"Levelling the playing field for players without daily access to a Pokestop - would this work?"

#PokemonGO: Long time lurker but first time poster!First, a bit of background: I have a disability that causes fatigue. For me this means that I can’t make it out of the house every day - I generally get out and about every 2nd or 3rd day. I’ve found my own way to play PoGo and work around this - whenever I do make it out I take the opportunity to hit every stop I see, fill my bag as much as I can to keep me supplied with balls until the next time. I also spend real-world money and my few gym coins on incubators so that I can squeeze maximum benefit out of of the walking I do manage to do. I suppose my playing style is best described as “bursty”!Until recently, this approach has worked out pretty well for me, I’m currently most of the way up level 29, 198 in Pokedex (+2 more come Friday when I do my 7-day catch streak lucky egg session and finally get a Dragonite!) and able to participate in the local gym game a bit, although I rarely have more than one mon in a gym at any given time. So definitely not a hardcore player, but active. The game has achieved it’s aim of getting me out and walking around more…just not every day.There’s one thing I have no workaround for though, and that is getting a 7-day streak of Pokestops. My closest Pokestop is only about 5 minutes walk away, I can see it on the game map from my house, but some days it might as well be on Mars. I know lots of other forums would say “just spoof the 5 mins a day to your nearest stop and you’re sorted!” but I’m not willing to do that, I’ve been playing legit since the start and I’m not about to that now! Which is why I’m posting this on here!Missing out on that 7-day stop streak was never that much of an issue, until they started guaranteeing an evolution item on the 7th day. That massively, massively tips the balance of the game - evolution item drops from stops are so few and far between that being unable to get a 7-day streak suddenly leaves me at a huge disadvantage. So far I have only had 2. I could be playing for a really long time before I have a hope of evolving some of my mons that have been sitting with enough candy for ages now - I have a 100% Seadra forlornly waiting for a stop to randomly drop a dragon scale. It effectively puts it almost out of reach and I have to think of those evolved mons as something close to ultra-rares for me, while other players are guaranteed at least a roll of the dice every week.It strikes me that this problem will often also apply to rural players, where the nearest stop might be an hour’s drive away - it’s not just players like me who might find it difficult or even impossible to hit a stop every day.I’ve been trying for a while to come up with a way the game could address this, to level up the playing field for disabled and rural players who lack regular access to stops, but without just giving it all away for free or cancelling out the point of 7-day streaks. Just adding more stops may help rural players, but not disabled players, and even then it’s difficult to distribute stops such that everybody has daily access to one.The best I can come up with so far is a system where you can leave a Pokemon at a stop to spin it for you. Here’s how it might work:I walk to my local stop and drop off Kevin the Mediocre Meowth*Kevin stays there and can spin the stop for me once a day, at a cost of 1 candyKevin is automatically returned to me after a number of days, unless I physically visit the stop again to either collect him or reset the clockI would certainly set a time limit on how long your mon could stay at the stop without revisiting it to reset the clock. That limit should certainly be less than 6 days so that 7-day stop streaks don’t become pointless. Even a 48 hour limit would be game-changing for me though as it opens up the possibility of a streak (Day 1 - I drop off Kevin & spin stop, Day 2 - Kevin spins the stop for me, Day 3 - Kevin spins the stop for me & returns, Day 4 - I walk to a stop and drop him off again…etc…)I would also limit it to one Pokemon at a time, so I can only get max one spin a day without leaving the house.I guess if you still think it’s giving away too much too easily, then at the time limit your mon could even return fainted as they do from gyms - so you’d have to either use throwaway mons or spend potions & revives.Advantages:It would make no real difference to those players who live or work by a Pokestop and are resource-rich - but for people like me it’s an absolute game changer. So it levels up the playing field a bit.It fits with the already established in-game concept of your Pokemon doing a job for you.It’s not something for nothing - it costs you at least candy, maybe potions and revives or a suicide mon, and it will only work for a limited time before you have to go back to the stop.It’s a use for those trash mons that otherwise don’t do a whole lot but are easy to collect candy for. I could imagine stops round here surrounded by shoals of goldeen or flocks of spearow.As well as solving the problem of how to access a reliable source of evolution items, it means players like me wouldn't miss out on events like the free incubators stops gave out over Christmas.It keeps the game about getting out and about, without requiring that to be possible every day to fully participate.Disadvantages:It does make the 7 day streak thing much less of a challenge, although in practise I think most urban able-bodied players are likely to be passing a stop every day anyway so for them it wasn't much of a challenge to start with. It still hands the most to those of us who are already at a disadvantage.It's a perhaps an overly complex solution to something that could be solved by just stopping the guaranteed evolution item on a 7 day streak thing and increasing the drop rates instead. But the guaranteed evolution item has been very popular with players, and I think it was added to make sure people do get a reliable way to earn evolution items. This solution retains that reliability, still making you work for it but in a more universally accessible way.So, you guys give a lot of thought to how the game is balanced. What do you think? Is this workable? Anybody got any better ideas?(* Ever since I named him Kevin I can't bring myself to grind him up for candy. Might as well give him something to do! <<scritches Kevin behind the ears>>) via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2pbCqT9