Pokemon Go ARG by Niantic (a Google company)

I really wish players in rural areas weren't so screwed. I can't find a pokestop within miles of my house let alone any gyms, and hell for that matter I have walked a mile in both directions on my road and have yet to find a single nearby pokemon either.

From what I've read, there are 150 Pokémon just like the original.

When you go hunting, the rare ones have a ? on top of their heads when you try to capture them instead of displaying CP. As soon as one turns up, give it a rasberry and use your best pokeball. They seem to turn up more frequently where multiple stops are clustered and crowds are busy clearing the chaff spawns.

The colour circles are an indicator of creature difficulty but I've seen pidgeos (?) with orange circles at level 12 and they are almost as common as Zubats. Colour other than green means prepare to waste a rasberry and quite a few pokeballs.

Of course Chuck Tingle knows about Pokemon Go (If you don't know who Chuck Tingle is, may be NSFW depending on where you work)

IMAGE(https://scontent-mia1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13627178_1340460175981325_4539092747625617938_n.jpg?oh=6294c51485e57c64b8db0670edb34114&oe=582EA341)

Dyni wrote:

There are about 15 pokestops right across the street from my house... in a cemetery.

There is a cemetery with lots of graves from the late 1800's - early 1900's, with a bunch being big monuments to dead steel barons. Probably the most stops I've seen in any one place. It's got nicely paved paths and no cars, so it's perfect to walk or bike around and stock up.

Arkon wrote:

I really wish players in rural areas weren't so screwed. I can't find a pokestop within miles of my house let alone any gyms, and hell for that matter I have walked a mile in both directions on my road and have yet to find a single nearby pokemon either.

The Ingress map is a good way to find likely pokestops and gyms near you.

I got home from work last night and glanced out my window. I see a kid out on my sidewalk with his phone out walking one way down the sidewalk, then turning around in front of my house to go the other way while staring at his phone.

I went out my front door and yelled, "ANY POKEMON YOU SEE IN THIS YARD ARE MINE, DO YOU HEAR ME?"

The kid just... froze and went bleach white. He stuttered, "I'm sorry... I'm not even sure how this works."

At that point I smiled at the kid and walked out there and explained the footprints mechanic to make the kid feel better and sent him to an area of the neighborhood where I had better luck.

After wishing the kid well I thought about growling "and stay the f*ck out of my yard" as he walked away but I figured he'd been through enough.

Anyway, I'm a jerk.

So I checked the Google account permissions page (yesterday and this morning to be sure) and Pokemon GO isn't even listed. I'm on Android. Is that what other Android users are (not) seeing?

The permissions brouhaha was with iOS.

sometimesdee wrote:

The permissions brouhaha was with iOS.

Yeah, but I don't even see it listed on my page. I figured it would at least show up.

mrtomaytohead wrote:
sometimesdee wrote:

The permissions brouhaha was with iOS.

Yeah, but I don't even see it listed on my page. I figured it would at least show up.

You can see what permissions it has in the Play store.
I think since it gets permission to use existing accounts on the phone when you install it, it doesn't have to request access again when you sign in using the Google account, since your phone itself already has access to the account.

Just got one leveled up to over 1K CP. It was already trashing the local gyms at just under 700, would mince the local opposition now. Btw the opposing element thing makes a pretty big difference in close gym battles of similar CP monsters. Gotta catch 'me all...

sometimesdee wrote:

The permissions brouhaha was with iOS.

I'm on Android and Pokemon Go definitely has "full access" to my account (just as much as Google Chrome does, for comparison).

https://security.google.com/settings...

I've also seen about 4 different versions of this, each with a different pokemon in the backyard

tanstaafl wrote:

IMAGE(https://scontent-mia1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13627178_1340460175981325_4539092747625617938_n.jpg?oh=6294c51485e57c64b8db0670edb34114&oe=582EA341)

Amazon's Prime Day Sale has some good deals on battery packs to help offset how quickly this game drains batteries.

Why we are pay $3500 month for a studio in SF.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/NyJRs1H.jpg)

If you want to recreate my neighborhood in Carlbear's photo, just take away all the pokestops and gyms, and make it so that you're lucky if you get two pokemon appearing during a thirty minute walk. Hell, I even went to the nearest shopping center (size of two city blocks) right off of the interstate, and there wasn't a single pokestop or gym. WTF is up with that.

Love the game, hate that it is so desolate for anyone not living in an area deemed worthy enough to have stops/gyms. And I'm not even truly rural.

Farscry wrote:

If you want to recreate my neighborhood in Carlbear's photo, just take away all the pokestops and gyms, and make it so that you're lucky if you get two pokemon appearing during a thirty minute walk. Hell, I even went to the nearest shopping center (size of two city blocks) right off of the interstate, and there wasn't a single pokestop or gym. WTF is up with that.

Love the game, hate that it is so desolate for anyone not living in an area deemed worthy enough to have stops/gyms. And I'm not even truly rural.

It's got very little to do with being deemed worthy and everything to do with whether you have active Ingress players in your area. Places of business tended to not be made into Ingress portals, they favored monuments, public art, historical sites, and municpal buildings. So go to your local downtown or college campus instead of a mall.
The Ingress map is a good way to find likely pokestops and gyms near you.
This is Portland, Maine's downtown:
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/SyXzvET.png?1)
This is the Maine Mall just outside of Portland:
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/pa47fIr.png?1)

There is a gym literally on the front entrance of my work. All the interns at work are team yellow and my whole group is team blue. Lunch was a fierce competition, but now my Jolteon is top dog!

Stengah wrote:
Farscry wrote:

If you want to recreate my neighborhood in Carlbear's photo, just take away all the pokestops and gyms, and make it so that you're lucky if you get two pokemon appearing during a thirty minute walk. Hell, I even went to the nearest shopping center (size of two city blocks) right off of the interstate, and there wasn't a single pokestop or gym. WTF is up with that.

Love the game, hate that it is so desolate for anyone not living in an area deemed worthy enough to have stops/gyms. And I'm not even truly rural.

It's got very little to do with being deemed worthy and everything to do with whether you have active Ingress players in your area. Places of business tended to not be made into Ingress portals, they favored monuments, public art, historical sites, and municpal buildings. So go to your local downtown or college campus instead of a mall.
The Ingress map is a good way to find likely pokestops and gyms near you.
This is Portland, Maine's downtown:
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/SyXzvET.png?1)
This is the Maine Mall just outside of Portland:
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/pa47fIr.png?1)

Yeah, I went to lunch with my parents on Sunday and it happened to be near Monroeville Mall (of dawn of the dead fame). Suprisingly only 2 stops, but it had 2 gyms. I would have thought there would be more. It also didn't help that every employee on their break, and various groups of teens were everywhere and the network was swamped. Indoor buildings and 4g coverage don't mix well.

Yeah, I get that I could go drive downtown and get lots of stops because this was built off of Ingress portals. That's not new information.

My point is that it's stupid for this game to make it so that I would be better off driving around downtown to play rather than going out for a walk in the general vicinity of where I live.

Taking a half hour in the evening for a walk is good for my health and totally the point of having this game function the way it does, though it's about all the time I can take before it's time for doing family stuff. Driving fifteen minutes each way to get downtown leaves no time for an actual walk, wastes gasoline and harms the environment.

This isn't going to encourage suburbanites to stick with the game; unless there's going to be some significant changes they should rename the damn thing to Pokémon Urban:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/guKDjXd.jpg)

(not my screenshot, but it could be)

At least two Pokestops in my area disappeared overnight. One was the entrance to the local mall, the other was the local university's soccer field entrance. Both are still there in Ingress. So they either removed them for some reason or the servers are still acting up and not sending the data to the client.

I'm crap at throwing Pokeballs; I need my Pokestops!

Plus, I found a CP 71 Pidgeotto today that I had to hit with 5 balls before it would stay captured.

I know it won't feel like a great solution, but you can suggest new portals in Ingress. I expect that those will eventually find their way into Pokemon Go. If there is a park near your house, walk there and get a good picture of the park sign or something and submit that as a portal.

I know it won't fix the exasperated gap between the high density urban areas and the far more rural areas, but if your neighborhood went from having nothing to having a single pokestop?... again, not a solution, but if I was 12, I'd love whoever made that single pokestop show up at the park.

Farscry wrote:

Yeah, I get that I could go drive downtown and get lots of stops because this was built off of Ingress portals. That's not new information.

My point is that it's stupid for this game to make it so that I would be better off driving around downtown to play rather than going out for a walk in the general vicinity of where I live.

Taking a half hour in the evening for a walk is good for my health and totally the point of having this game function the way it does, though it's about all the time I can take before it's time for doing family stuff. Driving fifteen minutes each way to get downtown leaves no time for an actual walk, wastes gasoline and harms the environment.

This isn't going to encourage suburbanites to stick with the game; unless there's going to be some significant changes they should rename the damn thing to Pokémon Urban:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/guKDjXd.jpg)

(not my screenshot, but it could be)

Once they add the ability to submit locations for pokestops & gyms, it will get better. The Ingress criteria favored urban and historical areas, with natural features (lakes, streams, fields, etc) explicitly forbidden, but that's counter to what Pokemon Go criteria should be, which should favor urban areas less (not much tall grass in a city). Unfortunately Niantic hasn't acknowledge the issue (that I know of), but there are reports that someone got a pokestop and gym added to their area when they emailed Niantic about how their town was a pokewasteland.

I figure I'll give it another go in a few months and see how my area looks then.

I suspect and hope that this is mostly a function of the much smaller Ingress audience meaning that a lot of these areas just never had things submitted as requests (of course leading to the cycle of newer Ingress players in those areas dropping out). I'm confident that they will set up the Pokemon Stop recommendation/request service like they did with Ingress, but I'm not confident that they will do that and start processing and creating them fast enough to keep understandably frustrated people from leaving.

One of the good recommendations I heard for this was to be able to register your "home". And every 12 or 24 hours being able to use it, which would heal all of your pokemon a bit, and give you a batch of stuff (maybe as much as 4-5 stops). For people in higher traffic areas that may not even be a 25% increase to the amount of stuff they get, for more rural people that would be a nice bonus to what they have now.

Also I am hoping that they expand on the non-combat roles of pokemon you see alluded to and mentioned in the game. Specifically in this case being able to send a flying pokemon to visit the closest pokestop for you now and again would be nice.

Those would all be awesome additions. I also really hope they get trading worked in. I mean, trading pokemon with your friends is a cornerstone piece of the old (and current) game series.

Yup, there are some fantastic solutions out there if Niantic would choose to implement them.

Honestly what bugs me more than the lack of pokestops is the absurd barrenness of my area for pokemon spawns. That shouldn't be tied to population/pokestop density, but it appears to be. I've walked around 5km according to the app, and I am barely level 4 yet. Most of the pokemon I've caught are thanks to the two personal lures (the scentbombs or whatever they're called) I've used and then left the app running while watching tv in the evening, which is rather the opposite of how the game is supposed to work. If that's what I have to do, then it makes more sense to ditch the app and just play a regular pokemon game on my 3DS.

The only reason I am being stubborn and trying to play the phone app game is because I adore the concept behind it, and if I am going for a walk anyway then why not make it more fun? (Assuming I am going to run into any actual wild pokemon on the walk).

I hope they make adding stops a thing in GO as there is a Fire Station directly across the road from my back yard. I can see the trees on the other side of the station through their garage doors when they are open. Guess I could try that Ingress adding thing...