"How quickly could you level up if all you ever caught were pidgey?"

#PokemonGO: I was working really hard yesterday bored. Here are the results of my thought experiment.Let's say you wanted to go on the ultimate lucky egg binge.First, you should max out your Pokémon storage so you can evolve 1,000 of whatever you like in one really long lucky egg session. I chose Pidgey because it is a Pokémon that requires the lowest amount of candy to evolve (12) and is the most common, but it's worth mentioning that this would work the same for Pidgey, Weedle, or Caterpie. This will require 15 upgrades (you start with space for 250 and each upgrade increases the total capacity by 50. At 200 coins/upgrade, that works out to be 3,000 Pokécoins.Cumulative requirements: 3,000 Pokécoins.Next, we need to get a sense for how many lucky eggs our session would require (and how long it would physically take to perform this). Since the evolution cycle takes about 21 seconds/evolution, you can perform ~86 evolutions per lucky egg. So it would take a total of 13 lucky eggs to pull it off. So it will take about 6.5 hours to perform the egg event.Cumulative requirements: 3,000 Pokécoins, 13 lucky eggs.Okay, so how many Pidgey would we actually need to capture and transfer before we had enough candy to begin our lucky egg binge? You get 3 candy for every capture. Since you can only store up to 1,000 of them at a time, every time you capture the 1,000th Pidgey, you should transfer it until you have enough candy to evolve 1,000 Pidgey. How many is that? 10,000. So you'll have to capture 2,750 Pidgey in total.Cumulative requirements: 3,000 Pokécoins, 13 lucky eggs, 2,750 Pidgey.So what level would you be at by the time you had actually caught all of these Pidgey? At 100 XP per capture (assuming you never curved or got a bonus other than the bonus you get for every 100th capture of that species and the 500 you get for capturing the first one), you’d have 278,200 XP which puts you about 24% through level 21.This is important, because of the level bonuses. By level 21, you will have received 5 lucky eggs. So, before the Big Egg Day, you'll need to purchase 7, not 13 (you'll actually acquire one from levelling up on the big day).Cumulative requirements: 3,000 Pokécoins, 13 7 lucky eggs, 2,750 Pidgey.By level 21, you'll have received 335 balls (you start with 50). One way or another, you're going to need a minimum of 2,750. In fact, you'd absolutely need more than this (because you'd have to deal with Pidgey flying away or not capturing on the first throw - not to mention it dodging or you missing) but let's just figure out the minimum. You'll need to obtain an additional 2,415 Pokéballs. Here, there be a fork in the road. You can obtain balls from Pokéstops, or you can buy them.The loot you get from Pokéstops is random, of course. And it's hard to get an accurate average, but let's assume you get two balls from each Pokéstop visit (and let's assume you don't get any 10th distinct stop bonuses). It would take a minimum of 1,233 Pokéstops - earning you 50 XP a piece which adds another 61,650 XP.That's actually enough to gain another level and another 10 balls, so we need to subtract off 5 Pokéstop visits and 250 xp from our totals.So, with the Pokéstop method, you'd have to hit a minimum of 1,228 stops, would have to spend 3,000 Pokécoins to upgrade Pokémon storage and 500 Pokécoins to get lucky eggs.Cumulative requirements: 3,500 Pokécoins ($25), 2,750 Pidgey, 1,228 Pokéstops.Now, if you didn't use Pokéstops, you'd have to buy all 2,465 Pokéballs and you wouldn't get extra XP for having hit them. At minimum, you'd have to spend 10,000 pokecoins on balls, 3,000 Pokécoins on storage upgrades, and 500 pokecoins on lucky eggs. - so 13,500 pokecoins in total which is a minimum of $100.Alternative requirements: 13,500 Pokécoins ($100), 2,750 Pidgey.Evolving 1,000 Pidgey with lucky eggs earns you 1,001,000 XP (the extra 1000 is the new Pokémon bonus for catching your first Pidgeotto x2 because it happened during a lucky egg).Using the Pokéstop method, you'd have a total of 1,340,600 XP (96% through level 27).With the purchasing method of Pokéball acquisition, you'd have 1,279,200 XP (71% through level 27).Is this practical? Of course not. In 119 days of playing, I've only encountered a total of 772 Pidgey. That's an average of 6.5 Pidgey/day. At that rate, it would take 423 days to even encounter the number of Pidgey necessary to pull this off.TL;DR: You'd be level 27 in about 1 year, 2 months and after having spent a minimum of $25-$100. It's significantly slower than it would be with diversified Pokémon; not to mention, a lot less fun. via /r/pokemongo http://ift.tt/2foPnD8