny are about 1 in 19, so the odds of a particular IV combination also yielding a shiny are 1 in 19, which means that 1 in 418 raids will yield a shiny 96+, 1 in 1028 raids will yield a shiny 98+, and 1 in about 4100 raids produces the coveted shundo.Personally, I don't like powering up a shiny unless it is one of my top six candidates by stats, and that is statistically unlikely. But it becomes more likely if I reroll my shinies with lucky friend trades.If you get a lucky friend per week, you'll have to do 988 raids over the course of the year to have a shiny a week to reroll with a weekly lucky friend trade. From 988 raids, you should get 2 shiny 96+ and likely a 98, but you're only 1 in 4 for a hundo. If you lucky trade 52 shinies, you have a pretty good chance at a hundo, and you will probably get 3 98s and 6 96s, dramatically improving the expected yield of high-iv shinies from raids. That is a dramatic increase in the output of quality shinies.Don't sleep on thisDoing a guaranteed lucky friend reroll once a week is like doing 200 extra T5 raids per year in terms of the likelihood of finding very high-IV legendaries. Doing a guaranteed shiny reroll once a week is like getting 200 extra shinies per year, in terms of increasing your odds of getting high-IV shinies.And what's important to note is that the friendship system is not monetized in any way. Leveraging this system is comparable to spending at least an extra hundred dollars per year on raid passes, and doing that many extra raids. If you haven't been taking a systematic approach to getting the maximum advantage out of this, then you need to figure out how you and your friends can use this to improve your lineups. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2Oc6hYp