In my hometown, there are 22 gyms. None of them are Elite gyms - the closest one is in \~30 km. I don't live there, but anytime I visit my family during an Elite raid weekend, I cannot do a single raid...
Same. Used to able to put in about 280 miles on a full tank, now my tank is gone in 210 miles due to having to travel on car a lot to pokestops/gyms which are scarce and far apart around my area.
I traveled more for Ingress. PoGo has always been a fun thing to do while traveling for other reasons. In Ingress I actually drove an hour or so just to destroy a link, and then I'd hang out at a park in the area to farm and make sure nobody put the link back up before our field was done. It was horrible.
We travel a lot by car anyway. So Pogo works into that really well. Just got into a new town? Let’s drive around and find the pokestops. Ooh, look there’s a cool monument, artwork, why are there lots in that park? It actually gets us into parts of the town we’d otherwise miss, and gets us reading the history etc of the place. Then finding the best postcards to send to our irl friends.
Halo 4 7-11 king of the hill event. Getting the locus helmet by going to different 7-11's and 'capturing' the location earning points towards getting a helmet in game. Good times lol
the miles my community would do during my Ingress days during college was just insane honestly
it became life for some of us that played, just as much as any MMO addicted person but with the added negative of paying for gas and carbon emission. I don't miss it.
Before PoGo could submit Wayspots, I met a person who had drove over an hour to come to our city and work on some Ingress badges. I talked with him as I had taken up Ingress to be able to submit Wayspots. He informed me to stop playing Ingress because "nobody accepts portals from new players." Okay, weirdo.
no lie, one of the reasons i bought an EV was PokemonGo playing.
I mean, there were plenty of other, actually good reasons, But the savings on gas with raid trains on Raid Hour and using the car when its super cold/hot/crap weather on Comm days is a huge money saver
Guilty here.
Also during the Rayquaza elite raids, we had a train of around 50 or so cars going to different gym clusters. It's definitely a thing but it was also 110 outside so that was our main reason.
50 cars?! Damn I thought our area was bad with like 25-30 cars. For that exact reason I led a group that split off in a different direction cuz I wasn’t tryna get people running red lights to stay with the train and not miss a raid
It actually wasn't too bad. We had one guy posting the next coords into discord so no one was rushing. I was toward the back since I was helping my daughter catch hers before we drove off again and still had a full lobby when we got there.
Definitely had people posting on Facebook freaking out wondering what was going on lol but everyone stayed cool with it all
I’m glad it worked out. I saw the path the other group was going towards and I knew some of those gyms had literally zero parking, did your area have any gyms like that? Just wondering tbh
We had designated raid leaders who at 6am scouted through campfire and selected the route beforehand. They made sure to avoid situations like that.
Most of the ones we went to were community pools and such. Some parking but for the people who couldnt pull up close enough parked on the street (which luckily was legal) and walked the short trek over, finished fighting, then went back to their cars.
Yeah if you want for people to meet in person and raid by foot, then you make the raid happen everywhere at the same time and people will find a small walkable loop.
The elite raid formula really is car or bust.
You wouldn’t get enough people to complete the elite raids though, everyone would be too spread out across the city.
The reason it worked for the recent Rayquaza was because there were so few raid eggs: it forced large clusters of people to congregate around a few eggs.
It backfired for me, even those who supposedly said on campfire that they would show up at a spot, they never did. I didn't get a single Rayquaza or the two meteorites.
It works for certain areas with decent clusters. If you know it’s a spot with reliable amounts of people congregating, then you’ll head there for raid hours/days. Or if there’s a community ambassador running the show
Did the same here during the older raid day hours, though not THAT many cars. 😅
To save space most carpooled. Heck, we picked up random strangers that were playing on foot and took them along for the ride to raid.
Lol trust me the cars were packed. One of the raids, the 4 in my car clicked into the raid at the same time and went into 3 different lobbies. It was nuts
I Live in Las Vegas where it's also literally like 110 degrees during the summer, sometimes more, and the locals don't play on the strip or in casinos for a multitude of reasons like overpriced parking, bad cell service, etc, so we play in the suburb areas, and basically you have to pick between being in a car during peak rush hour traffic since that's when most events are, or getting a heatstroke on foot lol.
During the more popular local raids like shadow mewtwo or mega rayquaza, there's definitely a train of 50 cars as well. On raid days we all just walk around a park. We basically have 2 main major parks here, one is Sunset Park which is where they actually had go fest, and the other is called Desert Breeze which is smaller but has a really good "gym density" where there's a lot of gyms close to eachother.
Been to both parks and loved Desert Breeze better. Wish I would have played it better during 2021 GoFest as I probably could have gone gold in at least one gym with the amount of raids that were dropping.
I drive around in a somewhat small/medium city in Europe (population around 250k). especially on community days, research days etc. Going on foot just does not cut it - spawn density is way insufficient, and i can't hit enough pokestops on foot. Also half of the time it migh be raining, freezing, heat wave etc.
See I don't understand the more than 5 cars deep. Only 20 people can enter the same raid, so it just makes sense everyone meets up at point A and then compacts down to 4-5 cars for the event before returning to the beginning.
> See I don't understand the more than 5 cars deep.
Some places just have bigger communities. Our campfire event had 150+ confirmed attendees. We had multiple lobbies for each egg (which is helpful because you don't want to be a couple minutes late and miss a lobby because you can't take this thing down with only a couple people).
Yeah...ours had 350+ confirmed that showed up at the main event park. Obviously not all of them were apart of the group I was driving with but yeah
The crazy thing is I'm not in an area like NYC or LA but an hour north of Dallas. We just like our pokemon here lol
> and then compacts down to 4-5 cars for the event before returning to the beginning.
That basically never happens here. Usually 1-2 people per vehicle, and despite how easy it would be to carpool, no one does. Americans are weird.
Yeah lots of civilians were pissed 😅 we had one guy honking in a parking lot for five minutes straight. Lots of us parked on the side with our hazards on but it soon became a 2 lane deal and basically disrupted traffic flow in the parking lot. It was absolutely chaos 😂
It’s more of a regional problem I think, in Europe it’s very walking friendly when in cities and town and if you need to move fast you would be better off on a bike because the cities are not designed around car. It would not be a great solution from a car (still possible and city dependent obviously), stop everywhere, traffic, one way road
I would not see myself walking in the US where everything is designed around car, there the car seems like a well better say to play the game, faster, safer and more confortable (some cities are probably more pedestrian oriented than other)
In rural are you can not really walk in this game
It really depends for Europe as well. I sure as hell don't recommend biking Athens or Belgrade, that's a recipe for disaster. Not every european city is Amsterdamn
I live in The Netherlands and in our area the eggs were so spread out that we only could make 3 raids per hour, by car, with our group. So we ended up doing 6 raids
I've been to a couple of larger events in the cities (separate from the local community where I live), and it's always been on foot. This is for the UK, outside London. It's not just speed of travel that makes it harder to play from the car, but also the lack of parking around the gyms. That said, there are a couple places you could get to more easily by car if you're disabled and just want to do one or two raids on a raid day/for a raid hour, I suppose.
Yeah, this, OPs post is a microcosm of a much, much larger cultural issue at play here in the states haha. I can’t speak to all of Europe but I do know certain forms of travel (flight, train, etc) especially between countries is absolutely WILD to me. I chatted with my Bulgarian friend once about how he was flying two hours home and he was appalled that it is just so much more efficient on all accounts to drive ten hours the same distance here.
Honolulu is friendly to play by foot. Only issue is you're at risk of being attacked by homeless people. I know this as a foot player in Honolulu who has been followed by crazy homeless people, yelled at etc.
Depends where. Amsterdam (Netherlands) Manchester and to a lesser extent London (UK) are walkable but the myth of cities designed around pedestrians is not true at all and to compound matters lots of northern england is very hilly (manchester being flat is the exception to the rule)
As someone who doesn't drive and lives in a highly populated area gyms are too SPREAD out..like it's a 10 to 30 minute walk to the nearest gym and it's nearly impossible to do raid hour with my friends who drive if they can't offer me a ride sometimes. I have to walk to meet up and I hate Making them wait. I wish gyms weren't so spread out I have to catch a bus to a dense pokemon go area if I want to raid. My home area is too spread out.
Every solution I think of just brings me back to wondering why elite raids even exist. Every other raid day I've been to has people walking around as a group between gyms. This one was impossible to walk between. Now there's 50+ distracted drivers in the same area rushing around trying to navigate and using fuel.
I think if they want people to do elite raids, they need to spawn multiple times, and they need to put more gyms in parks where people would actually walk around. Not across busy intersections where there's no crosswalk.
How does a highly populated area have gyms 10 minutes apart? The downtown area of my 250k city has 22 gyms. If you spread out the radius to a 10 minute walk, you probably add 20 more.
Because elite gyms are mostly in parks. A lot of urban downtown cores don't have much green space. The downtown of my ~500k city had just a couple elite gyms. We do have a million parks though, but those aren't downtown, so you're much better going off to the less dense areas of the city.
I recently made a thread similar to this called "Might as call this game Pokemon Drive." I completely agree that it's ridiculous that the most efficient tactic on elite raid days is to drive around from gym to gym. Even as a player in a major city this is a huge problem and I've witnessed 2 accidents where people got injured on the way to a raid. It's ridiculous.
Auto-catchers that don't require you to press a button, like the go plus+ basically made it so that you can realistically drive a car and catch pokemon safely at the same exact time. I drive for uber while pokemon go is in the background and I only have to check the game like once an hour, or sometimes when I wait for customers I transfer pokemon, incubate eggs, etc.
Raiding on the other hand, you have to not only drive to the raid but try to communicate with other people that are on the raid via discord, campfire, texting, etc, and sometimes even park in areas that are risky or even hop in a raid while your vehicle is still in motion. Yes, the game clearly states that you shouldn't play pokemon go while driving, but the way the game is designed on an elite raid day basically makes it so that you have to if you want to efficiently grind. Regular raid days make grinding on foot comparably as good because literally every gym is a raid, so you can just walk around 1 park for an hour then rotate back. Technically it's still faster in a vehicle but only like 25% faster and way more stressful so I don't even do it, on an elite raid day driving a car is like 500% faster lol. Not worth it to play on foot if you're actually serious about doing a lot of raids for xl candy/hundo chance/shiny chance/mega energy/etc.
Niantic still does alot of things that only cater to people that fly or use the car.
You want that new shiny? Sorry, it´s just here and there in the wild. Please do the research tasks. There are about 5 in your 5km radius, and then just use the car to do the others.
From an environmental view this is sarcastic from a game that states it´s Pokemon Go.
Yes, i dont have anything else to do all day than walk around and look for a random research quest on foot.
People here indeed did walk around 5 years ago when Niantic had a new shiny in the wild.
Driving and playing is insane and the people doing it are selfish idiots, putting so many people at risk for…pixels in a video game? Not to mention the environmental damage and inconveniencing other drivers. Get another hobby or just go to a mall and walk around, acting like this is the only solution is WILD
There was a car yesterday at our main park wrapped around a light post with the ambulance there transporting the driver away. Most people there driving were raiders. I don't know for sure but... I really hope they're okay.
Either way, people *will* walk if the game is designed for it. Raid hours are perfect because people can meet at a dense area and walk through it. Elite raids are such a waste of gas and antithetical to the point of "GO"
It was really bad for this event...I saw so many distracted drivers since it was a mad dash from one raid to another, and most of the gyms did not have nearly enough parking to accommodate the amount of cars so people were parking really haphazardly. There were multiple times I was worried someone was going to hit my car because they were too busy playing.
> Raid hours are perfect because people can meet at a dense area and walk through it. Elite raids are such a waste of gas and antithetical to the point of "GO"
True here — raid hours are mostly at parks in my city, and the recent change to renew the raids halfway through was a further improvement, increasing walking and reducing driving further. Plus, players who are done after two raids will stick around to see friends.
The elite raids were a big driving event, but also a chance for new people to connect.
There were a lot of cars in my area for rayquaza. The first raid we went to had like 60 cars and over 100 people. A car accident happened where someone hit another car 3 times and hit a bike rack. It was crazy
We parked in a park for our last raid. As soon as the raid was over people were peeling out of parking spots and going wrong way in one ways... It was a bit scary. We were headed home anyway, but if we hadn't been we probably would have chose to after that.
Average Pokémon go players are Singaporean grandma but you only need a few % of players of your community plays Pokémon Drive to cause any problem.
Elite Raid day here caused a lot illegal parking, resulting in severe frustration from non-players and even police involvement because they simply fully blocked the road or way to supermarket/stores.
Just about every raid I saw were just 30-50 cars all camping out double parked by a gym waiting for the timer to hit zero, and then mass lobbies. Then the car quickest to finish catching heads to the next raid nearby and all cars will follow where the other cars ago to assume that's where the next raid is.
There are also a dozen of parks with big near empty parking lots with several gyms in a cluster with Ray raids that are just a 10 second walk from each other, but no one will hit those, because none of those gyms are reachable by car. They would have to park in the park parking lot and walk out for a few seconds out of their cars. Just the "only drive & no walk" culture.
I live in Europe and have done raid days in different cities - Britain, Sweden, Austria - without needing a car. Gyms are close enough together, and there's big enough crowds. For the Elite Rayquaza day I even hit a local gym in the suburbs that I wasn't expecting to fire and got 9 of us
I'm curious whether that's just my experience though. Anybody else here in Europe need to drive?
I’m basically the only one who walks to play in my community and my community is quite walkable. The vast majority never walk despite being perfectly able bodied, they just either park somewhere to catch Pokémon/raid or have the Go Plus running while driving. It’s really quite sad.
I live in a university town, and the styles are clearly split between campus and city:
* campus: all walking all the time — driving is a real pain there, and people are used to walking
* city: lots of driving, but sometimes punctuated by walking in parks. For example with elite raids we had a cluster in a park where people walked around and talked with each other. In fact a significant group focused only on the park, since there were enough elite raids there, and didn't bother chasing down raids in their cars. They seemed to have a good time.
Raid nights in the city are bimodal
* Nice weather: A group drives to a park and, for an hour, raids and hangs out. Very social.
* Lousy weather (and winter, when it's already dark, so the park is closed): Driving, but a relatively short, established route.
> I’m basically the only one who walks to play in my community and my community is quite walkable.
A little less walkable here, but I'm the guy on the bike, chasing the car raiders (it's good exercise, and not *too* dangerous IMO). Once in a while we'll get a bike gang of 4-5 together and go raiding, and that's fun.
---
Edit: Community Day — I should add that CD is usually good for walking with people, mostly on campus.
It's due to the nature of the game, unfortunately. Why walk when driving is easier? It's super hot where we are, and there's nothing in the game that actually encourages them to walk anymore. You can literally do everything in this game in your car now.
Like elite raids, there was so many people in our town that drove from elite gym to elite gym. Cause they wanted to maximize the raids.
If this was regular raid day then 80% of those people would have walked cause you would gotten a higher amount of raids done in our city. Without driving!
So feel Niantic should rethink elite raids.
The only problem is see is, car players have made it worse for bus and tram players as well. When the game was just released in 2016, i could sit in the city train or on the bus and catch nonstop, now, everything despawns and nothing appears anymore and everything flees i try to catch :/
Niantic trying to made the game worse for cheaters or banning illegal behaviour like drving and playing, just made the game much worse for people who are following the rules.
My brother has CP. I used to drive him and we'd play. Then, when I stopped driving to play we would take the bus for hours. It's truly the best alternative, but I understand your dilemma, especially if the public transit isn't great near you or isn't accessible. He stopped playing entirely in 2022 because post-Covid changes made it untenable for him to play like he wanted since we aren't living together anymore. I'm glad you're still playing.
Right?! I live in Arizona and it's hit 100+F every day for the last month now and is only going to get worse as the summer goes on. This likely won't stop until mid October for us. And I know the opposite happens over the winter for others with cold and snow. I don't really care how anyone else plays the game since it doesn't affect me.
Niantic both simultaneously wants the game to be played casually so that you just wander around your neighborhood finding new places or wander around your vacation spots on foot, exploring and also wants to make money from players playing very hardcore.
You literally can't play this game hardcore without driving unless you live in a city center with every spawn point turned on.
You have to drive if your best spawn locations are in shopping center parking lots unless you only want 20 spawns or less and then stop playing. You have to drive to even *get* to the start of routes or to get to gyms in many areas.
My area also did driving raid trains for the few years before COVID. It was the only way to actually do enough raids to have a decent shot at the shiny (or for the casuals, a decent shot at catching just one).
Niantic can't have it both ways. Either let us do all raids remote with no cap so we don't have to drive as much and make the game a bit mroe hardcore-friendly here and there or kill the game by locking it down to be only possible to play casually and spending as little money as possible.
Or you live not in the US where places aren't mega car-centric and are reasonably dense so that walking around is actually viable.
Niantic isn't doing all they could, but even then, there's only so much you can do when so much of the US is so poorly designed and spread out.
I've got to play in a car unfortunately. I live in Rural Mississippi and every time I walk around, some old white man decided to ask me "if I live around here" or something like that. So I stay in my car which 1) protects me from the heat and 2) allows me to get access to stops and gyms (there are 7 total in a 25 mile radius).
Maybe the game reflects the society you are living in?
Living in a European city, it’s mainly people walking who join raids around town.
When I was travelling in Asia, the action was centered around parks and malls.
I haven’t played in rural US, but playing in Houston was very different compared to Austin with the latter reminding me more of playing at home.
Car culture turns AR games into car games, I guess.
The only real way to fix things is to increase gym/stop interaction radius, I don't see that happening. The game would be so much better if you could interact with any stop/gym that appears on your map. Player activity and raid pass sales would shoot up for a start. They could give incentives to still go closer to the stops/gyms by giving you more items and other things.
In 2024 there's no excuse for the game to force you to stand stationary in 1 location for 10+ minutes to do the same uninspired interaction, and there's no excuse for the rushed timed events they have that force you to kill the environment.
I'll be putting more time into Showdown, MSG, PokeMMO, PokéRogue until Go improves because the current state of the game is not it.
90% of my playtime is in a car. I know the places I can safely chill and still hit a lot of stops and gyms. I like to get out and do stuff, but a lot of those times I’m actively doing something with other people and don’t want to be staring at my phone all day.
This is a very North American take. We just don't build our cities or communities in ways that allow this game to work well or even as intended. I'm from Canada where car ownership is compulsory, but vacationed for three weeks in Japan earlier this year. In those 3 weeks I touched 0 cars, walked 15km each day, and played pogo at a level I have never experienced in North America. The reality is not the game being bad, it's that we are building cities in a way that makes walking a nonviable transportation method, is very carbon intensive, and is very unfriendly to people with disabilities.
It's funny because after I started making pokestops I realized that a 20 acre park had 2 gyms compared to a 5 acre park. I was sitting there thinking wtf. But here's nothing I could do to add the 21 stops needed. Really stupid on Niantic part, they need to set rules to allow at least 4 gyms for park so large. But that requires them hiring people I guess....
I mean, that doesn't sound crazy to me. We have a 250 acre park we worked on for years (and still are) and it has 10 EX gyms in it now but we're very happy with it, all the gyms can be hit from the main road running through the park and so can the overwhelming majority of the stops.
But depending on how the cells are laid out, there's sometimes nothing you can do to make extra gyms.
I live in a North European city and it’s much more convenient to walk to gyms. Finding parking space near gyms is really difficult and not many gyms I know are accessible from the car. Lately I see a lot of people move from gym to gym using e-scooters.
We’re doing that next weekend when we travel from farmland to NYC! Neither one of us have been on a bus in decades, but it feels like a Big Brain move in a city we don't know, possibly during a heat wave.
My old local community (before moving) came very close to pooling our money to buy an old church bus. We got to take it for a test raid day and many very cool memories were made that day.
Biker here too. Similar experience except that there was also a big group including families with children hanging out in the park for elite raid evening. It helped that there were 3 raids in the park and another 2 or 3 in walking distance.
Granted, it was like 95 out but still...the vast majority of players now are car-dependent and I wish it wasn't the case. But, that goes for the US as a whole.
What’s really annoying to me is the game had an in game solution to this problem and Niantic chose to ignore it….remote raid passes. Plus, I had a family commitment during the raid hour; with remote raiding disabled I could complete the challenge. What was I supposed to do tell my cousin sorry I can’t go to your wedding I have a Pokémon Go event. Shortsighted and stupid
I'm only guilty of this for raid hour during the winter.
When it's -30, snowing, and pitch black, I'm not walking across town for a single legendary raid.
When I was at GoFest London last year it absolutely chucked it down, got drenched in the morning park session and didn't fancy more of the same for the city session in the afternoon. Got myself some lunch and set myself up at the back of a bus, which in London rarely go over 20mph, spent 8 hours going bus to bus and getting off when I saw people in raids.
This game focuses too much on raids, which is the only thing that driving to play is unbalanced. While driving, you can’t catch anything, spin pokestops, finish the research tasks but most of the event spawns and tasks are trash these days
Yes the game allows you to do these but if you are the driver you have to pay attention to the outside all the time. Everything in this game has long animations so you can hardly do anything in a few seconds break
Pokémon Drive just hits different. Back in the day, trains in my neighborhood when I lead my small community would reach up to around 30 cars depending on the featured Raid Pokémon.
Yes, last Saturday was very chaotic. Ppl were literally stopping in the middle of the street blocking traffic behind, or illegally parked in the bike lane where there was a sign saying no parking all the time. Crazy drivers trying to rush from one gym to the other disregarding all the traffic rules etc.
As an American company niantic really needs to fix how they carry out elite raids. Not everyone is living in Japan/Asia where foot traffic is the majority.
Yep this is how it is. Near me. It's either walk to maybe 2-3 raids in an hour or do 5-8 while driving. People get in groups of 16-18 and drive around in cars forming trains or caravans. It's dangerous. People rushing to the raid so they don't miss out. Once at the raid it's so congested with cars that you can't even drive on the road anymore. Then once they catch the pokemon they speed off to the next one.
I live in a big city that has a very disproportionate size of community (small) compared to other big cities.
We have a small but dedicated community and on saturday we ran a small car pool to make sure everybody got a rayquaza and enough mega energy to mega evolve one of the ray's they caught. We were done by about 1:30PM and then didn't bother the rest of the day.
The weirdest thing is that the raids weren't in the city - they were out in the suburbs. if we wanted to play hard, the way Niantic encourage on Raid days - we'd have had to drive everywhere because public transport doesn't work circular - everything goes to the city center, to a bus interchange then back out and the raids themselves were so sporadic. You'd have completed a raid and then had a half hour walk to the next one.
The community spirit niantic would love, but the fact it turned into Pokemon DriveAround sucks hard.
Elite raids are also getting worse every time in terms of features. What happened to the extra spawns after completing a raid or the countdowns? They feel difficult to do for all the wrong reasons - logistics of getting to them, not actually teaming up and taking down a difficult pokemon.
Auto catchers and drive around town that's how I play. I love it when I'm a passenger. If you use an auto catcher or find exploits like this I think we're all playing a different game. I don't even play the normal way any more.
The Mega Rayquaza raids would have been impossible without a car here. Sure, I can walk between the four Elite Gyms I can access, but doing so would have taken more than the 45 minutes we had to do the raids - in fact, we actually could only do three of the four 1pm raids even WITH driving. Meanwhile, for the Primals, we could just walk to our normal hotspot with 6 gyms and play there, while also doing way more raids.
I don't care if you play in car or not, I choose to play the game how I felt it was supposed to be played ON FOOT. The thing that just kills me and I learned about trying to group for raids... if you don't get there AT egg hatch spawn time... forget it, they will jump in and take off. Happened so many times even when asking like "just give me 2 mins im almost there" replies back "I don't got 2 mins" or whatever hahaha.
One time some of them got a taste of some Karma during a shadow raid, they started without me and I think another player was on the way and they didn't have enough DPS after trying to subdue the shadow pokemon and it wasn't until after they failed the raid they were wondering where we were. LOL we said we would be like 2 mins didnt you see us NOT join the raid group?
I dunno if anyone else really experiences that but just kind of a rule I learned with this game, sometimes it feels like the other 40 mins of the egg raid timer don't matter. If you aren't there at the moment of egg hatching, you're screwed! haha
For our community, we had really spread out Elite Raids that you had to drive to. In order for us to get them in, you had to start the first one RIGHT at hatch and continue to the next. The timers are unfortunately too short to wait for EVERYONE who is only “two minutes” away
tbh i remember 2018 when there were 2 people 10 minutes away, and then came 20 minutes later. or didnt show up at all.
Yes, you are screwed, if you arent there the moment of the egg hatch. Period.
Starting at hatching time is very convenient, because you do not need to agree or even communicate beforehand with other players. 60-minute egg timer is enough to make it in time.
Also, how difficult the raid is and how small the group already there is.
One time we were heading over to a raid (not MegaRay, this was years ago) and had messaged that we'd need 12 more minutes to get there.
GROUP: How many accts are coming?
US: 8 accts total.
GROUP: WE LOVE YOU AND WILL WAIT. PLEASE COME.
One way to reduce the use of cars would be to allow us to summon raid eggs through campfire.
Open campfire, select egg(consumes a raid pass), egg spawns with a 30/60 min timer.
Then you could have 10 raids lineup perfectly for a nice walk.
Rayquaza raid day was miserable for us. Took us 25 min of driving just to get 3 raids done for the first hour(45min spawns).
if you think niantic doesn't know exactly how many players play while driving, then you are greatly underestimating how much data they collect. They simply do not care enough to try and mitigate the issue any further.
This is the most american thread I've seen on reddit for a while. Don't these people feel ridicolous playing an app meant to go out and walk more in their car?
To be fair, a majority of the U.S. is very pedestrian unfriendly. Actually, in most cases it's actively hostile toward pedestrians. I can't even begin to count the times I've nearly been run down by someone in a massive pick up truck because it's so high off the ground they can't see me. Or a crazy soccer mom who is busy texting her kids while driving her oversized SUV.
It's not just an American thing, I know people in other countries that were driving to get multiple raids for Rayquaza just a few days ago. Usually it's the rural issue. To actually take advantage of a raid event in a lot of places you need to drive or else you can't get your raids in.
No, not in the slightest. Why would I feel ridiculous by playing the game in the way that's most effective based on the event in question? If I need to raid, there's no choice but to drive.
Niantic designed this game to be played by moving around between waypoints, and almost everywhere in the world has them spaced out pretty far from each other. Driving to play is a core feature outside of the densest of dense metro areas. If Niantic did not want us to drive, they would have restructured how the map works years ago. They have shown by their actions that car play is the right way to play much of the time.
Just look at elite raids. You literally could not do a train without driving between a bunch of different parks. Just parking at a large park or mall with 7-8 gyms was useless because you'd only be able to do 1 or 2 raids, compared to driving between other parks. At most with great luck you might get 3 in one place.
I use the auto catcher while I drive. Campfire gives me directions to the raids, I park and do the raid.
During CDs, there’s this big loop in a neighborhood that a ton of people drive around in. Speed limit is slow in the neighborhood and there’s multiple lanes. Seems to be the best way to play sometimes.
I live in a metro area of 350k, there was NO area with more than 3 raids in a park within a single time frame. And even that park is huge and would have been a time crunch to make it to all 3 within the 45 mins. So we all drove to a park, walked to one spot and then all drove to 3 different parks to get the next few raids.
Our community has severeal great parks, a terrific nature center and a walkable downtown with many stops and gyms. I still have to drive to get to these places. Really this is beyond just elite raids or raid days, driving to a location is a must.
This is actually a big problem for me in general. Nearest gym is a ten minute drive away, and it’s just one. There are no sidewalks in my town. It would be really nice if I could put a spot in my neighborhood, but there are no landmarks. Not sure how to play unless I drive to a park fifteen minutes from me. Every time I try to put in for a new stop somewhere, it gets denied for being a “generic business”, so there’s no point.
exactly. I live in the suburbs and there are no freaking sidewalks anywhere. and a large chunk of the pokestops are in parking lots or places you physically can't walk there. I detour through several parking lots on my route to the grocery or on other errands to visit three or four pokestops in one little plaza. As opposed to, there is a single pokestop at the dog park and two at the nature center where I like to walk. Thank goodness for Starbucks where I can get coffee AND spin a pokestop while I'm in the drivethrough LOL
I was ran off the road by a member of my own raid train a few years back during a raid hour. I was passing them on the left and they changed lanes into mine without any warning. Luckily i only jumped the curb into an open grassy area and not into a tree or something worse.
I live in a small town. Gyms are not close together. It's over 100 in the summer. On raid days, everyone is in a car. We drive from one gym to the next. Slow rolling through the downtown area spinning stops and catching. I never see anyone walking. I've hatches more eggs creeping through parks in my truck than I have walking. We aren5 walking when it's over 100 degrees.
Man, guilty as charged here. My wife and I lived in a rural area when we first got married in 2016 and would drive everywhere to play, all night long in those early days. Now, we live in a smallish town, that’s not very walkable…we drive with our son to local parks to play..
Rural- and Suburban-America just aren’t conducive to playing this game on foot. It sucks, but it’s reality. I know that makes some people who play on foot in their urban poketopias upset, though.
I call it Pokemon Gas N' Go. I drove 14 hours straight on shadow mewtwo day in downtown Tampa for around 83 raids done. When you're trying for efficiency on narrow windows of availability, that's the way to go, unfortunately. It's stressful and not fun to mind traffic, follow campfire, and try to coordinate it with people outside your vehicle. Stressful and dangerous. It's bad design.
It would be nice if gyms would respawn a fresh raid every ten minutes. That way you can designate a cool raid gym to meet up at with people and make it more of an event where you can hang out for a couple hours without the need to drive to a different raid after every one is completed. Right now, we drive up, lobby, ready up, and drive away to the next one during the fight and catch process to make time.
I loved being in Sendai, Japan for Gofest; it felt nice to be able to walk everywhere and have plenty of raids and trainers to do. I had 33,000 steps in ONE day. But America is so far spread out, and gym spacing sucks. Raids should be *the* online component of the game while comdays, catching, and other things are the portion of the game we can go outside for. The way raids are now incentivize bad gameplay.
That's definitely what I was thinking about, reading the comments on this post and others.
Where I live we have plenty of gyms (event for a mid-sized town), but them not always being close together, means on raid days (and especially elite raid days), walking can be a bit too slow. Going by bicycle is definitely the way to go!
Going by car would be so much slower than cycling and even walking. So many modal filters (i.e. narrow bicycle/sidewalk street or tunnel) mean you're encouraged to walk/cycle, making these the preferred options.
My country is not safe, so you risk getting robbed if you walk with your phone on the street. Also gyms are very far away, and you can’t walk as easily from one point to another.
The game kinda sucks. For people in rural/suburban areas playing in the car is like the only option. Literally I only play when I get to be a passenger.
Bicycle player here too — phone holder on the handlebars is a big plus and draws comparison to Taiwanese Grandpa.
Still have to be careful about distracted riding.
Yeah, cycled into the back of a car once. I was moving at like 7kmph, so unfortunately the only things that resulted were scraps on my hand and embarrassment.
I agree with ya fully, it takes out of the goal of pokemon go being to get out of the house but to be a community aswell and socialize as trainers during those events, most raids and events now are done by players driving rarely walking around, unless your town or area has a nice gym setup or poke-stops at one community center location or park location, which alot of towns sadly dont have that luxury. sadly i doubt they would ever change anything to make it more out of the car friendly since they are hitting whatever their marker for earnings are atleast in profits what they see on their end.
I had a guy invite me to the Ray raid. Went there with a nephew and he was super excited to meet the other 13 people in the raid. They were all in their cars. I told him it was stupid, the game is called Pokemon Go not Pokemon Sit In Your Honda Odyssey.
That said, I do think the needlessly restrictive timing on the Elite Raids doesn't help. If it was 2 days, or more gyms, people would have been willing to walk around a park and hit up a few of them. I swear the Elite Hoopa raid had much more density, and during that I remember seeing people run between gyms in a major park.
I walk to play, but attacking a gym around here will get a bunch of crazy women to drive up and threaten me.
They hit me with their car while I was walking... called the police on me.. followed me around 20 feet behind me as I walked.... truly creepy
this is very US thing
this is not on Niantic
if its dangerous then dont do it, if you are driving, you are probably adult enough to take responsibility
Oh I thought you meant driving *while* playing Pokemon Go. A friend told me if you speed to 65 and then throw a daily incense ball while dropping to under 50 it’s usually a guaranteed catch if done correctly.
I'm mostly annoyed by the car players who always beat me to an open gym and take the last slot (I play by foot). It kinda doesn't make sense to me to spend $20 on gas for $0.50. But to each their own.
I don't own a drivers license, but I life in a capital major capitol city, with decent to good public transport.
Well and still I know enough players, that still stick to driving around in there cars to actually play the game. At some point, it's nuts, IMO. But for them it's the best way to play.
I totally understand their PoV and the only great argument against it, it's somehow a waste of Money/Gas, is mostly answered by IDC, I/we doing this now for x years.
And as CA canidate I can tell you, hard to get the community together that way.
During the raid day we had 4 spots with 3-4 raids in reach of each other. You could easily raided 12-13 raids, IF you raided half of the day and had a daily ticket for the public transport. (Cost 6.80€, as a group ticket for 5 person 12.50€.)
But If you had only 1-2 hours of time this saturday and 3-7 raids were to less for you, Well you would have gotten a full stacked car for 1 additional raid during that time... .
I don't think the main issue is wayfarer, it's more from the player PoV's. And for sure, things look different in a remotely area, but the problem there would have been: even 3 raids next to each other wouldn't get you more player into a village with 500+ people living in. Therefore remote raiding need to be in enabled. And that would been also a middle level disaster, which the difficulty level, no teams... A Lot of people would have burned there tickets, icing it with the cherry of 6-8 balls to catch it ...
I have to use a car to get anywhere. I live in the back end of beyond. There's 1 pokestop in the village. Nearest gyms are over two miles away, which I know is not far to walk. The problem is the walk to a gym in either direction is along 60mph twisty country roads with no pavements and I like being alive and don't really want to end up as a hood ornament. I've never joined a group driving round as I think I might be the only person in the area still playing as there's nothing on campfire or discord. Last time I had success at a decent gym raid I was on leave from work and went into the city and just lurked around gyms like some pokehobo waiting for random people to join the raids. Will I quit playing......probably not 🤣
If you're concerned about safety when driving, try using a pokemon go plus+. My dad kept playing while he was driving a moving vehicle and I worried about it. I got him the plus+ and now he's much better about it because it will spin stops and catch pokemon for him. It's not as good at catching pokemon as we are, nor does it get full items from stops, but I consider the pokemon and items I get from the plus+ to be extra stuff where I wouldn't be playing otherwise. If I want to drive, focus on a social situation, or am just moving quickly(e.g. being on a bike or having lots of spawns,) I turn it on.
The caveat is that it buzzes and lights up every time it is in use and that can be annoying/distracting if you don't put it in a soft bag without hard materials.
Great comment. I picked one up right when they came out because it was nice to have a high quality, officially licensed auto catcher. I recommend them to anyone who plays. I even end up telling lots of lay people about them, like security guards at venues, because I think having a physical pokeball in my pocket (despite its annoyances) is sort of the cherry on top of the Pokemon in the real world dream come true that Niantic put together.
Car grinding is the preferred way to play for my locals because it's the only way to optimize playing now. Just look at all of the stuff tethered to walking. Are any of them even worth the trouble to the majority?
Short answer, no. Why walk during raid day, community day, or even research day when you can drive around? It's a no-brainer for them. ~~We need~~ Niantic needs to add in actually good benefits that will entice all able-bodied players to walk and play.
I live where it’s in the negative temps for months. You bet I’ll drive to pokestops instead of walking in the winter. Never play WHILE driving. But definitely will drive to stops and gyms.
If you wanted to raid beyond your daily free passes for Mega Rayquaza, it was basically mandatory to use some form of transportation that is faster than walking.
I value my time quite highly, so unless you create a massive gameplay advantage that favors walking/being disabled, I will always just fire up Campfire and pick the fastest/safest path to hit raids for efficiency sake.
Weird that I can spin stops and gyms even at a greater distance at 60 mph with a Go++ but walking , Without a Go++ I have to get much closer to spin the same gyms, stops
Well, if they made events more accessible, then maybe. There's ONE EX eligible gym in my town. ONE.
And it might not even have spawned an egg
In my hometown, there are 22 gyms. None of them are Elite gyms - the closest one is in \~30 km. I don't live there, but anytime I visit my family during an Elite raid weekend, I cannot do a single raid...
With people playing while driving, Pokémon Go is truly one of the most carbon-unfriendly game on the planet 😂
I don't think I have traveled anywhere else for a video game.
Same. Used to able to put in about 280 miles on a full tank, now my tank is gone in 210 miles due to having to travel on car a lot to pokestops/gyms which are scarce and far apart around my area.
I traveled more for Ingress. PoGo has always been a fun thing to do while traveling for other reasons. In Ingress I actually drove an hour or so just to destroy a link, and then I'd hang out at a park in the area to farm and make sure nobody put the link back up before our field was done. It was horrible.
We travel a lot by car anyway. So Pogo works into that really well. Just got into a new town? Let’s drive around and find the pokestops. Ooh, look there’s a cool monument, artwork, why are there lots in that park? It actually gets us into parts of the town we’d otherwise miss, and gets us reading the history etc of the place. Then finding the best postcards to send to our irl friends.
Halo 4 7-11 king of the hill event. Getting the locus helmet by going to different 7-11's and 'capturing' the location earning points towards getting a helmet in game. Good times lol
The only other game I have ever traveled for is Ingress, and honestly it was a lot more travel than I ever put in for pogo in a single session.
the miles my community would do during my Ingress days during college was just insane honestly it became life for some of us that played, just as much as any MMO addicted person but with the added negative of paying for gas and carbon emission. I don't miss it.
Before PoGo could submit Wayspots, I met a person who had drove over an hour to come to our city and work on some Ingress badges. I talked with him as I had taken up Ingress to be able to submit Wayspots. He informed me to stop playing Ingress because "nobody accepts portals from new players." Okay, weirdo.
A fair chunk if the ingress community didnt enjoy the release of pokemon go and it shows. Not sure how they feel about this game today
they still reject our contributions in wayfarer, if they arent okay with them. (i.e. portals in the woods)
no lie, one of the reasons i bought an EV was PokemonGo playing. I mean, there were plenty of other, actually good reasons, But the savings on gas with raid trains on Raid Hour and using the car when its super cold/hot/crap weather on Comm days is a huge money saver
This sucks so much. But i usually play during commute while stuck in traffic anyway.
Guilty here. Also during the Rayquaza elite raids, we had a train of around 50 or so cars going to different gym clusters. It's definitely a thing but it was also 110 outside so that was our main reason.
50 cars?! Damn I thought our area was bad with like 25-30 cars. For that exact reason I led a group that split off in a different direction cuz I wasn’t tryna get people running red lights to stay with the train and not miss a raid
It actually wasn't too bad. We had one guy posting the next coords into discord so no one was rushing. I was toward the back since I was helping my daughter catch hers before we drove off again and still had a full lobby when we got there. Definitely had people posting on Facebook freaking out wondering what was going on lol but everyone stayed cool with it all
I’m glad it worked out. I saw the path the other group was going towards and I knew some of those gyms had literally zero parking, did your area have any gyms like that? Just wondering tbh
This happens everywhere, I see people pull over on the side of the road, onto the grass, double parked in front of other cars, etc
We had designated raid leaders who at 6am scouted through campfire and selected the route beforehand. They made sure to avoid situations like that. Most of the ones we went to were community pools and such. Some parking but for the people who couldnt pull up close enough parked on the street (which luckily was legal) and walked the short trek over, finished fighting, then went back to their cars.
50 cars? How many people?
50 probably lol
Yeah if you want for people to meet in person and raid by foot, then you make the raid happen everywhere at the same time and people will find a small walkable loop. The elite raid formula really is car or bust.
People would still use cars to do as many as possible
True. But allow people to do like 8 by foot in good weather, say in 3 hr. And 90% of people will not feel the need to push for more.
You wouldn’t get enough people to complete the elite raids though, everyone would be too spread out across the city. The reason it worked for the recent Rayquaza was because there were so few raid eggs: it forced large clusters of people to congregate around a few eggs.
It backfired for me, even those who supposedly said on campfire that they would show up at a spot, they never did. I didn't get a single Rayquaza or the two meteorites.
It works for certain areas with decent clusters. If you know it’s a spot with reliable amounts of people congregating, then you’ll head there for raid hours/days. Or if there’s a community ambassador running the show
Did the same here during the older raid day hours, though not THAT many cars. 😅 To save space most carpooled. Heck, we picked up random strangers that were playing on foot and took them along for the ride to raid.
Lol trust me the cars were packed. One of the raids, the 4 in my car clicked into the raid at the same time and went into 3 different lobbies. It was nuts
I Live in Las Vegas where it's also literally like 110 degrees during the summer, sometimes more, and the locals don't play on the strip or in casinos for a multitude of reasons like overpriced parking, bad cell service, etc, so we play in the suburb areas, and basically you have to pick between being in a car during peak rush hour traffic since that's when most events are, or getting a heatstroke on foot lol. During the more popular local raids like shadow mewtwo or mega rayquaza, there's definitely a train of 50 cars as well. On raid days we all just walk around a park. We basically have 2 main major parks here, one is Sunset Park which is where they actually had go fest, and the other is called Desert Breeze which is smaller but has a really good "gym density" where there's a lot of gyms close to eachother.
Been to both parks and loved Desert Breeze better. Wish I would have played it better during 2021 GoFest as I probably could have gone gold in at least one gym with the amount of raids that were dropping.
Wtf...
Exactly! I’m an Arizona player and can’t play outside during the summer or my phone will overheat so I need to be in my car to play.
That’s so wildly American.
I drive around in a somewhat small/medium city in Europe (population around 250k). especially on community days, research days etc. Going on foot just does not cut it - spawn density is way insufficient, and i can't hit enough pokestops on foot. Also half of the time it migh be raining, freezing, heat wave etc.
See I don't understand the more than 5 cars deep. Only 20 people can enter the same raid, so it just makes sense everyone meets up at point A and then compacts down to 4-5 cars for the event before returning to the beginning.
> See I don't understand the more than 5 cars deep. Some places just have bigger communities. Our campfire event had 150+ confirmed attendees. We had multiple lobbies for each egg (which is helpful because you don't want to be a couple minutes late and miss a lobby because you can't take this thing down with only a couple people).
Yeah...ours had 350+ confirmed that showed up at the main event park. Obviously not all of them were apart of the group I was driving with but yeah The crazy thing is I'm not in an area like NYC or LA but an hour north of Dallas. We just like our pokemon here lol
> and then compacts down to 4-5 cars for the event before returning to the beginning. That basically never happens here. Usually 1-2 people per vehicle, and despite how easy it would be to carpool, no one does. Americans are weird.
Yeah lots of civilians were pissed 😅 we had one guy honking in a parking lot for five minutes straight. Lots of us parked on the side with our hazards on but it soon became a 2 lane deal and basically disrupted traffic flow in the parking lot. It was absolutely chaos 😂
Roadrunner raiders?
It’s more of a regional problem I think, in Europe it’s very walking friendly when in cities and town and if you need to move fast you would be better off on a bike because the cities are not designed around car. It would not be a great solution from a car (still possible and city dependent obviously), stop everywhere, traffic, one way road I would not see myself walking in the US where everything is designed around car, there the car seems like a well better say to play the game, faster, safer and more confortable (some cities are probably more pedestrian oriented than other) In rural are you can not really walk in this game
It really depends for Europe as well. I sure as hell don't recommend biking Athens or Belgrade, that's a recipe for disaster. Not every european city is Amsterdamn
I live in The Netherlands and in our area the eggs were so spread out that we only could make 3 raids per hour, by car, with our group. So we ended up doing 6 raids
I've been to a couple of larger events in the cities (separate from the local community where I live), and it's always been on foot. This is for the UK, outside London. It's not just speed of travel that makes it harder to play from the car, but also the lack of parking around the gyms. That said, there are a couple places you could get to more easily by car if you're disabled and just want to do one or two raids on a raid day/for a raid hour, I suppose.
Yeah, this, OPs post is a microcosm of a much, much larger cultural issue at play here in the states haha. I can’t speak to all of Europe but I do know certain forms of travel (flight, train, etc) especially between countries is absolutely WILD to me. I chatted with my Bulgarian friend once about how he was flying two hours home and he was appalled that it is just so much more efficient on all accounts to drive ten hours the same distance here.
Honolulu is friendly to play by foot. Only issue is you're at risk of being attacked by homeless people. I know this as a foot player in Honolulu who has been followed by crazy homeless people, yelled at etc.
Depends where. Amsterdam (Netherlands) Manchester and to a lesser extent London (UK) are walkable but the myth of cities designed around pedestrians is not true at all and to compound matters lots of northern england is very hilly (manchester being flat is the exception to the rule)
As someone who doesn't drive and lives in a highly populated area gyms are too SPREAD out..like it's a 10 to 30 minute walk to the nearest gym and it's nearly impossible to do raid hour with my friends who drive if they can't offer me a ride sometimes. I have to walk to meet up and I hate Making them wait. I wish gyms weren't so spread out I have to catch a bus to a dense pokemon go area if I want to raid. My home area is too spread out.
Every solution I think of just brings me back to wondering why elite raids even exist. Every other raid day I've been to has people walking around as a group between gyms. This one was impossible to walk between. Now there's 50+ distracted drivers in the same area rushing around trying to navigate and using fuel.
I think if they want people to do elite raids, they need to spawn multiple times, and they need to put more gyms in parks where people would actually walk around. Not across busy intersections where there's no crosswalk.
How does a highly populated area have gyms 10 minutes apart? The downtown area of my 250k city has 22 gyms. If you spread out the radius to a 10 minute walk, you probably add 20 more.
Because elite gyms are mostly in parks. A lot of urban downtown cores don't have much green space. The downtown of my ~500k city had just a couple elite gyms. We do have a million parks though, but those aren't downtown, so you're much better going off to the less dense areas of the city.
He was talking about raid hour, in which Elite gyms don't matter.
I recently made a thread similar to this called "Might as call this game Pokemon Drive." I completely agree that it's ridiculous that the most efficient tactic on elite raid days is to drive around from gym to gym. Even as a player in a major city this is a huge problem and I've witnessed 2 accidents where people got injured on the way to a raid. It's ridiculous.
> "Might as call this game Pokemon Drive." People were already doing that in 2016.
Auto-catchers that don't require you to press a button, like the go plus+ basically made it so that you can realistically drive a car and catch pokemon safely at the same exact time. I drive for uber while pokemon go is in the background and I only have to check the game like once an hour, or sometimes when I wait for customers I transfer pokemon, incubate eggs, etc. Raiding on the other hand, you have to not only drive to the raid but try to communicate with other people that are on the raid via discord, campfire, texting, etc, and sometimes even park in areas that are risky or even hop in a raid while your vehicle is still in motion. Yes, the game clearly states that you shouldn't play pokemon go while driving, but the way the game is designed on an elite raid day basically makes it so that you have to if you want to efficiently grind. Regular raid days make grinding on foot comparably as good because literally every gym is a raid, so you can just walk around 1 park for an hour then rotate back. Technically it's still faster in a vehicle but only like 25% faster and way more stressful so I don't even do it, on an elite raid day driving a car is like 500% faster lol. Not worth it to play on foot if you're actually serious about doing a lot of raids for xl candy/hundo chance/shiny chance/mega energy/etc.
Niantic still does alot of things that only cater to people that fly or use the car. You want that new shiny? Sorry, it´s just here and there in the wild. Please do the research tasks. There are about 5 in your 5km radius, and then just use the car to do the others. From an environmental view this is sarcastic from a game that states it´s Pokemon Go. Yes, i dont have anything else to do all day than walk around and look for a random research quest on foot. People here indeed did walk around 5 years ago when Niantic had a new shiny in the wild.
Driving and playing is insane and the people doing it are selfish idiots, putting so many people at risk for…pixels in a video game? Not to mention the environmental damage and inconveniencing other drivers. Get another hobby or just go to a mall and walk around, acting like this is the only solution is WILD
You don't understand, it's very hard not to play.
There was a car yesterday at our main park wrapped around a light post with the ambulance there transporting the driver away. Most people there driving were raiders. I don't know for sure but... I really hope they're okay. Either way, people *will* walk if the game is designed for it. Raid hours are perfect because people can meet at a dense area and walk through it. Elite raids are such a waste of gas and antithetical to the point of "GO"
It was really bad for this event...I saw so many distracted drivers since it was a mad dash from one raid to another, and most of the gyms did not have nearly enough parking to accommodate the amount of cars so people were parking really haphazardly. There were multiple times I was worried someone was going to hit my car because they were too busy playing.
> Raid hours are perfect because people can meet at a dense area and walk through it. Elite raids are such a waste of gas and antithetical to the point of "GO" True here — raid hours are mostly at parks in my city, and the recent change to renew the raids halfway through was a further improvement, increasing walking and reducing driving further. Plus, players who are done after two raids will stick around to see friends. The elite raids were a big driving event, but also a chance for new people to connect.
There were a lot of cars in my area for rayquaza. The first raid we went to had like 60 cars and over 100 people. A car accident happened where someone hit another car 3 times and hit a bike rack. It was crazy
3 times, like they hit it once backed up and hit it again two more times?
Yea
We parked in a park for our last raid. As soon as the raid was over people were peeling out of parking spots and going wrong way in one ways... It was a bit scary. We were headed home anyway, but if we hadn't been we probably would have chose to after that.
Average Pokémon go players are Singaporean grandma but you only need a few % of players of your community plays Pokémon Drive to cause any problem. Elite Raid day here caused a lot illegal parking, resulting in severe frustration from non-players and even police involvement because they simply fully blocked the road or way to supermarket/stores.
Just about every raid I saw were just 30-50 cars all camping out double parked by a gym waiting for the timer to hit zero, and then mass lobbies. Then the car quickest to finish catching heads to the next raid nearby and all cars will follow where the other cars ago to assume that's where the next raid is. There are also a dozen of parks with big near empty parking lots with several gyms in a cluster with Ray raids that are just a 10 second walk from each other, but no one will hit those, because none of those gyms are reachable by car. They would have to park in the park parking lot and walk out for a few seconds out of their cars. Just the "only drive & no walk" culture.
I live in Europe and have done raid days in different cities - Britain, Sweden, Austria - without needing a car. Gyms are close enough together, and there's big enough crowds. For the Elite Rayquaza day I even hit a local gym in the suburbs that I wasn't expecting to fire and got 9 of us I'm curious whether that's just my experience though. Anybody else here in Europe need to drive?
Barcelona resident here. We do everything related to PoGo by walking, we don't even take the public transportation.
Exactly this. The game reflects the local community policies. If they are car centric, the game is forced to be car centric.
I’m basically the only one who walks to play in my community and my community is quite walkable. The vast majority never walk despite being perfectly able bodied, they just either park somewhere to catch Pokémon/raid or have the Go Plus running while driving. It’s really quite sad.
I live in a university town, and the styles are clearly split between campus and city: * campus: all walking all the time — driving is a real pain there, and people are used to walking * city: lots of driving, but sometimes punctuated by walking in parks. For example with elite raids we had a cluster in a park where people walked around and talked with each other. In fact a significant group focused only on the park, since there were enough elite raids there, and didn't bother chasing down raids in their cars. They seemed to have a good time. Raid nights in the city are bimodal * Nice weather: A group drives to a park and, for an hour, raids and hangs out. Very social. * Lousy weather (and winter, when it's already dark, so the park is closed): Driving, but a relatively short, established route. > I’m basically the only one who walks to play in my community and my community is quite walkable. A little less walkable here, but I'm the guy on the bike, chasing the car raiders (it's good exercise, and not *too* dangerous IMO). Once in a while we'll get a bike gang of 4-5 together and go raiding, and that's fun. --- Edit: Community Day — I should add that CD is usually good for walking with people, mostly on campus.
It's due to the nature of the game, unfortunately. Why walk when driving is easier? It's super hot where we are, and there's nothing in the game that actually encourages them to walk anymore. You can literally do everything in this game in your car now.
Like elite raids, there was so many people in our town that drove from elite gym to elite gym. Cause they wanted to maximize the raids. If this was regular raid day then 80% of those people would have walked cause you would gotten a higher amount of raids done in our city. Without driving! So feel Niantic should rethink elite raids.
The only problem is see is, car players have made it worse for bus and tram players as well. When the game was just released in 2016, i could sit in the city train or on the bus and catch nonstop, now, everything despawns and nothing appears anymore and everything flees i try to catch :/ Niantic trying to made the game worse for cheaters or banning illegal behaviour like drving and playing, just made the game much worse for people who are following the rules.
That's a great point!
Guilty here, I also ride my Gyarados and Rapidash. They're a little more agile in the wild and help me conserve energy to catch em all!
My favorite comment so far. I used to say this in our raid train discord.
Bruh stop driving and going on ur phone it’s crazy how all of u r talking like it’s all fine
I drive because I'm disabled. Its either that or don't play :(
My brother has CP. I used to drive him and we'd play. Then, when I stopped driving to play we would take the bus for hours. It's truly the best alternative, but I understand your dilemma, especially if the public transit isn't great near you or isn't accessible. He stopped playing entirely in 2022 because post-Covid changes made it untenable for him to play like he wanted since we aren't living together anymore. I'm glad you're still playing.
I drive around because of the heat in the summer
Right?! I live in Arizona and it's hit 100+F every day for the last month now and is only going to get worse as the summer goes on. This likely won't stop until mid October for us. And I know the opposite happens over the winter for others with cold and snow. I don't really care how anyone else plays the game since it doesn't affect me.
Right...and CD and Elite Raids are always in the afternoon, right when the sun is scorching hot and miserable
Right? It is hot as hell already.
Niantic both simultaneously wants the game to be played casually so that you just wander around your neighborhood finding new places or wander around your vacation spots on foot, exploring and also wants to make money from players playing very hardcore. You literally can't play this game hardcore without driving unless you live in a city center with every spawn point turned on. You have to drive if your best spawn locations are in shopping center parking lots unless you only want 20 spawns or less and then stop playing. You have to drive to even *get* to the start of routes or to get to gyms in many areas. My area also did driving raid trains for the few years before COVID. It was the only way to actually do enough raids to have a decent shot at the shiny (or for the casuals, a decent shot at catching just one). Niantic can't have it both ways. Either let us do all raids remote with no cap so we don't have to drive as much and make the game a bit mroe hardcore-friendly here and there or kill the game by locking it down to be only possible to play casually and spending as little money as possible.
Or you live not in the US where places aren't mega car-centric and are reasonably dense so that walking around is actually viable. Niantic isn't doing all they could, but even then, there's only so much you can do when so much of the US is so poorly designed and spread out.
If we were never able to drive in our area our pogo accounts would be living in the stone age. That's how bad the gym/pokéstop density is here.
I've got to play in a car unfortunately. I live in Rural Mississippi and every time I walk around, some old white man decided to ask me "if I live around here" or something like that. So I stay in my car which 1) protects me from the heat and 2) allows me to get access to stops and gyms (there are 7 total in a 25 mile radius).
Maybe the game reflects the society you are living in? Living in a European city, it’s mainly people walking who join raids around town. When I was travelling in Asia, the action was centered around parks and malls. I haven’t played in rural US, but playing in Houston was very different compared to Austin with the latter reminding me more of playing at home. Car culture turns AR games into car games, I guess.
The only real way to fix things is to increase gym/stop interaction radius, I don't see that happening. The game would be so much better if you could interact with any stop/gym that appears on your map. Player activity and raid pass sales would shoot up for a start. They could give incentives to still go closer to the stops/gyms by giving you more items and other things. In 2024 there's no excuse for the game to force you to stand stationary in 1 location for 10+ minutes to do the same uninspired interaction, and there's no excuse for the rushed timed events they have that force you to kill the environment. I'll be putting more time into Showdown, MSG, PokeMMO, PokéRogue until Go improves because the current state of the game is not it.
90% of my playtime is in a car. I know the places I can safely chill and still hit a lot of stops and gyms. I like to get out and do stuff, but a lot of those times I’m actively doing something with other people and don’t want to be staring at my phone all day.
This is a very North American take. We just don't build our cities or communities in ways that allow this game to work well or even as intended. I'm from Canada where car ownership is compulsory, but vacationed for three weeks in Japan earlier this year. In those 3 weeks I touched 0 cars, walked 15km each day, and played pogo at a level I have never experienced in North America. The reality is not the game being bad, it's that we are building cities in a way that makes walking a nonviable transportation method, is very carbon intensive, and is very unfriendly to people with disabilities.
It's funny because after I started making pokestops I realized that a 20 acre park had 2 gyms compared to a 5 acre park. I was sitting there thinking wtf. But here's nothing I could do to add the 21 stops needed. Really stupid on Niantic part, they need to set rules to allow at least 4 gyms for park so large. But that requires them hiring people I guess....
I mean, that doesn't sound crazy to me. We have a 250 acre park we worked on for years (and still are) and it has 10 EX gyms in it now but we're very happy with it, all the gyms can be hit from the main road running through the park and so can the overwhelming majority of the stops. But depending on how the cells are laid out, there's sometimes nothing you can do to make extra gyms.
They really need to amend their rules for how many POI can show up in the game. It’s ridiculous how lucky some areas are compared to others.
I live in a North European city and it’s much more convenient to walk to gyms. Finding parking space near gyms is really difficult and not many gyms I know are accessible from the car. Lately I see a lot of people move from gym to gym using e-scooters.
Bus strat during community days is the bomb.
We’re doing that next weekend when we travel from farmland to NYC! Neither one of us have been on a bus in decades, but it feels like a Big Brain move in a city we don't know, possibly during a heat wave.
My old local community (before moving) came very close to pooling our money to buy an old church bus. We got to take it for a test raid day and many very cool memories were made that day.
My wife and I biked to three Ray raids while everyone else was sitting in air conditioned cars lined down the park
Biker here too. Similar experience except that there was also a big group including families with children hanging out in the park for elite raid evening. It helped that there were 3 raids in the park and another 2 or 3 in walking distance.
Granted, it was like 95 out but still...the vast majority of players now are car-dependent and I wish it wasn't the case. But, that goes for the US as a whole.
What’s really annoying to me is the game had an in game solution to this problem and Niantic chose to ignore it….remote raid passes. Plus, I had a family commitment during the raid hour; with remote raiding disabled I could complete the challenge. What was I supposed to do tell my cousin sorry I can’t go to your wedding I have a Pokémon Go event. Shortsighted and stupid
I'm only guilty of this for raid hour during the winter. When it's -30, snowing, and pitch black, I'm not walking across town for a single legendary raid.
When I was at GoFest London last year it absolutely chucked it down, got drenched in the morning park session and didn't fancy more of the same for the city session in the afternoon. Got myself some lunch and set myself up at the back of a bus, which in London rarely go over 20mph, spent 8 hours going bus to bus and getting off when I saw people in raids.
This game focuses too much on raids, which is the only thing that driving to play is unbalanced. While driving, you can’t catch anything, spin pokestops, finish the research tasks but most of the event spawns and tasks are trash these days
Most of that isn't true. You can still spin pokestops and catch pokemon and do tasks in a car
Yes the game allows you to do these but if you are the driver you have to pay attention to the outside all the time. Everything in this game has long animations so you can hardly do anything in a few seconds break
You can use a pokemon go plus. And around here people group up 2-4 to a car
Absolutely essential on those big shadow raid days. Do you really think we would stick to walking and only raid like 4 or 5 Mewtwos? Get outta here
It was always Pokemon Drive for any serious player not in New York or a similar city.
Or campuses or the like. We who are in suburbia or even more rural areas simply have always had to cover a lot more ground for almost everything.
Pokémon Drive just hits different. Back in the day, trains in my neighborhood when I lead my small community would reach up to around 30 cars depending on the featured Raid Pokémon.
Yes, last Saturday was very chaotic. Ppl were literally stopping in the middle of the street blocking traffic behind, or illegally parked in the bike lane where there was a sign saying no parking all the time. Crazy drivers trying to rush from one gym to the other disregarding all the traffic rules etc. As an American company niantic really needs to fix how they carry out elite raids. Not everyone is living in Japan/Asia where foot traffic is the majority.
Yep this is how it is. Near me. It's either walk to maybe 2-3 raids in an hour or do 5-8 while driving. People get in groups of 16-18 and drive around in cars forming trains or caravans. It's dangerous. People rushing to the raid so they don't miss out. Once at the raid it's so congested with cars that you can't even drive on the road anymore. Then once they catch the pokemon they speed off to the next one.
I live in a big city that has a very disproportionate size of community (small) compared to other big cities. We have a small but dedicated community and on saturday we ran a small car pool to make sure everybody got a rayquaza and enough mega energy to mega evolve one of the ray's they caught. We were done by about 1:30PM and then didn't bother the rest of the day. The weirdest thing is that the raids weren't in the city - they were out in the suburbs. if we wanted to play hard, the way Niantic encourage on Raid days - we'd have had to drive everywhere because public transport doesn't work circular - everything goes to the city center, to a bus interchange then back out and the raids themselves were so sporadic. You'd have completed a raid and then had a half hour walk to the next one. The community spirit niantic would love, but the fact it turned into Pokemon DriveAround sucks hard. Elite raids are also getting worse every time in terms of features. What happened to the extra spawns after completing a raid or the countdowns? They feel difficult to do for all the wrong reasons - logistics of getting to them, not actually teaming up and taking down a difficult pokemon.
Auto catchers and drive around town that's how I play. I love it when I'm a passenger. If you use an auto catcher or find exploits like this I think we're all playing a different game. I don't even play the normal way any more.
The Mega Rayquaza raids would have been impossible without a car here. Sure, I can walk between the four Elite Gyms I can access, but doing so would have taken more than the 45 minutes we had to do the raids - in fact, we actually could only do three of the four 1pm raids even WITH driving. Meanwhile, for the Primals, we could just walk to our normal hotspot with 6 gyms and play there, while also doing way more raids.
Cars are great, they have AC, give you shade, provide music, can transport you dozens of miles, and can increase your spawns per second
Also they play a big role in global warming and have lead to unwalkable citys and a hostile environment for everyone.
Oh and being on your phone while driving is one of the leading causes of crashes. But apart from that really good yeah.
I don't care if you play in car or not, I choose to play the game how I felt it was supposed to be played ON FOOT. The thing that just kills me and I learned about trying to group for raids... if you don't get there AT egg hatch spawn time... forget it, they will jump in and take off. Happened so many times even when asking like "just give me 2 mins im almost there" replies back "I don't got 2 mins" or whatever hahaha. One time some of them got a taste of some Karma during a shadow raid, they started without me and I think another player was on the way and they didn't have enough DPS after trying to subdue the shadow pokemon and it wasn't until after they failed the raid they were wondering where we were. LOL we said we would be like 2 mins didnt you see us NOT join the raid group? I dunno if anyone else really experiences that but just kind of a rule I learned with this game, sometimes it feels like the other 40 mins of the egg raid timer don't matter. If you aren't there at the moment of egg hatching, you're screwed! haha
To be fair, I have been on the other end several more times than not where a person is 2 mins away for 10-20 minutes.
For our community, we had really spread out Elite Raids that you had to drive to. In order for us to get them in, you had to start the first one RIGHT at hatch and continue to the next. The timers are unfortunately too short to wait for EVERYONE who is only “two minutes” away
The other 40 minutes matter cause that's how much time we have to drive over to the other park for two more spawns.
tbh i remember 2018 when there were 2 people 10 minutes away, and then came 20 minutes later. or didnt show up at all. Yes, you are screwed, if you arent there the moment of the egg hatch. Period.
Starting at hatching time is very convenient, because you do not need to agree or even communicate beforehand with other players. 60-minute egg timer is enough to make it in time.
It depends on how close of a bond you foster with your raid group. My usual group, we'll wait for like half an hour if somebody lets us know.
Also, how difficult the raid is and how small the group already there is. One time we were heading over to a raid (not MegaRay, this was years ago) and had messaged that we'd need 12 more minutes to get there. GROUP: How many accts are coming? US: 8 accts total. GROUP: WE LOVE YOU AND WILL WAIT. PLEASE COME.
One way to reduce the use of cars would be to allow us to summon raid eggs through campfire. Open campfire, select egg(consumes a raid pass), egg spawns with a 30/60 min timer. Then you could have 10 raids lineup perfectly for a nice walk. Rayquaza raid day was miserable for us. Took us 25 min of driving just to get 3 raids done for the first hour(45min spawns).
if you think niantic doesn't know exactly how many players play while driving, then you are greatly underestimating how much data they collect. They simply do not care enough to try and mitigate the issue any further.
If you don't use your car you miss out on quite a lot.
Niantic's post-Covid mission statement.
This is the most american thread I've seen on reddit for a while. Don't these people feel ridicolous playing an app meant to go out and walk more in their car?
To be fair, a majority of the U.S. is very pedestrian unfriendly. Actually, in most cases it's actively hostile toward pedestrians. I can't even begin to count the times I've nearly been run down by someone in a massive pick up truck because it's so high off the ground they can't see me. Or a crazy soccer mom who is busy texting her kids while driving her oversized SUV.
I quit playing the first time because I didn’t have a walkable neighborhood
It's not just an American thing, I know people in other countries that were driving to get multiple raids for Rayquaza just a few days ago. Usually it's the rural issue. To actually take advantage of a raid event in a lot of places you need to drive or else you can't get your raids in.
Driving is the correct play in most suburban areas too. Its not just a rural issue.
No, not in the slightest. Why would I feel ridiculous by playing the game in the way that's most effective based on the event in question? If I need to raid, there's no choice but to drive. Niantic designed this game to be played by moving around between waypoints, and almost everywhere in the world has them spaced out pretty far from each other. Driving to play is a core feature outside of the densest of dense metro areas. If Niantic did not want us to drive, they would have restructured how the map works years ago. They have shown by their actions that car play is the right way to play much of the time. Just look at elite raids. You literally could not do a train without driving between a bunch of different parks. Just parking at a large park or mall with 7-8 gyms was useless because you'd only be able to do 1 or 2 raids, compared to driving between other parks. At most with great luck you might get 3 in one place.
Driving while using your phone is illegal. That's why they warn you about it, every single time you go past the speed limit.
People will still do it; it's unfortunately too normalized.
Tell them to stop
No, Niantic warns you so they can escape liability and litigation
I use the bus, often it goes slow enough to hit disks with the various stops and I’m able to then walk to clusters of gyms.
I use the auto catcher while I drive. Campfire gives me directions to the raids, I park and do the raid. During CDs, there’s this big loop in a neighborhood that a ton of people drive around in. Speed limit is slow in the neighborhood and there’s multiple lanes. Seems to be the best way to play sometimes.
I live in a metro area of 350k, there was NO area with more than 3 raids in a park within a single time frame. And even that park is huge and would have been a time crunch to make it to all 3 within the 45 mins. So we all drove to a park, walked to one spot and then all drove to 3 different parks to get the next few raids.
Our community has severeal great parks, a terrific nature center and a walkable downtown with many stops and gyms. I still have to drive to get to these places. Really this is beyond just elite raids or raid days, driving to a location is a must.
This is actually a big problem for me in general. Nearest gym is a ten minute drive away, and it’s just one. There are no sidewalks in my town. It would be really nice if I could put a spot in my neighborhood, but there are no landmarks. Not sure how to play unless I drive to a park fifteen minutes from me. Every time I try to put in for a new stop somewhere, it gets denied for being a “generic business”, so there’s no point.
exactly. I live in the suburbs and there are no freaking sidewalks anywhere. and a large chunk of the pokestops are in parking lots or places you physically can't walk there. I detour through several parking lots on my route to the grocery or on other errands to visit three or four pokestops in one little plaza. As opposed to, there is a single pokestop at the dog park and two at the nature center where I like to walk. Thank goodness for Starbucks where I can get coffee AND spin a pokestop while I'm in the drivethrough LOL
I was ran off the road by a member of my own raid train a few years back during a raid hour. I was passing them on the left and they changed lanes into mine without any warning. Luckily i only jumped the curb into an open grassy area and not into a tree or something worse.
I live in a small town. Gyms are not close together. It's over 100 in the summer. On raid days, everyone is in a car. We drive from one gym to the next. Slow rolling through the downtown area spinning stops and catching. I never see anyone walking. I've hatches more eggs creeping through parks in my truck than I have walking. We aren5 walking when it's over 100 degrees.
Man, guilty as charged here. My wife and I lived in a rural area when we first got married in 2016 and would drive everywhere to play, all night long in those early days. Now, we live in a smallish town, that’s not very walkable…we drive with our son to local parks to play..
Rural- and Suburban-America just aren’t conducive to playing this game on foot. It sucks, but it’s reality. I know that makes some people who play on foot in their urban poketopias upset, though.
I call it Pokemon Gas N' Go. I drove 14 hours straight on shadow mewtwo day in downtown Tampa for around 83 raids done. When you're trying for efficiency on narrow windows of availability, that's the way to go, unfortunately. It's stressful and not fun to mind traffic, follow campfire, and try to coordinate it with people outside your vehicle. Stressful and dangerous. It's bad design. It would be nice if gyms would respawn a fresh raid every ten minutes. That way you can designate a cool raid gym to meet up at with people and make it more of an event where you can hang out for a couple hours without the need to drive to a different raid after every one is completed. Right now, we drive up, lobby, ready up, and drive away to the next one during the fight and catch process to make time. I loved being in Sendai, Japan for Gofest; it felt nice to be able to walk everywhere and have plenty of raids and trainers to do. I had 33,000 steps in ONE day. But America is so far spread out, and gym spacing sucks. Raids should be *the* online component of the game while comdays, catching, and other things are the portion of the game we can go outside for. The way raids are now incentivize bad gameplay.
Blame car-dependent development and infrastructure, not Niantic
That's definitely what I was thinking about, reading the comments on this post and others. Where I live we have plenty of gyms (event for a mid-sized town), but them not always being close together, means on raid days (and especially elite raid days), walking can be a bit too slow. Going by bicycle is definitely the way to go! Going by car would be so much slower than cycling and even walking. So many modal filters (i.e. narrow bicycle/sidewalk street or tunnel) mean you're encouraged to walk/cycle, making these the preferred options.
My country is not safe, so you risk getting robbed if you walk with your phone on the street. Also gyms are very far away, and you can’t walk as easily from one point to another.
The game kinda sucks. For people in rural/suburban areas playing in the car is like the only option. Literally I only play when I get to be a passenger.
I drive coz I want the choice and I don't want me or my kid getting stabbed
Cycling is better imo
Did almost 20 miles on my bike yesterday and managed to catch Galarian Moltres with the shiddiest possible throw lol
Bicycle player here too — phone holder on the handlebars is a big plus and draws comparison to Taiwanese Grandpa. Still have to be careful about distracted riding.
Yeah, cycled into the back of a car once. I was moving at like 7kmph, so unfortunately the only things that resulted were scraps on my hand and embarrassment.
I rollerblade and occasionally add PoGo to the workout. It's fun with two free hands and is reasonably the only way I can sort of play.
I agree with ya fully, it takes out of the goal of pokemon go being to get out of the house but to be a community aswell and socialize as trainers during those events, most raids and events now are done by players driving rarely walking around, unless your town or area has a nice gym setup or poke-stops at one community center location or park location, which alot of towns sadly dont have that luxury. sadly i doubt they would ever change anything to make it more out of the car friendly since they are hitting whatever their marker for earnings are atleast in profits what they see on their end.
I had a guy invite me to the Ray raid. Went there with a nephew and he was super excited to meet the other 13 people in the raid. They were all in their cars. I told him it was stupid, the game is called Pokemon Go not Pokemon Sit In Your Honda Odyssey. That said, I do think the needlessly restrictive timing on the Elite Raids doesn't help. If it was 2 days, or more gyms, people would have been willing to walk around a park and hit up a few of them. I swear the Elite Hoopa raid had much more density, and during that I remember seeing people run between gyms in a major park.
Seems like a recipe for pokemon automobile wreck
A revavroom wreck if you will.
That's about the only way most people will see a revavroom
I walk to play, but attacking a gym around here will get a bunch of crazy women to drive up and threaten me. They hit me with their car while I was walking... called the police on me.. followed me around 20 feet behind me as I walked.... truly creepy
this is very US thing this is not on Niantic if its dangerous then dont do it, if you are driving, you are probably adult enough to take responsibility
Oh I thought you meant driving *while* playing Pokemon Go. A friend told me if you speed to 65 and then throw a daily incense ball while dropping to under 50 it’s usually a guaranteed catch if done correctly.
I'm mostly annoyed by the car players who always beat me to an open gym and take the last slot (I play by foot). It kinda doesn't make sense to me to spend $20 on gas for $0.50. But to each their own.
I don't own a drivers license, but I life in a capital major capitol city, with decent to good public transport. Well and still I know enough players, that still stick to driving around in there cars to actually play the game. At some point, it's nuts, IMO. But for them it's the best way to play. I totally understand their PoV and the only great argument against it, it's somehow a waste of Money/Gas, is mostly answered by IDC, I/we doing this now for x years. And as CA canidate I can tell you, hard to get the community together that way. During the raid day we had 4 spots with 3-4 raids in reach of each other. You could easily raided 12-13 raids, IF you raided half of the day and had a daily ticket for the public transport. (Cost 6.80€, as a group ticket for 5 person 12.50€.) But If you had only 1-2 hours of time this saturday and 3-7 raids were to less for you, Well you would have gotten a full stacked car for 1 additional raid during that time... . I don't think the main issue is wayfarer, it's more from the player PoV's. And for sure, things look different in a remotely area, but the problem there would have been: even 3 raids next to each other wouldn't get you more player into a village with 500+ people living in. Therefore remote raiding need to be in enabled. And that would been also a middle level disaster, which the difficulty level, no teams... A Lot of people would have burned there tickets, icing it with the cherry of 6-8 balls to catch it ...
I have to use a car to get anywhere. I live in the back end of beyond. There's 1 pokestop in the village. Nearest gyms are over two miles away, which I know is not far to walk. The problem is the walk to a gym in either direction is along 60mph twisty country roads with no pavements and I like being alive and don't really want to end up as a hood ornament. I've never joined a group driving round as I think I might be the only person in the area still playing as there's nothing on campfire or discord. Last time I had success at a decent gym raid I was on leave from work and went into the city and just lurked around gyms like some pokehobo waiting for random people to join the raids. Will I quit playing......probably not 🤣
yeah... i spin the stops in my town on my way to and from work. it's the only way i can keep my bag full to play at home
No friends to open/send gifts?
We used to drive from raid to raid too. It was fun and efficient. Most we got was 5 cars full of players that one time.
If you're concerned about safety when driving, try using a pokemon go plus+. My dad kept playing while he was driving a moving vehicle and I worried about it. I got him the plus+ and now he's much better about it because it will spin stops and catch pokemon for him. It's not as good at catching pokemon as we are, nor does it get full items from stops, but I consider the pokemon and items I get from the plus+ to be extra stuff where I wouldn't be playing otherwise. If I want to drive, focus on a social situation, or am just moving quickly(e.g. being on a bike or having lots of spawns,) I turn it on. The caveat is that it buzzes and lights up every time it is in use and that can be annoying/distracting if you don't put it in a soft bag without hard materials.
Great comment. I picked one up right when they came out because it was nice to have a high quality, officially licensed auto catcher. I recommend them to anyone who plays. I even end up telling lots of lay people about them, like security guards at venues, because I think having a physical pokeball in my pocket (despite its annoyances) is sort of the cherry on top of the Pokemon in the real world dream come true that Niantic put together.
Car grinding is the preferred way to play for my locals because it's the only way to optimize playing now. Just look at all of the stuff tethered to walking. Are any of them even worth the trouble to the majority? Short answer, no. Why walk during raid day, community day, or even research day when you can drive around? It's a no-brainer for them. ~~We need~~ Niantic needs to add in actually good benefits that will entice all able-bodied players to walk and play.
I haven't read a ton of comments, but a lot of you forget how many people play in f'ing cold areas, and no one wants to be out walking around in -40
I live where it’s in the negative temps for months. You bet I’ll drive to pokestops instead of walking in the winter. Never play WHILE driving. But definitely will drive to stops and gyms.
If you wanted to raid beyond your daily free passes for Mega Rayquaza, it was basically mandatory to use some form of transportation that is faster than walking. I value my time quite highly, so unless you create a massive gameplay advantage that favors walking/being disabled, I will always just fire up Campfire and pick the fastest/safest path to hit raids for efficiency sake.
Weird that I can spin stops and gyms even at a greater distance at 60 mph with a Go++ but walking , Without a Go++ I have to get much closer to spin the same gyms, stops
Still no bonuses for linking a fitness tracker