One Pokemon GO player recently discovered a metropolitan area with an astonishingly enormous amount of PokeStops. They then took to social media to report their discovery, just as Pokemon GO introduced another legendary Pokemon as part of a new event.
Since the release of Pokemon GO in 2016, gamers have been able to submit PokeStop proposals to Niantic. However, in the past, developers in the United States were more likely to accept such landmark submissions in urban regions, putting rural places at a disadvantage. As a result, rural Pokemon GO gamers have been grumbling about this unequal PokeStop distribution for as long as the game has existed.
This gap has only grown over time, as recently demonstrated by Reddit user Hj_the_boyoYT, who discovered a metropolitan area with over a hundred PokeStops within walking distance of one another. The location under question is in downtown Gdansk, a city on Northern Poland’s Baltic coast. This PokeStop-rich Pokemon GO location’s screenshot later went viral on Reddit, eliciting conflicting opinions from the fans.
While some players were astounded by the incredible amount of PokeStops in downtown Gdansk, others saw the site as just another example of how unfair Pokemon GO is for rural gamers. Others viewed the location as emblematic of the game’s larger map design difficulties, not least since it contains only a single gym while having a high number of PokeStops.
Some Polish fans, in response to the newly viral screenshot, stated that Poland is plenty of such PokeStop-filled locations, speculating that this state of affairs was shaped by the misuse of the Pokemon GO Wayfarer feature.
The limitations for setting waypoints were significantly more permissive when this service originally appeared in 2019, allowing players to spam submissions with essentially no limits. About a year later, Niantic imposed a hard limit on the number of waypoints that could be stored in a single such grid unit, known as an S2 cell. However, the harm had already been done, and Niantic has been struggling to clean up the regions that were a hub for early Wayfarer abuse ever since.
It remains to be seen whether the developer can make considerable progress in balancing the game’s overworld map design in the future. Niantic has been largely focused on continuously delivering new content to the popular mobile game since its inception, with balance changes being more of an afterthought for the company.
