Pokemon Go Now Available for iPhone and Droid

The Game Room
101

I’ve been finding that this game really doesn’t seem to be that great in the suburbs. In my area of stacked subdivisions, the only Pokestop remotely in walking distance is a water tower, which is a terrible Pokestop since the fence around it keeps you out of range, except for one little area that you can get to by walking a ways down people’s alleys.

What driving around town I’ve done, I’ve noticed that a large number of stops are “roadside” artwork. OK, great, the city put a bronze statue on the intersection of two major city streets, that’s a great place for the city, but it seems a really dangerous place to put a Pokestop.

I’m also not sure I fully understand the rarity/leveling process. I picked up a Tauros, which I believe is rare (I’ll admit to not knowing all that much about Pokemon in general, but I noted it has no evolution at all). OK, great, but it’s still just 128 CP, and I strongly suspect that once I turn my army of Pidgey’s into McNuggets I’ll end up with something far stronger, just because I’ll have the candies to upgrade it more. (or rats. Just pulled up my “nearby” list and out of 7 Pokemon nearby, 6 are Rattatas…)

102

Agreed, the game really isn’t rural-freindly, we have 50 acres of hay fields, gently rolling terrain, and for the most part is Pokemon free, maybe a few weedles, caterpies, a smattering of the small bird types and the very occasional venonat tribble-like critter.

However, get on the road, and all the low level wilderness types show up.

Go to the nearest town, Dover NH, and downtown is stacked with stops and gyms

Thankfully, just down the road from home, a quick 5 minute drive away, Kittery Trading Post in Kittery, Maine, has four stops in the parking lot and a gym, and Pokemon lures are regularly used there, that’s where I caught a Meowth

This weekend I’m going to hit the beaches close to home, Long Sands, Short Sands and Harbor Beach

And P-GO let me discover a really nice recreational hiking trail close to home, practically in my backyard, Highland Farm Preserve, it has a few pokestops on the trails and a gym in the parking lot

If the purpose of P-GO is to get people out, active and exploring, it would make more sense to have locations like Highland Farm, not roadside stops and spawning points that encourage distracted driving and not paying attention to your surroundings…

103

Holocaust Museum: Please stop coming in here to catch Pokemon

How are the Pokestops selected? This seems pretty tasteless. Surely there must be a mechanism for removal of sites?

104

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. There have been some questionable locations that have slipped through, and people in rural towns that don’t have much of an Ingress player base are kind of screwed too.

Pokemon spawn locations are apparently based on Ingress XM spawn locations. These seem to be based on cell phone activity heatmaps, so places where people use their cell phones while stopped or walking slowly like malls, sidewalks, parking lots, street corners, etc have a good chance of spawning Pokemon. Again, people in rural towns and out in the country are screwed, while big cities full of pedestrians and historic monuments and art are great places to play.

105

I want to know if this is true about the legendary birds because it would also tie into the “the pokemon that are three steps away are just pretend filler and not actually on the map” theory as well. This is because last thursday and friday there was definitely a Moltres shadow in my workplace’s area at three steps away and it stayed there for two days. But if it’s an event-only pokemon, there’s no way the Moltres could just have been flapping about and the three-step pokemon really are most likely complete fakes.

106

So, I just evolved a Pidgey into a Pidgeotto. Should I keep extra Pidgeys for some reason?

107

NVM

108

Keep transferring away the Pidgeys for candy because you can turn it into a Pidgeot, which is fairly strong. You might want to keep one strong extra Pidgey around to turn into another Pidgeot later. They’re pretty generic and their cap isn’t very high, but they’re better than nothing if you want to take on gyms. And when you leave a pokemon behind at a gym, you still want some good ones in your roster to take on other gyms you come across. So having seconds of the common pokemon isn’t a bad idea.

Also, there’s no reason to stop catching and evolving pidgeys because you get a healthy EXP bonus for every pokemon you evolve. So unless you’re running out of pokeballs, just keep evolving them up and then transferring them away just for the EXP.

109

If you saw it for two days, then it definitely wasn’t a normal spawn. Normal Pokemon spawns only last for 15 minutes until they vanish. Maybe they’re trying to simulate the feeling of seeing something amazing off in the distance that you can’t reach yet.

110

If you see it again, you should take a screen shot. People have been looking, and I don’t think anyone has reported seeing a Moltres anywhere, even three steps away.

111

Depends. Right now I’m stockpiling weedles, pidgeys, and rats. I have enough so much candy I can evolve dozens of them. I’m sitting on a lucky egg and when I have enough weedles and pidgins etc to match my candy amounts I’m going to evolve them all with a lucky egg to maximize XP.

So, no, you don’t have to keep duplicates, but you might want to. The pokemon that cost 12 or 25 candies to evolve are worth keeping around in the proper ratio wrt to candy. I realized this too late and now I need to catch MORE worms birds and rats.

112

The current power-leveling scheme for low level players seems to be to stockpile Pidgeys, and enough candy to evolve them once, and then when you get a Lucky Egg trigger it and then evolve them all. You’ll get double the XP from evolving them, and if you set everything up just right you can evolve up to 60 of them before the Lucky Egg bonus runs out.

113

I think the “Gets kids to get out and move around” is more marketing hype than actual purpose. I get the impression that Ingress was mainly aimed for/played by niche tech-savvy types, the exact type of people who find ways to “game” the system just as enjoyable as actually playing the game itself–which means that using that data as the basis for the next game is going to have some initial flaws.

I noticed that, a short distance from where I work, there is a small “concrete park” It’s a little area with a few benches, some sculptures, and some plaques talking about how one of the old cattle trails came through the nearby area.

There are 4 Pokestops there, it looks like you can hit all 4 if you’re standing in the center.

So in terms of leveling up, getting, items, etc, it seems like I’d be a lot better served just driving over there and sitting my ass down for a while than I am exploring my neighborhood.

114

I put a lure on the pokestop at work (which is water based) and gave myself incense too.

I ended up catching ELEVEN Magicarp and 3 Psyducks. Ugh.

We also figured out that you need to catch 101 'Carps to evolve it into a Gyrados

115

Something like that. 400 Magikarp Candy to evolve. You get 3 with each capture then 1 for each MK transfered.

116

Can’t play today as it freezes up every time I capture a Pokemon.

117

Hang on to your Magikarp! They may be the best Pokemon of all! :smiley:

Ridiculous, profane infographic at:

http://ci.memecdn.com/292/9532292.jpg

118

Ok unfair rant time…

I love Ms. Cups I really do, but I live in a relatively rural/out-of-the way area and there was a gym that I could TOTALLY beat (I’m pretty weak). I tried and I was literally ONE GODDAMN HIT AWAY before my last Pokemon died. I wanted to charge up and try again because I can beat it I know I can.

But the (real life) bugs were getting to her and she didn’t want to stand around as I tried again so I had to walk away and lord knows when I can check that gym out again and when I do I’ll probably be too weak like I am every other gym and this was probably my ONE chance to own/beat a gym and I can’t now.

Ugh.

119

I have a Samsung Galaxy Ace that is 1 year old and it tells me “Your device is not compatible with this version.”

:frowning:

120

To add to this, one of Ingress’s goals is to make the player learn about the location they go to, so players creating a new Ingress portal would go to local landmarks, sometimes the mundane like a statue, or some graffiti, and create a portal with information on that location. Lot of players probably just ended up using the places they go to everyday as locations of interest, so that’s why churches, restaurants, Disneyland, etc. have a lot of Pokestops