Post-event: Is the 1 in 165~ shiny rate for Bronzor fair and reasonable?

I want to preface this post by saying that regardless of your own priorities/playstyle, it’s important to provide rational feedback and Niantic have shown that they do sometimes take this into consideration (adjusting poor spawns for lunatone/scyther events to reasonable levels for buneary/aipom), so please feel free to comment with your thoughts.

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Now that the latest event is finished and before shifting focus to the next, we can reflect on the release of shiny Bronzor. After 3000~ reports, the research group proposed the rate to be around 1 in 165 (https://thesilphroad.com/science/extraordinary-raid-week-bronzor-shiny-rate/).

Regardless of your own playstyle and unless more gameplay options are added, the main driver to continue playing this game for a large section of the community is the shiny hunt, and I think it’s generally accepted that shinies SHOULD be rare, but that hard work, smart play and effort should give the player a very good chance of getting the event shiny in question.

‘Smart Play’ in going for shiny Bronzor involved stacking 3 ‘Win a Raid’ research tasks and then doing a Bronzor raid for a total of 4 chances. Wild Bronzor did spawn but not really common enough to significantly influence playstyle or encounters. I’m not sure of the rarity of the task in question, but I’d estimate it to be roughly 1/10, which means you’d need to spin roughly 30 unique pokestops before having to search and hope for a Bronzor raid to get your 4 encounter chances. To get these 4 chances organically, I’d estimate it taking about an hour considering you’d need luck in the timing of raid spawns.

To keep this short and to the point, if you played smart and very hard and completed 200 encounters, you’d be looking at:

• 50 raids for roughly 40$

• 150 tasks from roughly 1500 daily-unique pokestop spins

• 50 hours dedicated play at 7 hours per day during the event

And after all this, you’d have roughly a 73% chance of getting a shiny Bronzor.

Personally, I feel this rate is far too low, and they missed the mark by a long shot. Even semi-hardcore players who can find 2-3 hours of dedicated ‘smart play’ per day wouldn’t come close to achieving a good chance at being rewarded despite their efforts.

I apologise for anything you might disagree with in my analysis/estimates- I understand each city/player may have different circumstance but I’m hoping we can look at the topic in broader terms so that we can provide feedback on whether an objective at this level is reasonable.

In sharing your own feedback, I’d ask you to remove any bias you have with regards to your care-level for shinies and please consider Niantic’s actual intended play conditions:

• single account

• no raid map beyond 200m~

• Pokemon tracker limited to closest pokestops

• no in-game communication methods/task marking