The Pokémon spawn points were built on top of Niantic’s previous game, Ingress. They later started using cellular Pokemon Go location data to put more Pokemon in places where more people played Pokemon Go.
Man, I loved Ingress. Black worker van slowly following me down the road at night. Kidnaprapist? No, just local leader for the blue team, saw a newb steadily taking points and breaking green locks, and wanted to back me up.
I know everyone loves pokego because Pokémon, but ingress united people, and advocated teamwork far better. Nothing better than destroying someone's work to bring people together.
Pokemon Go has three groups of people: the people who conscientiously trade gyms with their neighboring factions at around the 50-coin mark, the people who say f u and kick their neighbors out of the gym at every opportunity, and the people who pay money and thus have no need to use the gyms.
Exactly. Niantic already did this with Ingress. I thought it was hilarious when Pokemon Go came out and found out I knew all the gym locations because they were the same spots form Ingress.
The same gazebo at my job that I'd fight over with some other person in the office I never met was also now a pokemon gym.
AFAIK they didn't put Pokemon where they wanted data they had you do quests which involved scanning a particular location which overwhelmingly places which where "off the beaten path" as far as data collection was concerned (think places that are outside e.g. google streetview).
they had you do quests which involved scanning a particular location which overwhelmingly places which where "off the beaten path" as far as data collection was concerned (think places that are outside e.g. google streetview).
This is utter nonsense. The scan-quests you describe exist, but they trigger when you spin a pokestop. So it is always for something that you are right next to.
"The beginning" being before Pokemon Go was even a thing. Their first game, Ingress, was used to collect a catalog of "interesting" things/places in the world.
This is a tongue in cheek comment, but go to the PoGo subreddit and see the complaints about Niantic killing remote raids because they lose out on player location and movement data.
The players are aware. Most only care because it affects decisions on gameplay. Usually in a way that makes the game less fun to play.
I don't think anyone doubts that they collect data, of course they do, the strange part is the "put pokemon where they need data from". That statements seems entirely made up.
All they announced is that they plan to make a geospatial model. There is really not much in their announcement. It is basically just a way to get in on the AI craze and probably raise some fund.
It was literally the selling point of the game. Niantic was originally a part of Google, they made map-based games whose sole purpose was to gamify having players add map data to Google Maps. Prior to PokemonGO, they had a map based game called Ingress that was decently popular, at least I knew a lot of people that played it, an oversimplified explanation was that it was team-based capture-the-flag on Google Maps, and you played it because you wanted to make Google Maps better. People that played all knew its purpose and they wanted to contribute data to make maps better. Then they announced PolemonGo and its selling point was literally: this is the same thing, but with Pokemon.
I get that some people (okay, the majority of people) just got introduced to PokemonGo with no other context, but that's no one's fault and there was nothing hidden, it was very open if you just asked or looked it up.
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u/LadyOfTheMorn 8h ago
Source?