Possible relationship between newly accepted Wayspots and nearby Power Spot removal?
Hi everyone,
I would like to ask whether anyone has experienced something similar, because the timing in my case seems too consistent to be a coincidence.
Timeline
For several months, our community fitness station consistently appeared as a Power Spot, especially during Max Mondays.
At that time, our area already had several Wayspots in Pokémon GO, including:
Badminton Court (PokéStop)
Children’s Playground (PokéStop)
A community signboard outside the neighborhood (PokéStop)
I later submitted the Community Pavilion through Wayfarer. Around the same period, I also submitted the Fitness Station, but it was marked as Duplicate. At the time, I didn’t realize that the Power Spot was located at the same Fitness Station that I later nominated through Wayfarer.
A few days later:
The Community Pavilion was accepted and became a PokéStop.
The existing Badminton Court PokéStop was automatically upgraded to a Gym.
Immediately after these map updates, the Fitness Station Power Spot disappeared.
The Fitness Station Power Spot has never returned.
I have checked multiple Max Mondays.
No new Power Spot has appeared elsewhere in or around the park.
Before these changes, the Fitness Station had been a very stable Power Spot for several months.
My question
Has anyone observed that adding a new PokéStop or upgrading a nearby PokéStop to a Gym can cause an existing Power Spot to disappear permanently?
I understand that Power Spots may rotate, but in this case the timing was immediate and it has remained absent through multiple Max Mondays.
I am trying to understand whether this is expected behavior or whether others have observed a similar relationship between Wayspot updates and Power Spot placement.
Can you send the location so we can have a better look in it. From what i know, powerspot will only appear if it is inside a s17 cell which have already have a pokestop and 22m away from the poi. If you have submit a pokestop that is too near to the powerspot, it will disappear as it does not meet the requirement of 22m.
Community observed that powerspot can only appear if its at least 22m away from nearest wayspot. It seems your new wayspot is too close to powerspot in order for powespot to appear
I checked the coordinates and measured the distance between the Community Pavilion (now the NEW PokéStop) and the former Fitness Station Power Spot. The straight-line distance is only about 10.6 meters, so it seems very likely that they are within the ~22 m distance you mentioned.
That would explain why the Power Spot disappeared immediately after the Pavilion became a PokéStop. I really appreciate your explanation.
I do have one more question.
Are Power Spots tied to existing locations in Niantic’s database (such as existing Lightship Wayspots that simply don’t appear as PokéStops or Gyms), or does the game generate Power Spots independently at random eligible locations?
The reason I’m asking is that the Power Spot was located exactly at the Community Fitness Station, which I later nominated through Wayfarer. My nomination was marked as Duplicate, so I’m wondering whether the Fitness Station might have already existed somewhere in Niantic’s database but simply wasn’t visible as a PokéStop or Gym.
Or was it simply a coincidence that the Power Spot happened to appear at that exact location?
I checked the coordinates and measured the distance between the Community Pavilion (now the NEW PokéStop) and the former Fitness Station Power Spot. The straight-line distance is only about 10.6 meters, so it seems very likely that they are within the ~22 m distance you mentioned.
There are two different sources for Power Spots. There was a mass import from a third party source by the Pokémon Go Devs when the feature went live. A lot of these are wayspots for random business listings. The other source is existing wayspots that aren’t eligible to become Pokéstops or Gyms. So the answer to your question is effectively “both of the above”, though new Power Spot data only comes from wayspots that were added but not eligible to become Pokéstops or Gyms, as the mass import was a one off occurrence. New Power Spot data tends to sync into the game around the 4th of each month.
Welcome. Maybe to add to the great explanations above, it shouldn’t be possible for a community contributed wayspot to be duplicated to one of the imported business listings. However, there are also community contributed wayspots that you could not be seeing if you are only looking at the Pokémon GO overworld. Pokémon GO has inclusion rules based on density so all wayspots in the database will not make it into it. If you use the Wayfarer map (top tab of the Wayfarer website), or enable duplicate POI checking in the Pokémon GO submission screen, you should be able to find the answer to your question.
It is hard to help further without seeing the coordinates - you are welcome to share them if you’d like people to look at whether the fitness center already exists in the database and what it could have been duplicated to.
Thank you so much for your suggestion n it really helped!
I checked the Wayfarer Map as you recommended, and it turns out the Street Gym Equipments already exists as a Community-Contributed Wayspot. It was submitted about 3 years ago, but it’s marked as “Not in game”, which explains why my nomination was marked as Duplicate.
So I now understand that the Fitness Station was already an existing hidden Wayspot in Lightship, rather than just a randomly generated Power Spot location.
It also explains why it consistently appeared as a Power Spot until the nearby Pavilion became a PokéStop. Since the Pavilion is only about 10.6 meters away, it likely no longer met the distance requirement for a Power Spot.
Everything makes a lot more sense now. Thanks again for pointing me to the Wayfarer Map, I probably wouldn’t have figured this out otherwise!
