Pokemon GO Team Rocket Special Research Glitch Lets Players Beat Giovanni Without 'Finding' Him

gamerant.com:

Pokemon GO July Battle Weekend gives players the opportunity to seek out and defeat multiple Team GO Rocket leaders and the team's head honcho Giovanni. Doing so gives Pokemon GO players a chance to capture rare Shadow Pokemon, including Shadow Latios.

Niantic released the Pokemon GO Battle Weekend event to celebrate the game's sixth anniversary. During this event, players were able to engage in several different activities, but the main draw for many was hunting down Team GO Rocket battles in order to find rare Shadow Pokemon to strengthen their teams.

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Normally, in order to find and fight Giovanni players first need to complete special research Team GO Rocket tasks. These include things like defeating Team GO Rocket grunts and leaders. Once those tasks have been completed, players are rewarded with a Super Rocket Radar that reveals potential locations for Giovanni. Once the Super Rocket Radar is used, PokeStops will have decoy locations or the actual location of Giovanni, but players have to check out each PokeStop to see if it's a decoy or not. A bug discovered by Reddit user Htb323 let them fight Giovanni while leaving the «Find the Team GO Rocket Boss» task uncompleted.

While it may seem useful to bypass the lengthy process of sifting through decoy grunt after decoy grunt in an effort to find and defeat Giovanni, it's actually kind of a problem. Leaving that task uncompleted means that players can't finish their research task and reap the rewards, and the only way to find the boss is to use a Super Rocket Radar. So if a player used their last Super Rocket Radar and ended up encountering this bug, their only recourse would be to contact Niantic support or hope