In a nutshell: Lucky Pokémon are ultra-rare monsters with better stats and a boon of a 50-percent reduced resource cost to powerups. Earlier this week, a Pokémon Go player posted a picture of 100 lucky Pokémon he gathered in a short time trading with a friend. When Pokémon Go developer Niantic got wind of the news, it halted trading while investigating what caused the glitch.
Getting just one lucky Pokémon is not easy, let alone being granted 100. Nintendo Life points out there are a couple of things that can increase your chances, like owning a monster for more than a year or trading with a “Lucky Friend.” This last one might have something to do with the glitch.
Trading with a Lucky Friend guarantees the trade will result in a lucky Pokémon. However, becoming a Lucky Friend is extremely rare. Players only have a five-percent chance once per day at the boon. Even then, it is only supposed to last for one trade.
Redditor AndKrem says that he and his friend were lucky friends when this occurred, but the status never disappeared.
If anyone wonder why it’s turned off https://t.co/fV2lBmpB5Q
— G47IX | PokémonGO 🇵🇱 (@g47ix) January 20, 2022
“We were both lucky friends when we started and still are. The status as lucky friends didn’t disappear and every trade turned out to be a lucky trade,” the lucky trader said in the r/TheSilphRoad subreddit.
It sounds like maybe it was a super rare occurrence where both friends got the lucky status simultaneously, and the game didn’t know how to handle the situation, but that’s just speculation on my part.
Players were a bit unpleased at hearing Niantic shut down trading. One player pointed out how quickly Niantic reacted to a post in an unofficial Pokémon subreddit but is slow to fix bugs posted through official channels.
“[It’s] just funny to me how they CLEARLY read Reddit but do NOTHING promptly fix other issues or listen to our recommendations,” said StevensDs.
Some were quick to respond that it’s always like that when developers find a glitch that affects their profits.
Other players had a more practical lean on Niantic’s haste.
“Is nice that a single person benefitted from something and they immediately batten down the hatches. Now they have a sample size of 1 for a bug, so reproducing it is gonna be difficult,” said a Kotaku reader. “If it were me, I would’ve waited until [Redditors] would inevitably post the steps on how to get the bug to happen before taking trading down. Cause now you have free repro steps.”
Shutting down trading within a game is not unprecedented. Shortly after Amazon’s bug-ridden New World launch, it shut down the games economy controls over a gold duplication glitch. It even went a step further by threatening any players who exploited the bug.
It appears that in this case, Niantic stopped trading before anyone else could exploit the glitch, and it’s doubtful it will punish the lucky traders that unexpectedly happened upon it. However, the developer has not commented further on the situation.