Yup I'm thinking of heading to Takapuna too. Looks like the weather is improving from what was forecast earlier in the week.

Since Larvitar is boosted by both clear and partly cloudy, we have a good chance of weather boost for at least some of the time. Accuweather is currently predicting either partly or mostly sunny for the three hour period. Whatever it says at midnight tomorrow is what we'll get in-game, based on my initial observations when game weather first launched.

Well, that was an interesting experience. Horrible server issues for most of the five hours (except between about 3.5 and 4.5 hours in). My sister lost two shinies to errors. We got cold around 6pm and it was dark so we drove around a bit and found a nice spot at the North Shore Event Centre that had a few lured stops we could farm from the car. I ended up with two very good IV shiny Larvitar (of eight total shinies) but one had a 10 attack stat so I evolved the other. Was already L33 so I was very happy with it. Also caught two other A-grade and one B-grade non-shinies with 15 attack which I insta-evolved, and I evolved one from storage with 14 attack right at the start when the errors were bad and I started to panic that I might not get a chance to do it later on. So I ended up with five Smack Down Ttars. I should have done 6 to make up a battle party - I had another in storage that was reasonably good. But I was too busy driving around looking for last minute spawns and forgot about it. Never mind.

The guy who runs Pokebattler, Celandro, mentioned on The Silph Road that Google Compute Engine was suffering some issues. That's what Niantic's servers run on, apparently. So the gameplay problems may not have been their fault and that explains why they struggled to fix them. I note that catch rates were buffed about an hour in, for everything, and remain that way. If it's to compensate for the Google Compute Engine problem, it may last until that is resolved. I'm going to drive around the neighbourhood for a bit with my Go Plus and a starpiece on and hoover up all the easy catches. I can't get up the energy to do much else in the game today!

I ended up with 9 shinies, lost 1 due to server issues. None of them with great IVs but I evolved the best one just for fun. Slightly disapointed that the shiny Tyranitar only looks slightly different to a normal one, I like it when the shiny version is a totally different colour. We stopped at 6pm as we were getting hungry and 9 shinies was more than enough.

Most shinies are very low CP or pretty decent / room for improvement - will have to clear them off eventually as they are not much use. I did get a battle with the best rated level 7 and evolved it during the extra time. Also had 1 shiny "flee" but received a credit for the quest, checked the pokebox and it was caught anyway.

Although we only had 6 shinies, son and I took a slow drive home to end at 7.20pm - driving around in the dark takes the fun out of it.

Nice haul! One of the girls who was walking around with us got none at all. Her game would barely load. We felt so sorry for her. I discovered last night that I did have six Smack Down Tyranitar. I had my Pokemon filtered by "recent", so completely forgot that the old stored one I evolved was waaaaay back on the list. I was super happy to discover that. Now I have six Smack Down/Stone Edge and nine Bite/Crunch. A few of the Bite/Crunch ones aren't great, but I already powered them up some time ago for Mewtwo so I am reluctant to get rid of them when I am not desperate for storage space. A few of them were Bite/Stone Edge, but since that's no longer a useful moveset I TM'd them to Bite/Crunch.

Yes, that was a very interesting Community Day; I didn't have some of the issues that some people had, but there was enough especially in the first hour or so to make the game very annoying. I am glad that we were "compensated" with extra time for the event, even though the issues were still present at 10pm (not as bad, but still not great). Was a shame to read later on that the Europe time zone also had major issues and they did not get any extra time.

I ended up with 10 shiny Larvitar (and later on, found one that was 84% - my first wild shiny above that magical 82% threshold). 
Also managed to get a Level 31 Perfect, several 98%, several 96% and a few other 91/93% .. I kept the perfect as is, kept with my tradition of not evolving any shinies but did evolved stored 2x 93% and a caught 98% into Tyranitar with Smack Down. With several Level 40 Bite/Crunch and Bite/Stone Edge already in use, I didn't feel the need to get anymore with Smack Down .. 1/2 of my Pokemon don't get used as is, so I don't need add more Attackers.

(also got a shiny Wailmer, to go with the shiny Wailmer I got on Friday - really not the shiny I was looking for as I already had one)

Oh, yes, I caught a shiny Shellder while waiting at the lures for the event to start. I'd love a shiny Wailmer. My son has caught 4 to my 0, lol.

So trading/friendship is coming .. Probably mostly useless to my current requirements, but hopefully I can get some Alolan Eggs from gift exchange ...

Yeah I'm thinking that I'm not very likely to do any trading, but I'll add some friends so we can send gifts to each other.

I'm sure as heck not spending a million dust on a regional, lol. But our raid group has already set up a little trading hub. We'll get to best friends status first, then a few regionals and shinies will likely change hands. Poor Kim, who didn't get a single shiny Larvitar on Saturday, has some Mr Mimes from her last trip to the UK, so we've done a deal :) Plus it'll help to stop the drama whenever I get shinies my son doesn't, because it means I can share them with him. I like the look of the extra raid attack and balls for raiding with friends. Might make the required group size a little smaller. The IV re-roll in trading will be interesting, too, because the better the friendship, the better chance of getting a stronger one. If my son and I both catch a L35 Machop with iffy IV, it would be cool to do a straight trade and see if we can get one (or both) to come out with better stats.

Not sure if any of you are on Android and use the APK files to update the game, but if any of you are .. and have updated to 0.107.1, do you get a frozen game when launching reward encounters?

I had to downgrade due to that issue .. which was a shame as the rest of 107.1 is pretty good.

No such issues on a Samsung S6 (107.1 loaded from APKmirror) - reward appears to load normally without delay.

nzkiwiman:

 

Not sure if any of you are on Android and use the APK files to update the game, but if any of you are .. and have updated to 0.107.1, do you get a frozen game when launching reward encounters?

 

I had to downgrade due to that issue .. which was a shame as the rest of 107.1 is pretty good.

 

There were a few reports of that on The Silph Road.

Official 0.107.1 updated on mine.