Brand-New Pokemon GO Player Gets Shiny Meowth As One of Their First Pokemon

gamerant.com:

First released in 2016, Pokemon GO is an augmented reality mobile game developed and published by Niantic in collaboration with Nintendo in which players are able to find and catch Pokemon based on their location data in the real world. Marketed as a way to get people up off of their couches and out into the sunshine, Pokemon GO delivers on the promise of putting players in the shoes of actual Pokemon trainers and allowing them to share in the spirit of discovery and the triumph of catching them all.

One of the hottest topics in forums and discussion boards around the Pokemon franchise is shiny hunting, which is just finding and catching shiny iterations or rare variants of Pokemon that are colored differently from all the available Pokemon in any given game. Though these shiny Pokemon do not serve any other gameplay function, nor do they offer any sort of advantage in battle, players are still eager to hunt down as many of these Pokemon as possible and catch them.

Pokemon GO Reveals Plans for Next Season

The chances to encounter a shiny Pokemon in Pokemon GO vary depending on different circumstances, but average at around a 1 in 500 chance, or about 0.2%, which, for a game that requires players to physically move to different locations in order to encounter the Pokemon, is quite low. However, sometimes players get lucky despite the odds. Redditor GhostlyInstincts points out that their sister has only been playing the game for 10 minutes and has already encountered and caught a shiny Meowth. Players in the comments offer condolences and warnings that after such early success, shiny hunting is sure to be more of a frustrating challenge in the future.

Stories about shiny hunting for hours and hours on end float around the