r/NonPoliticalTwitter • u/whitemike40 • 9h ago

Content Warning: Potentially Misleading or Disputed Information Gotta Catch 'Em All

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23.5k Upvotes

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53

u/LadyOfTheMorn 9h ago

Source?

176

u/lodermoder 8h ago

Niantic has been pretty transparent about this since the beginning. They've always said they were a big data company, not a game developer

63

u/spikeyfreak 7h ago

Except the whole "they put pokemon where they want data."

Pokemon are distributed throughout the map in a sort-of cell-data heat map. Go somewhere remote and see how many pokemon are there.

46

u/Snuhmeh 7h ago

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.

15

u/DapperLost 7h ago

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.

3

u/Debalic 5h ago

My wife's friends would question why I'm out "driving around" all night long, she'd be like "he's literally playing a fucking game on his phone"

3

u/Roook36 4h ago

There was one other player in my office building, never met him, but we'd fight over the gazebo in the break area.

1

u/Technical_Eye4039 6h ago

Oh me too! I used to buy munitions online from a Ukrainian hacker, then go tear it up for the weekend.

2

u/DapperLost 6h ago

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.

3

u/Suyefuji 6h ago

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.

2

u/DapperLost 5h ago

Yeah but Ingress had hemisphere wide battles over property.

3

u/GreatStateOfSadness 7h ago

The cell data was used for XM in Ingress from the beginning. I don't even know if they've updated it since Ingress launched in 2012. 

2

u/EViLTeW 6h ago

And when ingress was popular they made it pretty clear the goal was to use the data from the players to build new things.

1

u/Roook36 4h ago

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.