Definitely including dupes, I got rid of tons of dupes from events but the spawn pool was so limited you were bound go get more. I was dedicated enough to grind out wild shinies, but if it was locked behind incubators or raids, forget about it.

Its a collectors game with nothing good to collect. This might seem like a silly take, and with 813 pokemon now in the game, it should be. But the way pokemon are laid out in this game is just horrendous.

In the main series games, you LOOK for pokemon. You might just wander around the grass for a while and take what you get, but at some point, you have a shopping list. In order to find specific pokemon, you go to a specific location. You find the pokemon you are looking for, often with others similar in type.

Well, in pokemon go, this isn’t the case at all. There are maybe 20-40 pokemon in the spawn pool at any given time. Go somewhere, ANYWHERE around you, and you are going to see more of the same. Once you have them, you wait for the next spawn rotation (sometimes thats 1 month, sometimes its 8) or events. The events are somewhere between 3 hours and 1 week long, and then you might actually have some cool shit, and the game is exciting for a bit. But after that, its back to the same old bullshit.

Now the game is just about collecting shinies. This is really what niantic has tried to monetize. The (often only) way to get them is to either hatch eggs (buying incubators) or doing raids (buying raid passes). The other way to get them is by doing certain events where they hand them out like candy. I stopped a couple years ago when i had well over 300 shinies, because there just wasn’t a point anymore. The whole “cool collectible” factor came from them being rare, if everyone gets them in events, why is it special?

This is probably part of it. Wasn’t the first one like $30 on release anyway? Ill gladly pay another $30 for updated graphics, refined mechanics, new characters and a story.