Today, Pokemon Go launched a new quest subsystem, where you do tasks in furtherance of pokemon research. There's two kinds of research, special research and field research. The special research comes in the form of tasks assigned by Professor Willow:

Special Research

Even though I had already done my poke-walk this morning before the new system launched I couldn't resist going out for a short walk to hit the five stops I needed in order to complete the first step (and gyms do count as pokestops for this purpose – my fifth stop to satisfy the quest was a gym). An egg incubator seems like a really nice reward for the first task!

After I completed that one I got the next task. Because this one involves a lot of walking I think I'll just hit it “naturally” on my regular walk tomorrow morning, even though I'm excited for the new system I'm not excited enough to walk an extra few kilometers today.

Field Research

You can also pick up more discrete quests when you visit pokestops. (I didn't realize this at first, I thought the game was just giving me redundant notifications about the “research tasks” I was already working on). From what I can tell, when you satisfy these you get an opportunity to capture a pokemon, seemingly with egg- or raid-quality IVs and level. Both of mine were magikarp, I know those are potential raid bosses, maybe what pokemon you get as a reward is related to that? I think getting new mini-quests at pokestops is a pretty cool system. And having a task that's prompting me to “Spin 3 PokeStops you haven't visited before” is almost certainly going to encourage me to find some new stops to hit on my walk tomorrow morning:

Solo players finally getting some love?

A lot of Niantic's recent updates to the game, such as the raid subsystem, have seemed really focused on players who play the game in groups. I'm basically a solo player, I play while I'm on long walks by myself, and so far it seems like this system is much more compatible with the way I play the game.

A looming replicability crisis in Pokemon research?

So far it seems like there's an interesting variety of tasks in the quest system. It remains to be seen whether it will get boring or repetitive over time, but so far I'm really excited about this update. I had been growing a bit disengaged from the game in the past week or so, but this new functionality seems like it's going to jolt some life back into the game for me.