‘Pokémon GO’ Pokémon Spotlight Hour 2/17: What Is It?

Pokemon Anime

Credit: The Pokemon Company

Pokémon GO has implemented various measures to make its “get outside” oriented gameplay a little more oriented to staying inside, but it’s a tricky balancing act. It requires total re-orienting how the game works, and some of the systems don’t port over to stationary play as well as we might like. At least we’ve got the GO Battle League, which was already a huge boon to playing this thing at home. Regardless, Niantic is for the time being continuing to roll out mini-events even as larger ones get postponed, and one of those is the weekly Pokemon spotlight hour, happening tonight from 6:00-7:00 PM local time.

The official Twitter account posted about this this morning with a somewhat misleading teaser:

The reason this is somewhat misleading is that it seems to indicate that the spotlight hour is going to focus on a single Pokémon, like we saw last month, or at least that’s how I interpret the whole question mark in a circle sort of thing. But we’ve already got a preview of the event from the other side of the world, and it’s the same as we’ve had all month: increased spawns of all Pokemon and increased shiny chance. So don’t go looking for anything in particular, but do use your incense and try to get as much as you can at home.

I would strongly recommend going out to play this thing, especially in populated areas. In some places, playing outside will be illegal. If it is legal and you do go outside, try to maintain distance from other people on the street. Usually you can tell a Raid because of the people gathering around to play, but if you must raid try to access it from as far away as possible and join in with other people on the periphery, far away.

Right now, the most pressing problem that Pokémon GO has is Pokéball availability: it was a good move to make this game playable indoors, but it’s a lot harder when Pokéballs still only come from Pokéstops, and those are outside. If we had some sort of reliable, non-paid way to get them at home, we could really play without leaving the house.