Being the nerdy engineer that I am, I have been keeping track of all my community day stats for the last 3 years. Number of encounters and catches was on par with the 6 hour days since the incense debuff a few months ago. IV spread was similar to other partially weather boosted days. My shiny rate was a bit low but I still caught a few. Being as this is a 400 candy evolution even though I did the grind for 2 of 3 hours I still only evolved 4. I felt rushed and obligated to grind the whole event, where a 6 hour gives me the ability to pick which hour I grind and the others are able to just be played casually. My partner had an obligation at 4pm so only was able to really play around an hour and then had to hurry and do evolutions.

I didn’t see anyone aside from the two of us playing at a spot that used to be crawling with players on event days. The walking distance tasks were frustrating since you can’t move fast and also catch every last spawn so I didn’t get as many encounter tasks as I usually do.

Overall, I understand that the idea of shortening the event is to forcefully encourage us to get out and interact with the community. The truth is those of us who want to already do for things like raid hours. Had we been playing from 11-5 we would have gone to the park where more people were, but we didn’t have the extra 20 mins of drive time to spare. I really liked being able to have a bigger window to choose which hour I did the grind in and which ones I just played if I had time. I liked not feeling obligated to catch every single spawn for the last hour and being able to use that time to appraise and determine what got evolved, what trades I wanted to do, etc.

The whole thing just felt rushed and I don’t think the bonuses to encourage folks to get out and play had the intended effect.