There's no clear indication if patchy cell phone data coverage has led to a disconnection - and such disconnections are indistinguishable from Niantic's frequent server downtime. Pokémon Go does not deal gracefully with patchy, poor rural cell coverage. I don't have to worry about someone deciding I look suspicious, far away from any witnesses.Įven when struggling through Pokémon Go's design obstacles, technical ones crop up. I don't know if anyone driving by gave me any odd looks, but a middle-aged white guy fiddling around on the side of the road is at best odd here. I didn't feel comfortable with its little swipe-to-throw minigame as cars sped by. When I did see a Rattata along the side of the highway, I needed to stop and get a bit away from the road. Maybe I would have caught more Pokémon if crossing the road didn't mean cutting across six lanes of unrestricted traffic. It's not made for walking along the highway or biking on the side of the road, let alone biking on the road or driving. On a more personal level, Pokémon Go is made for sidewalks. Forget walking out into the tall grass in real life.
(Not that this is perfect there is an infamous story about an Ingress landmark at a nuclear power plant.) However, if there aren't any high-traffic areas at all, then there are no Pokémon to find.
There are good reasons to tie Pokémon spawn rates to traffic or population density: Doing so pushes players to public places and discourages people from trespassing on private property. My own experience bears this out: In several days of checking Pokémon Go as I walked to and from errands, I usually found only two or three Pokémon per mile walked. Reddit users have discovered that wild Pokémon spawn rates seem to be tied to population density. Instead, outside of these densely populated centers, Pokémon Go is about carefully husbanding dwindling resources from the few - if any - local Pokéstops, to catch the few Pokémon which do appear. It wasn't until I read other people's stories about Lure Modules and impromptu Pokémon Go player gatherings - in New York, or San Francisco, or Seattle - that I even learned that it was possible. There are few or no places to discover and nowhere to congregate. All of Pokémon Go's landmarks were submitted by Ingress players, using a form that was officially closed September of last year (with a multiple-year unresolved backlog left over).Īnywhere without enough Ingress players to submit local landmarks, there's nothing to do or see in Pokémon Go. Street art, statues, churches and temples, and monuments are the sorts of landmarks Go turns into Pokéstops and Gyms. Niantic, the developers behind Pokémon Go, reused the database of user-submitted landmarks from their previous geolocation game, Ingress. On the outskirts of a city of approximately 150,000 people, the world of Pokémon Go is as sparsely populated as the real one. No such landmarks exist on this stretch of road, though. Pokémon Go marks real-life landmarks as PokéStops, which replenish Pokéballs for capturing Pokémon and Potions for healing them, or Gyms, where you can battle other players' Pokémon for control. Trudging up the highway, I saw a pair of Rattata and little else. My first experience with Pokémon Go was trying it on a walk to the grocery store, approximately three quarters of a mile up Route 29. Pokemon Go is a world empty of adventure. Away from those cities, away from the coasts, Pokémon Go screeches to a halt. There are plenty of stories of a PokéStop drawing in dozens of Pokémon of all ages and creeds, but those stories almost always happen in densely populated areas. That hybrid of the real and fantastic can't help but run into reality. Pokémon Go overlays its world of Pokémon catching and battling on top of the real world.
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