"Game disparities that need to be solved (from the thread on Adventure Week / Larvitar stats)"

#PokemonGO: Someone mentioned I should post this as a separate comment or thread so I'm going to break this out as a post with a slightly different focus, working with the conclusion that the OP in that thread came to: there is a huge disparity in the game that needs to be addressed.Sorry, this is long. Here's my TL;DR conclusionsNiantic is unrealistic about the extent of how unexpected uses of the game have already broken huge parts of itNiantic has made it too hard to catch things that are competitive in gyms or that don't have an egg hatch pathwayNiantic's efforts to contain legitimate Pokemon collections are just maintaining disparitiesNiantic's response needs to acknowledge how the cheaters drastically affect the game & neutralize them, instead of working with the assumption that whatever they're planning to do is going to stop cheaters from logging in & dominating the shared gamespace aspects.This is just perspective that comes from playing the official game client in a busy urban area & having seen spawn data from maps at times when I was not playing or catching. (There is no part where I talk about a strategy of intentionally catching illicitly tracked monsters & using them in gameplay situations) We will be talking about spoofers, but only in the sense of observing their interactions with the game world.Illegitimate scanners/trackers perform a service for legitimate client users as a way to conduct automated exhaustive discovery & publishing operations, a feat that would be near-impossible but very substantially replicated with "manual" legitimate discovery activity. (As a matter of fact, legitimate data relating to Pokemon discovery is already widely available.) Regardless of how players might replace bot scanners with legitimate discovery tools, the game is still deeply flawed, broadly.Anyone who's spectated a scanner understands that the game spawn mechanisms are sloppy - ultra rare mons constantly spawn in the middle of rivers, industrial facilities, army bases, cemeteries, etc. (and often in the middle of the night), but entire areas of busy cities with parks and esplanades and greenways see nothing but Natu, Psyduck and Goldeen. Unown almost never appear and are a pipe dream for anyone just doing a walkabout.Pokedex completion is basically impossible without some sort of advantage, legitimate or not. (Legit examples include riding-in-a-long-slow-bus-as-tracker, playing in a dense urban area, or buying yourself a ton of lures and incubators) You can get a lot of stuff, of course... you really can't "catch them all". I certainly haven't.At the same time, urban gyms are filled with the (global) spoils that spoofing clients have collected. Spoofing additionally allows gym sniping so that unsuspecting players standing in the rain to prestige a gym will lose their spot to some idiot in a bedroom a thousand miles away whose game client is hovering over an about-to-be-free gym spot.Is the game fair for people who play it the Niantic way? Well, these players can't play in gyms... not without a car & a lot of time to drive around. (Niantic doesn't want you to do that, either!) Ultra-rare Pokemons are, in theory, possible to generate from single-incubator hatches & walking but are so rare that a person playing for hours daily in a big urban metro might never see one of the gym-relevant ones on the nearby for weeks. All the stuff in the store is expensive and, in the interests of closing the gameplay gaps with spoofers, useless. (but mildly helpful for completing a Pokedex) Even "regional Pokemons" are a broken construct because the Pokemons are so rare when you get to the destination, enough that some players spend hours using third party trackers to find one. (Anecdotes aside of people catching them at the arriving airport)We should dispense with the idea that rare mons are easily obtainable by all scanner users, too (and abandon the idea that they share any substantial advantages with spoofers). You can't catch what's not there and, in most places, rare things never spawn consistently in the vicinity of any location. So scanner users often have no benefit of something good being "within reach" and are often just watching nice things spawn in other parts of town. The events sometimes bring "big game" catches within reach... but they give spoofers chances to catch hundreds of them in a day. Even if it helped your Pokedex it didn't help narrow any disparities, and that goes for people using scanners too.(A big advantage of scanners, though, is that people zero in on a high-IV collection. Players using scanners joke that a Snorlax at 80% IV is "garbage". This is, in part, because Niantic created a combat game reliant on a CP formula that makes every single stat point count for a lot. But spoofers can do 10x better, and it's obvious from gym rosters that they do)I really hope that Niantic understands the full extent of these disparities and how their game decisions affect them. I feel like they've done a bunch of head-scratching things over the past months in regards to dealing with known disparities and, frankly, in maintaining a consistently thrilling and engaging game for users who stick to the in-game tracker. There is potential in playing the game the way that Niantic designed the game, butThe solution needs to come from within. It should not be played out as a cat-and-mouse game between outside bot scanners and Niantic.I think some immediate goals for Niantic should be: * Make a bigger vicinity for the in-game tracker & to have 100% spawn coverage using that trackerIncrease the amount of regional & ultra rare spawns & consider adding algorithmic consistency (beyond biomes & accidental "magic spawns") or even location/event announcementsCome up with some varied and extremely creative ideas to give the gym experience fully back to legitimate clients. Definitely do anything to stop gym sniping.Consider adding a LOT of gyms to urban areas & sell sponsorships heavily to local businesses or perhaps dilute the money that special urban gyms return in coin redemptions.Release the Gen1 legendaries & make them visible to high level playersGive away more incubators to higher-level players & have more lucky egg/double XP events to facilitate "grinding" (not really fun but this does draw people back into the game & closes a serious gap between bot-leveled accounts and real life players)Consider any way to make Unown collection completion an achievable goal for someone walking around a dense suburb or central cityConsider a "live map" that, at random locations for brief periods of time, shows a zoomable map of spawns. I know people who play a legitimate local game but then go home and watch the maps in other cities. It's entertaining... lean into it a bit.And, in the long run, the goal should be to, within reason, neutralize the known advantages that illegitimate game clients have. Ignoring these advantages hasn't worked, policing the accounts largely has had no visible effect, and the constant word on the street among player gatherings is that competitive battle play requires eye-popping quantities of super-high CP mons. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2s9Dqvr