I wanted to share this reply I got from support because I found it interesting and also confusing. I had an issue over the weekend during Kalos tour where one of my completed field research tasks got bugged and couldn’t be claimed (it just stayed in my list completed) it was a pikachu encounter.
After it happened I completed probably 10 more pokemon encounter tasks and tossed some into my backstock for later and caught some in real time depending on what they were with no issues. When rebooting the game repeatedly and waiting a day didn’t resolve it I contacted support.
It took them three days to get back with me and in the intervening time I had time to catch all my stacked encounters (and notably, after that I could claim the bugged encounter fine). It never even occurred to me that stacking them to catch later wouldn’t be the intended behavior! I catch a lot of them as I go, but during big fast paced events I often stack them to catch later when I’m not running around at full speed chasing the raid group.
Since it allows you to stack these for later (unlike some of the catch rewards that it makes you claim before claiming the next one), it never ever occurred to me that that wouldn’t be something they intend players to be able to do.
by justforcomplaints
13 Comments
Yeah its there as a contingency for losing encounters, the bug you experienced is fixed by clearing the stack.
You can hold up 100 encounters in there before it starts to replace the oldest. You can see if this is happening by using a berry on your first encounter. If it doesn’t have it next time you check (or species has changed) you know you’re losing encounters.
This is fairly well known. The stack used to effectively be infinite a long time ago, but Niantic realised how people were using it and implemented a cap of 100 stacked encounters. It’s technically meant to exist as a failsafe for if you have an issue with a research encounter like the game crashing, rather than a way to bank encounters for a later date.
I had the exact same issue, it was weird it wasn’t a bigger issue (looked here).
My only solution was to indeed catch all my stacked and then be able to get that one, thanks google. Apparently that bug is common and really annoying.
It has always been their position that it is not supported.
I think I read that they set it up so if the game crashed on task completion it didn’t just bin the task. Once set up it was left in limbo where it exists and mostly works, but isn’t “intended”.
A) Support responses aren’t allow on the sub because they’re often junk
B) this is a rare case of them being correct. The field research stack IS NOT and HAS NEVER BEEN a supported feature. At any time, a glitch or whatever could remove your stack and there is nothing you can do about it. IT HAS ALWAYS been a use at your own risk “feature”.
Yep, this has been known for a long time.
Stacking research to me seems more like an unintended result of other circumstances. Field research encounters don’t flee, but they still want to allow you freedom in running from them (for example if you ran out of PokeBalls). That just makes the research stack an unintended consequence, rather than a true feature.
Field research bugging out when you have a stack is a somewhat often reported issue, with clearing your stack usually being the fix. I believe this is a pre-made response, as i have seen it posted a few times in the past already.
It’s never a supported feature
It’s designed just in case your game crashed when entering the encounter screens
Pokemon stacking is just a “tip” among players, not an official feature from niantic / scopely
So is quick catch an intended method? Imagine if scopely removed quick catch.
Stacking encounters for later use is an exploit rather than a feature.
Could they make it a feature? of course
Will they? Probably not. I imagine most people stack to use at later events (i.e. double catch candy, double xp, stardust, etc.) That’s not how those events were intended to be played.
Personally, i stack because im lazy. I just can’t be bothered to catch most of the stack unless its shiny.
Really interesting to me that it seems like a lot of people knew this already. My husband and I are both day 1 players and neither of us realized this wasn’t intended behavior for the game, but we have only recently started engaging with resources like reddit that explain hidden mechanics and features in the game.
Now that I know I will be more cautious about it.
Since they don’t pop up that “you must claim x before you claim y” message you get like with the weekly research, I just assumed these were handled differently. The game isn’t always very transparent with players about what it expects from us.
They made an official statement that it was not a supported feature because there was a time when stacks got erased for a huge number of players due to a bug and people had shinies stacked and were very upset about it. So now it’s basically stack at your own risk. The feature exists, for the reasons people have mentioned (and also in case you tap on a research with full storage), and I’ll continue to use it to stack boosted stardust encounters for catching on a 3x stardust CD, but I have never, and would never, stack a shiny encounter or anything I particularly cared about catching.
It makes sense to me- the game supports a stack so you can recover it if the game crashes or something, and, I imagine, if you just want to stack two or three to grab some new Field Research, but it’s not intended to be used extensively.