Strong points
- In downtown Gdansk, there are over a hundred PokeStops nearby, getting mixed reactions from players.
- The abundance of PokeStops in urban areas highlights the long-standing problem of an unbalanced distribution, disfavoring rural players.
- Poland has other areas with a high number of PokeStops, potentially due to abuse of the Pokemon GO Wayfarer tool in the past. It remains to be seen whether Niantic will fix this problem.
A Pokemon GO player recently came across a metropolitan area with an incredibly high number of PokeStops. They then took to social media to share their discovery, having done so just as Pokemon GO debuted another legendary Pokemon as part of a new event.
From Pokemon GO launched in 2016, players were able to submit PokeStop suggestions to Niantic. But the American developer was historically more inclined to accept such historic bids in urban areas, leaving rural areas at a disadvantage. As a result, Pokemon GO actors in rural areas complain about this unbalanced distribution of PokeStop for as long as the game itself existed.
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This disparity has only grown over time, as recently exemplified by Reddit user Hj_the_boyoYT, who came across a metro location with over a hundred PokeStops within easy walking distance of each other. The area in question is located in downtown Gdansk, a city on the Baltic coast in northern Poland. The screenshot of this rich PokeStop Pokemon GO the location later went viral on Reddit, causing mixed reactions among fans.
Namely, while some gamers expressed amazement at the incredibly high number of PokeStops in downtown Gdansk, others called the location yet another piece of evidence pointing how unfair Pokemon GO is aimed at rural actors. Others further characterized the area as illustrating the game’s overall map design issues, notably because the area in question only has one Gym, despite having a triple-digit number of PokeStops.
Some Polish fans reacting to the new viral screenshot said that Poland is full of such PokeStop-filled areas, speculating that this state of affairs has been shaped by the abuse of the Pokemon GO traveler tool. Back when this service first launched in 2019, the rules for creating waypoints were much more lax, allowing players to spam submissions with virtually no limits. About a year later, Niantic introduced a hard cap on the number of waypoints per just one of these grid units, sometimes referred to as an S2 cell. However, the damage was already done by then, and Niantic struggled to clean up areas that had since been home to early Wayfarer abuse.
It remains to be seen if the developer manages to make any meaningful progress in balancing the game world map design going forward. From Pokemon GO launched, Niantic was primarily focused on constantly adding new content to the popular mobile game, with balancing changes being more of an afterthought for the developer.
Pokemon GO is available on mobile devices.
