Team Instinct

Celebrate the Equinox! 

Trainers,

From 1:00 P.M. PDT on September 22 to 1:00 P.M. PDT on October 2, 2017, you’ll earn double Stardust for catching Pokémon and hatching Eggs. Be sure to visit your local PokéStops/Gyms to collect special 2 km Eggs that have the opportunity to hatch Pokémon such as Chansey, Mareep, Larvitar, and more. There will also be special boxes from the in-game shop that feature items like Lucky Eggs, Lure Modules, and all-new Super Incubators which hatch Eggs 1.5 times quicker!

Now he starts every phone call with a Pokemon update. He gets all the names wrong and asks me what a Dragonite is called every time he brings up the “fat fighting orange dragon”

“I have a cool pineapple head now!”

“I was down to my last stripey ball trying to catch the blue dragon snake. I told him if he ran away I was gonna be so mad.”

“And the gym had one of those big fat orange dragons!” (he still can’t remember what a Dragonite is called)

BUT THEN. but then. he’s also like, OUTRAGEOUSLY into it now? He’s level 27 and talks about how “the gym wars are brutal, babe,” and how long it takes to take down a level 10 gym? (LEVEL T E N)

And a couple weeks ago he called me to talk about the merits of the old-style Gyrados (which he pronounces guy-rad-os sorry I can’t stop him) that has the dragon breath move, versus the new ones that don’t because Niantic made a change. And he has like 6 Gyrados because his work is by a Magikarp nest or something? HOW MANY fucking magikarp do you catch for 6 gyrados? He’s about to evolve two more. H E L P.

and he says shit like, “Learning about individualized values really radicalized my thinking.” and he means it. Before he evolves ANY pokemon he googles CP estimates and has a pokemon calculator??

This morning he called me because he finally has enough Dratini candy to evolve a fat fighting dragon and wanted to talk about which Dragonair he should evolve. (One with high CP but bad IVs, one with medium-high CP, but okay IVs, and one with the lowest CP of the 3, but A+ IVs) And at this point he’s so far beyond my skill with the game (he’s been higher-leveled than me for months now) that I don’t even know what to tell him. I literally can’t advise him.

Team Instinct. I told him I was Team Valor when I first told him about the game and he was like, “Okay I’ll join your team babe!”

And then idk he forgot?? And when his account crashed after a week he did a Pikachu restart (that should have tipped me off about the impending obession tbh) and he picked Instinct again.

I ain’t even mad bruh. He so clearly belongs in Instinct. He’s happy there. It’s his natural habitat. Before work he goes and meets up with some other Instinct people to take the Georgetown Cupcake gym in DC. It’s super cute.

Then he goes to work and keeps the game open so he can grab Magikarp every couple minutes. Apparently his work is like ON a friggin nest.

He keeps his Pokemon Go habit a secret at work. Nobody knows. On his lunch break, he says, “hey I’m gonna go for a walk” and goes on a 12-pokestop loop. He makes sure to hit up the local Dratini and Pikachu nests (the presence of which is UNFAIR AF). He also take a few minutes to reinforce ‘his’ gym, by which point has been under attack a few times.

At work, he keeps his phone on data instead of wifi (he has unlimited data. For some godforsaken reason he went through 30GB/mo BEFORE Pokemon Go.) because that means his avatar jumps around a bit more?? He says he opens and closes the app a few times to reset it and get the GPS connection to reset and nab him a few pokemon.

He has 114 Pikachu candy. I hate him. Apparently he’s watching the anime almost every night. He’s on season 2. I think he’s just gonna go through and watch it A L L which is a prospect so terrifying it needs no explanation.

Out of the 6 Gyrados he’s evolved, he’s kept the top 3. He sent me some screencaps the other day of his current top-contender Magikarp and the pokedex entry, where you can see he’s caught 585 of them.

Five hundred eighty five. Who tf has TIME for that??

Apparently he still hasn’t decided which Magikarp to evolve.

He has started wearing yellow shoes for #TeamInstinct pride lol:

He’s still wearing the shoes. He loved the keychain because he’s a DORK.

He’s level 34 now. 1.12 million xp. 1.25 million to level 35.

He estimates he’ll make level 35 by the first week of July. He joined on July 13 last year and would like to be at 35 by then. He still hasn’t spent a single penny on the damn game and is very proud of that.

His favorite from gen2 is Blissey, who he says is his “best gym defender” and he’s 8 candies away from powering up another high cp Chancy, so then he’ll have 2.

Another gen2 fave is “Hounder” along with “Umbrreon” and Espeon. He’s got a steelix, politoad, “the other slowbro type” and “multiples of those metal coat sunstone kings rock upgrade stuff”. Recently he got “that feriligator” and a typlosion. Not gen2, but he has a “really nice chariZard”

He was SUPER mad about the gym update since he had like 7 pokemon in gyms when it hit, but it hasn’t staunched his fervor. He’s just been buckling down and doing his best. He’s been saying stuff like “I have one raid pass waiting for a raid alert to pop” and I literally don’t know what that means??

But I know what you really want to know. What’s his magikarp situation??

He’s caught 1885 Magikarp.

That’s why he has so many gyrados and over 2k worth of candy. He says he has 5 “really nice” carp he could evolve if he wanted to. But… he doesn’t need to. I mean, look:

He described this as his “navy” and I think it’s pretty well stocked.

Also yes he caught a shiny: (older screencap so that’s why there’s fewer candies)

Wow.

Does he have a red Gyarados??

I’m LIVE on Twitch!  🐝🐛

Here I am in the Midland airport, doing my first raid battle ever, and no one else joined

The first huge update to Pokémon GO has been announced. This confirms that the Johto Pokémon are to come to Pokémon GO from today. Trainers around the world will have the opportunity to add Togepi, Pichu and select Pokémon originally discovered in the Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver video games to their Pokémon GO Pokédex through EEggs at Poké Stops. In addition to that, starting from today to December 29th, a special Pikachu wearing a festive hat will be findable for players. The press release implies that more Pokémon will be added as we go through early 2017

Pikachu has been spotted wearing a festive hat! Now until Dec. 29th at 10am PST, explore the world to discover this limited edition Pikachu.

Pokémon GO is in the process of being updated to version 0.49.1 for Android and 1.19.1 for iOS devices. Below are some release notes and comments from our development team.

Trainers will be able to transfer multiple Pokémon at a time to Professor Willow. To use this function, press and hold on a Pokémon.

Pokémon type icons have been added to the Gym battle approach and Gym battle screen.

The total Candy count for your Buddy Pokémon has been added to the buddy information screen.

The total kilometers a buddy has walked has been added to the information screen of each Pokémon that has ever been your buddy.

Minor text fixes.

Ditto can now be found in the wild in Pokémon GO 

Until today, the Pokémon Ditto was not available in the Pokémon GO game. However, it has started to appear for people around the world. When you capture a Pokémon, it’s possible that you will get a notification saying “Oh?” and informing you that the Pokémon you caught was in fact a Ditto.

Pokémon GO Celebration Event: starting November 23rd at 00:00 UTC and going through November 30th 00:00 UTC, all experience and stardust gained from all actions in-game will be doubled.