New Lawson Beacon Super Fracker

BREAKING NEWS – New Lawson SuperFracker!

As we discovered in our last teardown, the Lawson Beacon has been announced. It is essentially a Japanese promotional super fracker, providing double output lasts a full 24 hours — or until 630 hacks has been used (in total across any number of players).  This works in the same manner as the portal fracker, which only gets 150 hacks and lasts 10 minutes.

In Japan, all Lawson Portals will automatically get one every day from May 16th to 22nd and it will appear in-game in the same manner as a normal portal beacon:

There’s also a contest — all hacks made on beaconed portals will be measured by faction, as well as the number of times the beacon is maxed out (630 hacks).  Based on the number of times this limit is reached, there will be a globally increased drop rate of lawson powercubes for the week following the contest.  Double output if 63 beacons hacked to limit, quadruple output if at least one in each prefecture, and 8x output if 630 beacons hacked to exhaustion with at least one in each prefecture. The faction with the most hacks will also have their faction beacon above every lawson portal for the week following the contest as well. Also there will be purchase promotions similar to the Circle K USA promotion, by purchasing “ITO EN” products.

Unfortunately the contest appears to also only be available in Japan.  There has already been some pushback in comments about this, but everyone please remember — this is corporate sponsorship. If Lawson wants the promotion to be only in Japan, and pays for such, then it’s only in Japan. This isn’t Niantic showing favoritism to anyone. The same thing happened with the Circle K promotion.

This changes the balance from my previous ‘Frakking — good or bad?‘ article, at least in Japan during the contest. Hopefully due to trying to max out the frackers people will still socially farm the Lawson portals.

It is not known if this will become a permanent store item. The text of the announcement seems to hint at this, with Twitter citing a “new item”, but Facebook and G+ do not. If this was a permanently purchasable item, the impact of this would be bad overall for the game. For this reason we can assume that it’s strictly a promotion.

We will update this post once we have more information!