Several elements have led to this unfortunate (but, as Marouflard said, not very surprising) failure of the world quest today.
- The main issue was that players were given 24 hours, on a working (for most people) day, to hunt 5 forms. There were no indications about the possibility to hunt these at any other moment, and the expected number of forms needed to get all 5 is 5^5/5! which is 26. So, basically, there is a big incentive to hunt these forms, considering 24 hours might very well not be enough to get them all.
- Secondly, as stated before by other people, the world quest happening on a means, for most people, much less time to spend on the game. It also means that it is more difficult to commit on something : you might very well spend 2 hours playing, but if you don't know in advance that you will be able to spend 2 hours on the world quest, you're not going to catch any non-form Bidoof, because of the strong incentive to focus on forms.
- Thirdly, there is a structural flaw of the world quest in itself, it is that there are only 2 thresholds : 0.5% and 3%. That means that there is no incentive at all to go the extra mile and reach, for example, 1.5% unless we want to push to 3%. One way to solve it would be for example to give small rewards every .1%, like a few rare candies or whatever. It wouldn't really destroy the economy. The lack of incentive to push for more than 0.5% had this logical consequence : people were submitting just enough to get 0.5% and then went back to farming.
Those 3 elements made people not care enough about completing the world quest until the end was very close, and it was of course too late.
Here are my suggestions :
- It doesn't really matter if it is exactly July 1st when the world quest is launched, we literally had Valentine's in June, so it would make more sense to me to make it happen on a weekend
- As Hulfrite said, it would be a much bigger incentive to make the forms a reward for completing the world quests : if people were less in a hurry to get some Bidoof forms (if they were available for one week, for example), they would of course be much more interested in the world quest in itself. Also, adding small rewards for people who go the extra mile after reaching .5% would have almost guaranteed the world quest to be completed.
Thanks for reading, I hope you'll like my suggestions.