Niantic wrote the following for the announcement of Ingress Prime Day: “Plus, as part of the celebration, Trainers will have an opportunity to encounter two Shiny Pokémon that have colors matching Ingress Prime’s factions—Shiny Ponyta, which has bright blue flames, and Shiny Cubone, which has a green body!”
Nintendo Soup ahead of the event wrote: During the Ingress Prime in-game event, trainers will be able to catch a Shiny Cubone and blue Ponyta. Shiny Cubone represents the green faction, while blue Ponyta represents the blue faction in Ingress Prime.
What happens if we take this a little bit more literal and paint the following picture:
Could Pokémon Prime Day been a cross-over where Niantic used data from Ingress to determine where shiny Cubone or shiny Ponyta would hatch?
Technically this could look like the picture above. Most (all?) Pokestops in Pokémon Go are mapped to a portal in Ingress. Pokémon on the near-by scanner are mapped to the closest Pokestop. This means Niantic has access to the data to make it happen.
There are three observable bits of information that would differ in the player experience from existing events:
- Boosted shiny rates would appear different to the standard boosted shiny rate of 1 in 25 we experienced during community events
- Boosted rates would depend on where you played
- Some players will appear ‘a lot more lucky’
- Some people will have zero chance at all to get a shiny if they played in a region without active Ingress players
- The max. boosted rate (Cubone/Ponyta combined) would be 1 out of 50 but rates a lot lower (and even rates of zero) are possible
A public questionnaire shortly after the event yielded approx. shiny rates of 1 in 120 (Cubone) and 1 in 162 (Ponyta). SilphRoad Research later found nearly identical shiny rates – unfortunately they never published it.
A large number of players complained loudly about their bad luck – while another group of players seemed very lucky. Normally we chalk this up to biased reporting and random. But the main reason SilphRoad Research never published their rate was that the scatter in the data was larger as could be explained with a single shiny rate.
I proposed in two articles a shiny rate of 1 in 50 (combined with a zero rate) based on the public questionnaire data. The non public SilphRoad Research data could be explained with the 1 in 50 ratio (plus a zero rate) as well. But at the time I lacked any useful explanation for the why.
I was looking into area-based approaches based on S2 cells to explain the strange data when fellow researcher Worms made a throw away comment to me on discord – what if Cubone and Ponyta rates are related to Ingress factions. I don’t think he meant that serious. At the time I had not a clue how Ingress worked. But it seemed a hypothesis worthwhile checking as nothing else made sense.
This was more than half a year ago. I started to play Ingress originally to analyze if Pokemon Go Prime Day indeed could have been a cross-over event. Since then I got sucked into Ingress. I’m now a level 13 player who was be the Enlightened contact during the first FS event (First Saturday) in my area. I went to an anomaly (Bristol) and organized my local area during the world record for a starburst (Antwerp). I think I have a more than decent idea by now how the game works. I got a feel for the two different factions and the change over time of portals and fields.
I’m more convinced than ever that the shiny rates for Cubone and Ponyta indeed was linked to Ingress – specifically to portals ownership by Enlightened and Resistance players. I will present the reasons for the hypothesis in a list of blog posts that are part statistical analysis, part detective story, part speculation.
- Clues and corroborating evidence
- Did I overfit – the 1 in 50 drop rate investigated again
- Random follows strict rules – variance and spread
- A crime needs a motive
There is no way I can prove that I’m right. Only someone from Niantic would be able to confirm this. If anyone from Niantic would confirm/reject my write-up – that would be fantastic. Alas, I’m not counting on this. But hey – you can dream.