In a word: Lucky Pokemon are ultra-rare monsters with better stats and a boon of 50% reduced resource cost for bonuses. Earlier this week, a Pokémon Go player posted a photo of 100 lucky Pokémon he collected in a short time by trading with a friend. When Pokémon Go developer Niantic caught wind of the news, it halted trading while investigating the cause of the problem.
Getting just one lucky Pokemon isn’t easy, let alone getting 100. Nintendo Life points out that there are a few things that can to augment your odds, like owning a monster for over a year or trading with a “lucky friend”. The latter might have something to do with the glitch.
Trading with a lucky friend guarantees that 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 of winning. Even then, it is only meant to last for one trade.
Redditor AndKrem Says He And His Friend Were Lucky Friends When This occurred, but the status never went away.
If anyone wonders why it’s off https://t.co/fV2lBmpB5Q
— G47IX | Pokemon GO 🇵🇱 (@g47ix) January 20, 2022
“We were both lucky friends when we started and we still are. The lucky friend status hasn’t gone away and every trade has turned out to be a lucky trade,” the lucky trader said in the r/TheSilphRoad subreddit.
It looks like it might be an extremely rare occurrence where both friends got 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 upset to hear Niantic shut down the trade. 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] It’s just funny to me how they CLEARLY read Reddit but do NOTHING to quickly resolve other issues or listen to our recommendations,” StevensDs said.
Some were quick to respond that it’s always like that when developers find a bug that affects their profits.
Other players had more lean practical on Niantic’s haste.
“It’s nice that only one person benefited from something and they immediately batten down the hatches. Now they have a sample size of 1 for a bug, so reproducing it is going to be difficult,” said one Kotaku reader. “If it was me, I would have waited [Redditors] would inevitably post the steps for the bug to occur before deleting the trade. Because now you have free breeding steps.”
Stopping trade in a game is not without precedent. Shortly after the launch of Amazon’s bug-ridden New World, it shut down the game’s economy controls due to a gold duplication issue. He 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 that’s unlikely to punish lucky traders who unexpectedly stumbled upon it. However, the developer did not comment further on the situation.
