Niantic recently launched its Water Festival, which improved the spawn rate of all Water-type Pokémon in the game. The event also paved the way to the most awaited feature in the game, shiny Pokémon. And with the trading feature brewing on the horizon, players could expect more shinies to come - and they'll going to be very rare. Here's why.
Pokémon GO : Shiny Pokémon
The debut of shiny Magikarp and Gyarados marked the introduction of the most-awaited feature in Pokémon GO, shiny Pokémon. Similar to how the original series work, encountering a shiny Pokémon in the wild also takes a lot of time and effort. Many players are theory-crafting the exact encounter rate of shiny Magikarp and one of the most popular notions is that Niantic mirrors the shiny system from the original series, which is proved to be 1 out of 4096 encounters. However, others believe that the numbers are much lower than that.
Rare Shiny Pokémon And Trade System
Earlier today, John Hanke was interviewed regarding the trading system in the game, to which he replied "Trading won't be through the Internet. You shouldn't be able to exchange your Pokémon with someone who is 100 miles away from you... The person needs to be in your proximity."
Now, how does this correlate to rare shiny Pokémon? Well, that's simple. The rarer the shiny Pokémon are, the higher the effectiveness of trading becomes, which consequently, leverages the trading and monetary system of the game. Furthermore, since there is no GTS, players will have to trade Pokémon, which can also be found by the other and so, it only makes sense to make these shiny Pokémon to be much rarer in order to make trading viable in the first place.
The addition of the shiny variants is a smart business move from Niantic. The game had basically been revived from the ashes of its former glory. And so, it's evident that the company will make rarer shinies in order to encourage activity and traffic for their flagship and critically acclaimed title, Pokémon GO.
