Pokémon Sun and Moon’s latest giveaway is kind of a bust

Pokémon trainers can swing by GameStop from now until March 5 to pick up a special item for Sun and Moon: a single silver bottle cap. But those already deep into the metagame likely have enough of these to spare, making this one of the more disappointing giveaways in some time.

The bottle cap item is used for Hyper Training, a new feature that allows players to boost and maximize their Pokémon’s individual value stats, or IVs. Having a swath of bottle caps is useful for those who want to power up multiple members of their fighting team, and they’re not easy to find. Bottle caps — which come in both silver and the rarer gold varieties — are only obtainable through select means.

That would seem to make the GameStop promotion a good deal. Typically, players must fish around or use the Festival Plaza and Poké Pelago modes to start collecting silver bottle caps, and that can take time. But hardcore fans developed a guide to farming copious silver bottle caps shortly after the games’ launch in November.

The short version is that a specific lottery shop that players can install in the Festival Plaza will reward multiple bottle caps daily. It’s still a bit of a crapshoot, but players who are serious about Hyper Training can, and do, use the workaround to their advantage. Players have even figured out the best way to get multiple gold bottle caps, an even tougher feat.

This and other methods are well-known in the Pokémon Sun and Moon fanbase, so GameStop’s giveaway seems paltry at best. Responses to the Pokémon Twitter account’s announcement of the campaign give a sense of the disappointment:

Still, a gift is a gift. This one’s now available at GameStop locations nationwide.