"Medal capture rate bonus: What we know, what we don't."

#PokemonGO: I've seen a lot of speculation about when the catch rate bonuses were introduced and how exactly they affect the probability of capture. It's important that we know what is possible to determine and what is pointless to research.What we know:The medals somehow affect the capture rate of the Pokemon.The medals will sometimes re-appear after a Pokemon has been caught. This might relate to the capture being a direct result of the increased capture rate.The bonus has not and does not affect the colored target ring in any way.Here is some evidence of that:I've created a small app that takes input of various data found on the capture screen of a Pokemon. it takes in the Pokemon name, it's CP, and the color of the target ring. With this data the app can display some various info about the wild Pokemon, one piece of data being the Pokemon's level. The app is able to determine the level of every test case I provided, regardless of the medal tier or pokemon GO version. Here is an example.HERE is the name and CP.HERE is the colored target ring.When i run this information through the app it returns this data. Here the app is saying that the level of this Sandshrew is 18.Now I'll check the actual level of the captured Sandshrew using the amazing GOIV.As expected the level is 18. Since the formulas to determine the level rely heavily on the color of the target ring a small change in the rings color would result in a significant change in the determined level.Here is a cool comparison of how small a difference it takes to alter the determined level. I conclude that the target ring is not affected whatsoever by the medal bonus.What we don't know:The data above indicates that the actual bonus is not view-able in any way. The values might be stored locally but it is far more likely everything is kept server-side, until data-mining happens we will not be certain.This implies that there is no way to determine when Niantic applied this server side change. It may only affect updated users or they may have applied the server side change sometime ago.We still don't know exactly how each medal tier affects the capture rate.What exactly causes the medals to re-appear on capture and can it help us determine the exact capture rate bonus?I figure that the only way we are going to be able to get the exact percentage of increase in capture rate is to gather a lot of data to view some trends. Thanks for reading, please let me know if I've missed anything or if i should add anything else to the post. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2dzB4v1