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Comment by marxdeveloper | Hacker News Reader

I guess my account has been shadowbanned since the beginning - there are only 2 PokeStops in 5 km (3.1 mile) radius and all they have is Pidgey and Rattata 99% of the time.

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The way they have implemented it Shadowbanning is basically sending the bots to the cornfield.

I still think the game is ridiculous in how much it punishes people for simply not living in the city. Even if you had a low density of stops out in the country they could at least have decent numbers of random spawns. This is one reason I stopped playing, seeing only Pidgies and Ratatas gets old. Also, having the game get angry at you for riding a bike is dumb, bike riding is a huge part of the lore of the game!

Yeah, it's even weirder when you realise that better Pokemon appear in the countryside in the rest of the series. That's what the whole long grass thing is all about.

So the people who live in places most like actual Pokemon regions and who travel around like trainers get worse Pokemon than those who stick to the same large city and never go anywhere interesting.

Seems kind of backwards if you ask me.

That may just be the game for you - depends where you are. Compare your pokestops against the Ingress map if you're not sure.

Did you cheat, grief or troll?

I am putting a strong assumption that he has the same problem that a large chunk of players like myself have called 'ruralistis' or 'farmlandempti' where if you aren't in a large city or on a coast, your pokemon spawns for the first 8 months of the game were limited to pidgeys and rattatta and once in a blue moon there might be something amazingly rare like a Weedle, because our town data wasn't in the data source they used to calculate biomes.

Many player have noticed this and have been updating openstreetmaps.org data in hopes that Niantic does a biome refresh and that OSM is actually where they are sourcing their data from.

"updating" OSM = creating parks and rivers where they don't exist. It's an annoyance for OSM maintainers, there's a Slack channel that specifically flags things that look like they might be Pokemon Go users adding bogus features.

> and that OSM is actually where they are sourcing their data from

Which it isn't - they use Google Maps data. Tho GM uses OSM as one of their sources (apparently) so... YMMV

No. I open the app every day for 45-60 minutes when I go for a daily walk, no funny business.

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