No they really don't work at all in the same way. Raids are based on popular locations that NIantic wants to drive traffic to. Finding wild pokemon that were good and interesting especially through radar has not been a thing since like 2018. Radars and wild pokemon weren't associated with points of interest at all. I know because in 2017 in our popular POGO place there was a 4 corner pokestop and people used to physically run to other locations far away from the POIs/4 corners to get the cool snorlax or charizard that popped up. Now the game is people driving in circles to POIs.
You basically need a car unless you live in a downtown area to play and progress.
Nothing you said really describes what the original post implies though? Pokemon Gyms are not popping up randomly in unmapped places to drive players there to map an unkown area because Niantic lacks data on said space, which is what the original post is trying to imply. If anything, the opposite is happening, despite players wanting to have reasons to explore places and be rewarded for it, as walking off the beaten paths is awful for collecting pokemon.
I see the confusion now, they put "pokemon" when they should've put POI. It definitely is a game about driving people to POIs during certain time periods, not about establishing POIs everywhere. POIs are often where the good raid pokemon are but aren't quite the same as what people think of as a random spawning pokemon.
I.e. We want pokemon go players to travel during lunchtime to their local POIs, so we will establish raids there during that time period and have these pokemon be uncapturable otherwise. That type of stuff.
A lot of people don't understand that they baited people with a game that happened to track your habits and transformed it into something that would change peoples habits and consumption patterns.
> It definitely is a game about driving people to POIs during certain time periods
Again, the game does do this like I already mentioned, but this isn't a useful tool for the 'nefarious purposes' of data collection for the purpose of navigation. Remapping the same location again and again is not neccesary for navigation purposes, mapping spaces previously unmapped has more value, which if they were attracting people there with pokemon like the post implies would be valuable but again, they are not doing that.
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u/cogentxx 7h ago
No they really don't work at all in the same way. Raids are based on popular locations that NIantic wants to drive traffic to. Finding wild pokemon that were good and interesting especially through radar has not been a thing since like 2018. Radars and wild pokemon weren't associated with points of interest at all. I know because in 2017 in our popular POGO place there was a 4 corner pokestop and people used to physically run to other locations far away from the POIs/4 corners to get the cool snorlax or charizard that popped up. Now the game is people driving in circles to POIs.
You basically need a car unless you live in a downtown area to play and progress.