Fair Warning: this post is about 4.3 years old, so some of the information might be a bit dated. On the other hand, this post was last modified about 4.3 years ago, so maybe it's up-to-date after all. In any case, please keep all this in mind while reading. Thanks for understanding!
A Quick Diversion:  

The Actual News:

Oooh! Do I have an interesting little IV tidbit for you guys…

OK so a few days back was a Pokémon GO Community Day, which focused on Gastly. I caught maybe 80 of them, but in catching them and organizing their data, I noticed something interesting… NONE of them had any IVs below 4. Just take a look at the chart on the right; lots of 6s, 7s and 13s… but absolutely NONE below 4. This in turn explains why my graphs had a lower-than-average number of IVs between 0 and 3, which I assumed it to be because those were used maybe 25-33% less.

Incidentally, since the last update, I also included Shadow Pokémon to the list, to see if they have different IVs. So far it doesn’t seem to be the case.

Anyways, with the Gastly event finished and my numbers updated, here is what the charts look like:

Likewise, this is the chart where I focused on the IVs between 4 and 15:

Unfortunately though, it looks like I’ll need to restart my data collection again, because I did not take this into account. That is to say, I didn’t keep track of which Pokémon I caught earlier were from a previous event or not, so it’ll be damn near impossible to go through the data to determine what’s what. Like, now that I think about it, if Pokémon generated from this special event don’t have IVs below 4… then maybe something similar occurs with Pokémon generated by using Incense?

Seeing as I’ll be restarting my data collection, here is the final number of Pokémon that this data covers: dang near 700 total.

And even THAT wasn’t enough…!

Anyways… as it stands, it’s clear that Niantic does something different with how they generate IVs for caught Pokémon. Right now the data seems to suggest the following:

  • Pokémon caught normally, outside of any kind of special event, format, etc, have IVs randomly generated from between 0 and 15.
  • Pokémon caught from a special Professor event (ie Daily Field Research, Special Research, etc), or hatched from an egg, have IVs randomly generated between 10 and 15.
  • Pokémon caught from a Community Day event (ie Gastly, Weedle, Galarian Farfetch’d, etc), have IVs randomly generated between 4 and 15.
  • Shadow Pokémon caught from a Team Rocket event (ie Grunt, Boss, Leader, etc), have IVs randomly generated from between 0 and 15.
  • There is an unknown effect on whether stuff like Incense or Lures affect IV generation.

Now obviously this increased chance of getting not-crappy IVs during special events helps incentivize players to catch Pokémon during them. But now that I know that they do specialize like this… I’ll restart my data collection and be a bit more pedantic in my recording. But at least, hopefully this gives you a better idea of what you’ll need to do if you want to get some better Pokémon!

Finally, another data analysis topic I’d like to cover is: the percentages of items collected at PokéStops, as well as Gyms (both with and without “Team Bonuses”). But I’ll get back to you about that. See you next time!