Weekend Free-for-All

[inkstone]

Posting this early because I'll be out and about this weekend, so I'll be short on time.

ICYMI: As healingmirth pointed out in the comments of the last free chat, nests have migrated once again! In addition, the new Nearby tracker has rolled out to the rest of the continental US and large sections of Europe.

With the nest migration, I suspect a game update won't be too far behind. I wonder what'll be included?



With the new CP rebalancing, I figured we should feature this guy since he got a boost.

How was your week in PokeGo, trainers?

Comments

[havocthecat]

I...have no idea how the new tracker is supposed to work. Especially if you don't live near a huge pile of pokestops. I live near one, and that's stretching the meaning of "near."

[inkstone]

Yeah, I'm not a fan. I don't care that there's a venonat at the shopping center down the street. I want to know if there's a clefairy behind my house!

[havocthecat]

RIGHT? Unless they're planning on a major rollout of pokestops soon (in which case, I am buying some lawn art and submitting my yard as one), this is a ridiculous update.

[brightknightie]

The tracker now is slightly different from the one that reached my area with the first expansion outside San Francisco. I hope they chose to revert to that one.

When it first came, that tracker had 2 stacked panels, labeled "Nearby" and "Sightings:" at the top were 2 rows of pokestop-specific pokemon, and at the bottom was 1 row of the "grass" pokemon (assuming that you had enough pokemon around to fill all the slots; the rows and slots didn't flex, so sometimes they were just empty). If you tapped one of the "grass" pokemon, a pop-up told you to go look.

Then they changed it to what we all have now.

I hope that they choose to go back, and also consider having the number of rows or slots flex with the pokestops and other spawns in our actual vicinities. There's no need to have just one or the other, unless their servers can't handle it...?

[brightknightie]

Oh, interesting!

Below, healingmirth shares that the old Sightings comes back if you're either (1) out of range of all pokestops, or (2) have caught everything at all the pokestops in range.

Thant suggests that we should be able to get a mix of both at once, if Niantic is willing.

[tyger]

My week's been pretty good! :D

I went into town today, so I hit a bunch of stops! And I caught a jigglypuff, which is a first for me! I also caught a lickitung earlier in the week, so apparently it's the week for pink pokémon in my area, hahaha.

I also hatched a pretty damn strong krabby (for me), so hopefully that'll help with gym fighting for the next little while.

Kinda should do an evolve party followed by spending all my starlight on the strongest ones, but I'm hanging out for the next double XP event, since I managed to miss the last one by like. A day. (I should really procrastinate less.)

I levelled up again, too! Am now level 17, whee~~

[inkstone]

You have a lickitung! So jealous! I've only ever seen its silhouette on the tracker, having failed to find it.

[tyger]

I've only seen the one, even on the tracker! So I was pretty lucky that it was close enough I could actually find it. :3

[havocthecat]

Does anyone know when/what the next event will be?

[inkstone]

No word yet. I'd wait a couple weeks before checking back in about that. They might do something for the end of year holidays. IIRC, for Ingress, Niantic held events for Halloween, Christmas & April Fools.

[brightknightie]

FWIW, there are massive rumors of 12/09 or 12/07 for the rollout of the sponsored Starbucks pokestops and also generation two, but of course those are only rumors, and not even events, as such...

...it would make sense for the company to try to take advantage of kids' school holidays for an event. We shall see!

[yuuago]

Joy: Hatched a Dratini. Yay!

Also joy: I went out to buy some touchscreen gloves so that I could play this game in our ridiculous weather. I regret nothing.

re: the new tracker, I am Not A Fan. With the nearest pokestop 20 minutes away, I might as well not have a tracker at all. I never used it much to begin with, but at least with the previous version, it did work as intended.

[inkstone]

Our winter is not nearly as harsh as yours but I bought touchscreen gloves as well and they're awesome!

[zhelana]

I did half of lvl 19 and 3/4ths of lvl 20 just by evolving mon with a lucky egg during the double xp event! So that was exciting!

[healingmirth]

Woo! And those multiple-of-ten levels are such jackpots, congrats!

[zhelana]

thanks!

[ephemera]

I'm going to buck the trend, and say I'm really liking the new tracker so far - with the caveat that I've mostly got to play with it in areas with relatively abundant pokestops! I have found the triangulation sightings tool profoundly frustrating to the point of just never wanting to open it - with this, I can see that the precious Eevee is at the Pokestop behind me, and decide whether or not I care enough to turn around and walk back for it or not, but the rest of my game play is unaffected. It's also giving me a glimpse of what the nest re-jig has done for my local park (which is my nearest play area, but the opposite direction from my house than my route to work) so - that's my plan for tomorrow's walk, then! (Growlithes!)

[healingmirth]

Yeah, I think the best part of the new tracker is for people who are still hoarding less-common Pokemon and want a little direction for their walks, but The Few and The Loud (of which I am sometimes one!) are frustrated by stuff in a rarer tier.

I 100% spent like a month stopping what I was doing whenever there was an eevee in one the 4 spots in range of my house, so I'm glad this tracker suits your needs :)

[st_aurafina]

The tracker is basically no use to me - one pokestop in town nowhere near me. But I am enjoying the seven day bonuses, and all the extra spawns around the pokestops, even if I can't be as strategic in hunting.

Looking forward to whatever the Christmas event is going to be - I enjoyed the last couple of events.

[healingmirth]

Not A Fan of the new tracker, especially once I realized that the "third closest" poke stop it's pulling in near my home is the one across the river, not the one up the street. I've hit two other areas than the one around my house to see if it got any more useful with a higher density of stops, but hard to say.

I did discover today that in addition to old sightings coming back when you're not in range of a stop, at all, old sightings also come back if you clear out everything at the stops that are in range. Not likely to be of any use to me unless I'm spending a lot of time at that one shopping center, but eh.

Other than that, I'm mostly treading water in game. I've been lucky enough between eggs and travel so far that I only need one 5k hatch, one 10k hatch, and two more evolutions to finish my regional pokedex, so I'm just gonna let those happen in their own sweet time.

It's cold here, basically. If I'm still playing next spring/summer, I'll be more excited about gym battling to rack up coins and incubators faster, but for the time being I'm content to crawl through XP for a few months and hit up 2-3 gyms a day, if that. I do really like the battling, just not enough to sniffle while doing it.

[brightknightie]

Thank you for sharing that great discovery of circumstances under which the old Nearby returns!

I think that Niantic should mix it up on the panel, so that we get both/either pokestop and "grass" sightings all the time, based on our actual vicinities. The fact that the old view is lurking there suggests that this should be possible, if they choose to make it so.

[healingmirth]

You're welcome!

There's been a lot of hopeful speculation that we may eventually get a permanent dual option - sort of like how you can tab/swipe between pokemon and eggs.

I'm grumpy that they moved away from the phase in the rollout when it was 6 pokestops and 3 sightings, but likewise I'm hopeful that the current phase is basically forcing people to test the pokestop version on the large scale while they work on how they would technically implement it.

[lilacsigil]

Evolved my first Nidoqueen and my first Nidoking in the same week! I'm still having the bug where the Pokemon will appear in my list of Pokemon before actually hatching, which meant that I got to use my first Aerodactyl in a fight before I technically had one!

[healingmirth]

Woo! they un-nerfed prestiging so that you can get 1k/battle on a half-cp attacker again. I just leveled up a local gym to four open spots after dropping mine in, in celebration.

Still cold out, though. Oof.