"Why is your capture location wrong? Field research and analysis on how cells control caught pokemon locations."

#PokemonGO: Note that the following does not apply to eggs which appear to draw their location of origin from the specific pokestop from which they were obtainedTLDR Caught location appears to be based on the approximate centre of the level 10 S2 Cell in which a Pokémon spawns, regardless of where in the cell the said pokemon appears.Map (you can click the blue and green markers to access screenshots from each location)What are S2 Cells?S2 cell stands for Schneider 2 Cells, you can start to read up on deeper details here. (External Page) Anyone who has played Niantic’s older project, Ingress will likely be familiar with the regional scoring system which divides the entire globe up into almost-kinda-square-ish cells which are displayed both on the globe loading screen, on the Intel map and also whenever a player reviews their local score. In ingress, these regional cells are set as a level 6 s2 grid.For the sake of an example, I have rendered some level 6 sized s2 cells here. In Ingress, these S2 cells represent the following regions: PA04-ROMEO-09, PA03-ROMEO-06, PA04-ROMEO-09.But what does this all have to do with Pokemon Go?Probably a lot. S2 cells are a very smart way to control the distribution of regional pokemon, as well as potentially macro-scale biomes and more.On Caught LocationNoticing that many of my capture locations did not line up with where I actually caught my Pokémon, I set about investigating what was going on behind the scenes. I took note of the primary towns and suburbs that captured Pokémon where showing as their capture locations: The city of Woy Woy would always display as Kincumber South, the city of Gosford would display as the much smaller town of Lisarow, the major shopping centre at Tuggerah would display as the sleepy town of Ourimbah, and the town of Terrigal by the sea would display as nowhere.Knowing Niantic’s past use of the S2 system, I had a feeling that it had some influence over this situation, so I started working down in size from level 6 until I came to the smaller level 10 size, which in my area encompasses about 80 square km.This is how the region between Sydney’s North Shore and the city of Newcastle appears if it is divided into level 10 s2 CellsInterestingly when rounded to within two decimal degrees, the centres of these cells matched up perfectly to the caught locations of my Pokémon: Kincumber South sat at the centre of a cell, Lisarow sat at the centre of a cell which encompassed much of Gosford, so on and so forth.Fieldwork and ExperimentationI figured the best way to go about proving my hypothesis without cheating would be to find a cell in which I could safely access each side of it in order to test this. The process for the experiment was simple:Move to the North edge of the apparent cell, capture a Pokémon from a close location both internal and external to the S2 cell (I used incense as some areas had no spawns). Review the Pokémon’s said location and record for evidence.Repeat the above step for each the East, South and West sides of the apparent cell.ResultsThis Google Map shows the locations I checked, each side of the cell showed positive results for the hypothesis and many were down to the metre (when I could get appropriate spawns).ImplicationsIt appears that the capture location feature is indeed based on level 10 S2 cells.Interesting further research might be worth following up on the following topics: The transition of macro-sized biomes such as those that control the appearance of desert and temperate Pokémon, the distribution of regional species of Pokémon, and the relationship between gyms/pokestop distribution within any given cell of a particular size.Edit: Minor link formatting fixes via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2iAqt5u