A Year On From "Pokéstop Nomination" Have You Seen An Increase In Active Players In Your Area?

AScarletSabre-PGOAScarletSabre-PGO Posts: 754 ✭✭✭✭✭
edited November 2020 in General Discussion

I know they're officially called Wayspots but I'm just speaking in terms of Pokémon GO here. I know having a gym in the local neigbourhood park can make all the difference to a person's playing experience in the area. I definitely want to encourage the next generation of Pokémon trainers so as such, like I have stated previously, I am really careful with how I plan out nominations for an area.

A rather larger park (than the local neighbourhood ones) near my house previously had just six gyms, before November 2019, now has 20+ gyms (depending on what counts as "the park"). I've certainly seen an increase in the number of Pokémon trainers engaging with the park. I know we have the whole plague situation now and people to be more careful but in spite of that, I see more and new trainer names popping up. I think this is great!

I will always extol the benefits of a walk in the park. It is claimed a lack of Vitamin D is a key factor in how severe a person's Covid-19 is. Thus, people need to be spending more time out in the sunshine, if they are able to.

Comments

  • LukeAllStars-INGLukeAllStars-ING Posts: 4,625 Ambassador

    I have seen multiple new players only playing in my main gym. But all of different teams than I am... xD

    The number of players increased a lot. We also got over 200 new POIs making the area way more interesting. Also, I started to offer new POIs (of course for free, I am not that greedy) for areas with low numbers of POIs. This made it possible for everyone to play.

  • DerWelfe2205-PGODerWelfe2205-PGO Posts: 374 ✭✭✭✭

    Yeah. I live in a rural area and added more than 70 POI over the last year. We went from a handful active players to ~30

  • Mormegil71-INGMormegil71-ING Posts: 202 ✭✭✭

    I play Ingress, so I could nominate long before Wayfarer came to be. But back then, the increase was really noticable. In a year, we went from 6 stops and a gym to +170 poi. I saw, and still see, children, adults and retirees playing a lot. In areas that was empty before, there are now people. Not all play, but many tag along with those who do.

  • AScarletSabre-PGOAScarletSabre-PGO Posts: 754 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Hard to believe some people still believe more Pokestops and gym is a bad thing. "Oh look at me, I reached level forty with just one measly Pokestop" . Get out of here.


    There certainly would appear to be more people participating in raids recently, which I also love. If you built it, they will come! It brings me great joy to have breathed new life into previous empty suburbs and villages.

  • Ultimo6419-PGOUltimo6419-PGO Posts: 88 ✭✭✭

    Hard to tell. Our community is fairly active, the number of stops and gyms has been increasing steadily. Our town has about 60 Pokestops and 10 gyms. We might be able to add a few more, but I do not see 500 stops. We are just too small. On community days and raid hours, many players from nearby villages come because they enjoy the park, the historical town and the cafes together with a decent number of stops and free parking. However, in their villages, the number of stops is also growing and I suppose there will be a point where they will stay in their home villages. I hope that it takes a while, I like to see many players together in the park...

  • sogNinjaman-INGsogNinjaman-ING Posts: 3,313 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Locally, no, we have a pretty good local PoGo community and chat. Having said that, i'm seeing far more in the way of "unknown names" appearing on Gyms late at night, with groups of gyms all going the same colour with the same "unknown" names. Spoofing / cheating has massively increased.

  • AScarletSabre-PGOAScarletSabre-PGO Posts: 754 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I would hesitate to say spoofing has increased in my area. What has appeared to have increased is the amount of casual players returning to the game. Previously, there were entire suburbs without a single gym or Pokéstop. We still meet together for events in game too, which is nice. Local gyms do make the occasional player lazier but I'm still finding people in my area appreciate the social aspect of the game and enjoy coming out to parks (or the CBD) for the events.

  • Euthanasio2-PGOEuthanasio2-PGO Posts: 272 ✭✭✭

    Definitely. We have a trail that's getting fuller and a local facebook group with about 50 people.

  • Rodensteiner-PGORodensteiner-PGO Posts: 1,705 ✭✭✭✭✭

    yes, we did went from ~8 stops/gymsto over 100, and especially every widespread district, even the very rural, got pokestops and gyms.

    not only do ppl play pokemon go, they also play HPWU.

    strangely the effect on the ingress playerbase was short lived. guess the game is just too old and not suited for players.

    there are many players that play just here and there, mostly at home, but many people have access to spawns and items.


    on the contrary, the 2 towns where everyone played 2018 did ZILCH. they already had alot of pokestops and gyms, and noone there really added anything to the network. they even didnt clear up wrong locations. they did nothing.

    also to add to that, many people from our places that went to those cities dont go there anymore, as they now have their own gyms to play.

    if anyone is still submitting things, please think of the suburbs and districts that are rural. we had players crawling out from under a rock now they have a pokestop or gym. that will, in the long turn, be better than everything else.

  • Shilfiell-INGShilfiell-ING Posts: 1,559 Ambassador

    I like having more stops and gyms if they're legit, good quality, and can fit on a map cleanly in their accurate locations. I'd love to see some sort of metric as to when the gym/stop density stops increasing player base: if a small town with one gym and one stop goes to 4 gyms an 12 stops, for example, then later goes to 6 gyms and 16 stops - do the last two gyms and four stops increase the player base or is it already saturated? Is any increase offset by the normal attrition of bored short-term players?

  • AScarletSabre-PGOAScarletSabre-PGO Posts: 754 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Good question. For me at least, Wayspots have more utility than just their in-game functionality and I like to use them to educate people about an area. More Wayspots would also mean more learning for people unfamiliar with an area, and I've even learned new things about areas I thought I was familiar thanks to the submissions of other people.

    Besides increasing active players, more gyms does also mean more players can obtain all of the daily Poké Coin allowance (of course, some people with a home-gym do play very selfishly and never let another team control it for even a second). Plus, more gyms means more opportunities to conduct raid battles and more Team GO Rocket spawns. Both are important for certain events.

    Then there are those people who like collecting gym badges. It could be simply spinning for the badge or trying to get a certain number of points on as many badges as possible, normally the 30,000 required for the badge to turn gold. There's lots of reasons to have more Wayspots in an area.

  • Damastaglen-PGODamastaglen-PGO Posts: 124 ✭✭✭

    I live in a city but the area I live in never had much (for a city).

    Since Covid hit, a few in our community have been very active in getting our area filled with new stops / gyms of stuff that should have been a waypoint but no one did it before (I guess Ingress isn’t big here). Anyway, since then, we have had lots of new names pop up in gyms and doing raids.

    Maybe noobs, maybe returning players but it’s good we have an ever growing community.

  • DracoEris-PGODracoEris-PGO Posts: 15 ✭✭

    I live in an area that's well saturated in stops and portals already and I dare say only half the eligible wayspots have been submitted. Gyms often flip in 15 minutes or less tho which is very discouraging. I usually only flip gyms if I see the latest pokemon added has been in long enough to max out coins.

  • PkmnTrainerJ-INGPkmnTrainerJ-ING Posts: 5,119 Ambassador

    No. My local area/player base had grown when I hit level 10 on Ingress long ago and started adding POI. I only use Pokémon GO submissions if I am out of Ingress ones.

  • WoodWose-PGOWoodWose-PGO Posts: 128 Ambassador

    The effects of Pokéstop Nomination have been interesting in my local area. I currently live in a village-like suburb on the outskirts of two small cities. Despite a lot of figurative fertile ground for submissions, we were largely skipped over in the early days of Ingress, and it proved rather difficult to get Ingress Agents to come out once submissions opened back up for them.

    For the first couple of years of Pokémon GO, local Trainers here were highly dependent on traveling into larger cities. Our suburb was a relative backwater where you could hold gyms for weeks at a time and could rarely-if-ever organize a raid.

    Today, the vast majority of Pokéstops and Gyms we have are the result of either the few cases where we managed to convince an Ingress Agent to make some submissions for us or (more frequently) from Trainer submissions.

    These days, it's not unusual for people to travel to our parks and small regional university campus to play on community days, and you would be lucky to hold a gym for a day. Small local community chat groups have formed and grown, and it's now not entirely unheard of to have people we don't know show up to raids. At the same time, personally, I'm now much more disconnected from the communities in the cities that we once depended on to play.

  • WandHerring-PGOWandHerring-PGO Posts: 139 ✭✭✭✭

    I'm a bit in an usual case: I moved in my current home roughly at the same time I hit level 40... the very weekend the COVID lockdown started. So I don't know exactly how lively the community was before I arrived and what's the influence of COVID had.

    Still, in a period of roughly 9 months I doubled the number of POIs (10 to 20) and spawned 3 new gyms. It's a slow process because I'm in a large city but the neighborhood is vastly underexploited in term of nominations (probably due to a criminally outdated Street View). So everything takes months to get reviewed if I don't grind upgrades, and everything I don't update on Street View with a photosphere is very likely to get rejected no matter how I frame the support picture.

    In any case, I did notice I slow increase of players, notably during the raid hour. No new players, but old players living in the neighborhood. The POI density is getting high enough so events can be enjoyed here instead of having to move in a more crowded part of the city. It still doesn't have the density to bring other people over, but at least the local player base is not bleeding away every Wednesday.

    I still have a few POIs down the pipeline and a handful to resubmit (I still can't believe this sort of trail bridge got rejected), I'm also hoping the AMA about the new criteria will bring up some good news (laxer rules for trail markers, clear definition of what constitute a "private residential property" so this type of murals don't get rejected for being at the ground floor of a 6 stories building...). All in all I think there are 10 to 20 POIs that I still hope to get approved with varying degree of confidence (from community garden I really don't get why they got rejected in the first place to huge mosaic I find cool even though I know I'm pushing the envelope of what constitutes "Unique Art or Architecture"). Hopefully by the end there will be enough spots around to have turned the neighborhood and the nearby park into a gaming hotspot.

  • I managed to reach level 40 with a lot of effort playing in different places since where I live there was no poke stop, the few closest poke stops and gym were 8 minutes from my house walking but they were very few, there in 2019 when they enabled the nomination From pokeparadas I started nominating pokeparadas both in my neighborhood and in the surrounding neighborhoods, basically I was the only one who dedicated myself to nominate pokeparadas and thanks to me today adding the gym and pokeparadas that I create in my neighborhood and those that already existed in neighborhoods Nearby we have 20 gyms and more than 90 pokeparadas, and it was there that I met other players and more people were encouraged to play pokemon go, I do not know all the players, but today for those who are always there taking the gym and They join the raids. I can see that we are more than 30 players from different teams.

    The increase in poke stops and gyms has helped more people dare to play pokemongo and that many players do not have to be going to places so far away to play.

  • Mokorus-PGOMokorus-PGO Posts: 22 ✭✭

    I have a group of pokemon players, a lot of 40s, but I'm the only one on my neigboorhood who is rating the nomination, one by one I'm trying to make more on the parks arounds. Close neighborhoods are trying too but i see a lot of places that can be a pokestop but no one is send them or rate them or trying his best.

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