Tonight I was out checking out my local area to find Pokéstops and some more unique Pokemon, during the trip, I found my first truly inaccessible Pokéstop…
In York Beach, Maine, in Sohier park, the park next to the Nubble lighthouse, one of the most photographed lighthouses in New England, there was a gym, four accessible stops, and one very Inacessable stop…
…on Nubble Light island itself!
The Nubble light is located on a small island outcrop, and is an automated lighthouse (used to be manned), the only means of access would be to try and dock a boat near the treacherously rocky island, or scuba dive over, there’s no easy way to access the Nubble island
What Inacessable Pokéstops have you found in your travels?
In this case, Inacessable means there’s some form of physical barrier preventing you from walking to the Pokéstop
Pretty much all poke stops that aren’t also at a bar I frequent are inaccessible to me. Luckily, there are 3 bars and a liquor store that are pokestops near me.
Playing Ingress (the predecessor of PG) I found places in office buildings, military bases, and islands to visit. One of the points of the game is to meet new people, right?
IIRC, there was a cable car that shuttled between the mainland and the island, primarily used for moving supplies from shore to island, but also used when the lighthouse keepers would switch shifts, the cable car was removed a while ago
There’s one near me that seems to be some sort of statue or gazebo or something in the middle of a golf course nearby. The golf course is private, closed at night and only permitted for club members during the day. There also seem to be a lot of pokemon spawns on the golf course too.
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PokeStops and Gyms are based on the locations of Ingress portals, as the two games are both made by Niantic and they just reused their location database. Apparently all of the ingress portals are locations that were submitted by the playerbase and approved by someone at Niantic.
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So they’re piggybacking off of crowdsourced geocaching juice from Niantic’s previous game, plus some (dubious quality) manual checking. Which is failing pretty hard and frequently, judging from the facepalming inappropriateness of some of the Pokestops.
The locations of Pokestops and Pokemon Gyms were copied from the locations of portals in Ingress, which was also developed by Niantic. Ingress portal locations were submitted by Ingress players over a period of several years. If a location is a Pokestop portal, it’s because some time in the past an Ingress player took a picture of it and submitted it as a portal location, and someone at Niantic approved it.
Which is also why, apparently, a Trayvon Martin memorial mural has a description that said he was a “thug killed for living a thug life,” or something like that.
In Ingress, the game that Pokemon GO was based on, there’s a portal site (the equivalent of a gym or pokestop) located at the Trinity Site, the location of the first nuclear bomb detonation. The site is only open for tours on two days a year, once in April and once in October. Reportedly a large percentage of the tour groups on those two days for the last few years have been composed of Ingress players eager to ‘tag’ the remote portal for their own team and notoriety.
I don’t know if there’s a Pokemon GO gym at that location or not – not all 100% of the Ingress sites were copied over to the Pokemon GO database, it seems. The next chance to check is in October. If Niantic is on top of their game (and they usually are), there’s probably some kind of rare pokemon that’s only attainable there.
That would be a terrible idea. If word gets out that, say, MewTwo or something of similar value and rarity spawns there, people will start organizing clandestine trips to sneak out there to grab it. Quite possibly ending up in jail, or dead, as a result.
