"What's your personal goal in PoGo and how does it change your experience?"

#PokemonGO: Inspired by u/Exaskryz's great post on planning in PoGo and the implications for game design and player experience, I decided to start this discussion on personal goals in PoGo. I will give some examples of relatively unique goals that I and some of my friends have set and I invite everyone to share theirs.PoGo is open-ended meaning you set your own goals in game and then devise plans and work your way towards those goals. Having personal goals adds new layers to the game and helps retain interest and motivation. It also promises feelings of accomplishments when you achieve those goals or reach milestones.The most common type of goals is probably finishing various dexes: regular dex, shiny dex, lucky dex, living dex, etc. and these are easy to track and are often effective at keeping you engaged in the game.But I would like to share with you a few more less common goals that I and my friends have.First, my long term goal has been to max the top 6 raid counters for each type. The idea is to have teams of unique counters in raids so they feel less stale. It's also a more interesting grind than getting, say, 6 maxed Mewtwos/Rayquazas. I now have 46 unique species (62 individuals) of pokemons maxed and most of them are the top raid counters of their type. As a strict F2P, this goal has made my game play more enjoyable and psychologically more rewarding.Second, lately I've had a new goal: max and best buddy all the "useful" Mega Evolutions. I have marked about 30-35 Mega's as potentially useful and have maxed 20 of them and best buddy'ed 9 and 8 more are on their way. I would have completed more of them if the Mega system was not such a let down and dampened my enthusiasm...Third, a friend of mine has this as one of his (many) goals in the game: collecting "Battle Legends", which are mons that are maxed, double moved, best buddy'ed, uniquely named, and have won over 1000 battles (as shown on the gym pre-battle screen). This is a pretty unique and ambitious goal and he now has 85 of those (yes, he has best buddy'ed 85 pokemons). And from what I can tell, he enjoyed this process immensely.Fourth, another friend of mine has this goal of catching 100 (as shown on the dex entry, so trading also counts) of each released species that are confirmed to spawn in the wild. He has accomplished the goal for 90%+ of all released species, including things like Gyarados and Metagross. Many people in our community knows about his goal and have been feeding him mons for years to help with his progress.Fifth, another friend of mine loves Swablu and Altaria and collects all of them. One of her goals is to have a living cp dex of Swablus: have every possible cp of Swablu in her storage.This is just a taste of what personal PoGo goals might look like and how different they can be. You can probably imagine how having these goals give people vastly different experience, mentality, and motivation in game. It might be a little sad that sometimes we need to depend on these personal goals rather than good game design to keep us interested and motivated, but it is an open-ended game and we might as well make the most out of it.Share your own goals and experience in the comments and you may inspire someone else to do the same or find people who have already been doing similar things. Hopefully this post will make everyone's gameplay slightly more interesting. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/348nIlP