Pikmin Blooms Conflicted Event Design

Those of you who follow my Bluesky might have seen me posting about Pikmin Bloom a little over a month ago. Originally I intended to study how the game worked and then create a strategy guide to detail how to get the most event points (and by extension the best event rewards) each month. However things didn't end up going to plan..

Pikmin Bloom is a location based game made by Niantic, heard of Pokemon Go? It's the same people. Like most of their apps they are advertised as a game where you go outside and explore in order to progress - especially so in Pikmin Bloom where you are encouraged to walk around so you can grow Pikmin and plant flowers.

I started playing in mid December, A few days before heading down to the country to spend Christmas with my family, and hoped that the game would be a nice little motivation to spend time outside and go on walks. During the time I spent in the country this worked great, and at the start of January I made it a goal to try and get 12000 event points for the Blue Choclateir Dress and track my progress throughout the month.

Within the first couple weeks, I was well on my way and had gathered some interesting information about how the game seemed to distribute rewards - One of the games mechanics is mushrooms. These are points of interest that appear on the map and players must work together to destroy them. Usually they would provide a reward relevant to the color of the mushroom but the monthly event mushrooms instead provide a mystery box. From the data I had collected, I found that providing a higher contribution to a mushroom battle compared to your peers resulted in a statistically better chance at receiving a higher quality mystery box that could contain better rewards - and most importantly for my objectives - more event points!

This was very good news as I had already found that the event mushrooms were the single biggest source of event points in the game, so it was important to use all 3 attacks effectively to provide the best chances of receiving the event points that were needed. Especially since I figured out at the start of the month that I would need approximately 429 event points per day in order to reach my goal of 12000 by the end of the (28 day) month.

For the first couple weeks I was able to maintain the required average but then the strategy unfortunately fell apart when I returned to Sydney. While I was in the country, I had been logging on a few times a day when I had a bit of downtime to send my Pikmin off to battle mushrooms in a largely uncontested area. When I returned to the city, this was no longer the case and suddenly the game changed from a relaxing way to fill downtime to a frustrating search for mushrooms to attack.

You see, the game normally only allows 5 players to be attacking a mushroom at one time. If you find a mushroom and it already has 5 players then you can't attack it unless you use a Mushroom Recharge Ticket - a rare and expensive premium item. This wasn't an issue in the country due to the lack of competition from other players but in the city, most of the mushrooms I would find were already full. This issue is then compounded by the fact that if you have joined a mushroom you can invite your friends to join it as well - regardless of where they are physically. What would happen is one player would find a mushroom, invite their friends list and then within minutes it would be full!

In order for me to even attempt to keep up, I found I had to be watching the app much more vigilantly to either find mushrooms that weren't already full or listen out for the the notification of an invite from a friend and try to join before other players beat me to it.

I realized at this point that the game seemed to have lost sight of its vision. Why does a game focused on walking and spending time outside ask for so much attention? When I was in the city, the event mechanics encouraged players to instead be more tied to their phones which seems rather sad. The system also seemed to have mostly forgotten about mechanics like planting flowers and growing Pikmin since they are mostly irrelevant in events...

It would be reasonable to argue that maybe I just shouldn't have played the game like i did, with my goal of getting the final event reward but that really makes you wonder why they make it so difficult - Is it just a retention mechanic designed to keep players coming back day after day, or perhaps a push to try and get players to spend more in-app purchases so they can have an easier time collecting event points?

After about a week of trying to continue the challenge in the city, I decided to give up on it as it was taking too much away from enjoying my walks. Hopefully they will adjust the system in the future and then maybe i might give it another try but for now I shall wander in peace without the Pikmin.