"The In-Game Tracker: Easy Fix?"

#PokemonGO: BLUF: Recommend splitting "Nearby" and "Sightings" into two separate, swipeable screens, as has been implemented with the current split between "Pokemon" and "Raids".After a long period of being rather raid-centric, Pokemon Go has gone back to its roots with the awesome current event. Walking around town to catch 'mons and hatch eggs is fashionable again, and I'm loving it!However, it has again reminded me of a long-running frustration with the current in-game tracker. Currently, it is very difficult to use it to actually track Pokemon. Typically it brings about one of three different scenarios:Scenario 1: Area with 1-3 Pokestops. Unless you clear those stops of current spawns, you will be blind to other Pokemon in the surrounding area. You can still see Pokemon not tied to Pokestops when "Sightings" shows back up as a line of three 'mons underneath "Nearby" (when you've cleared the "Nearby" down to three or less 'mons), but this is... less than ideal in areas where there are more than three eligible Pokemon for "Sightings" to display.Scenario 2: Big city, lots of stops. You will see 5-7 stops with some of the Pokemon in close proximity to them. However, as best as I can tell, the game is... shall we say, inconsistent with how it prioritizes displaying rares and even uncommons. I have seen stops on "Nearby" display very common 'mons and when I arrive there, an uncommon or even rare shows up in very close proximity that was never displayed. Maybe it's just me?Scenario 3: No stops in range, only "Sightings" displayed. AKA how the game worked for months between the removal of the fabled "three-step" system and the current addition of "Nearby". One can still somewhat triangulate with it to hunt down rares that show up, and I personally breathe a sigh of relief when I leave stops behind and get to see a full screen of what's in the immediate vicinity. That being said, it is still a bit of a guessing game figuring out where to go to hunt down a targeted 'mon, and if you don't know where all the spawn points are to check, you can wander around for quite some time and still not find what you're looking for.Raids have certainly blunted this issue recently as many of us have been doing less active hunting the last few months, but I all but gave up on hunting Pokemon in scenarios 1 and 2 long before raids arrived, because it is still very difficult with the tools we've been given. Now that I am actively hunting again, I've been reminded of the limitations of that toolset. There are a few places where the "Sightings" do prove useful, of course, but they seem outweighed by the number of times seeing four common Pokemon at nearby stops has made me sigh about the unused white space below that and the potentially missed opportunities.A possible solution: Niantic has already implemented multiple, swipeable screens with the in-game tracker... the Raids screen. I would recommend splitting the current tracker into two screens: one for "Nearby" and one we could swipe to for "Sightings". Basically give players the option to ignore nearby Pokestops when there's nothing there they want to pursue and just see what's in the immediate vicinity instead. The game is clearly still tracking all that in the background, so I would think giving us a view into what the game is already seeing would be tremendously helpful. While that doesn't fully address the overall issue, it's a good start that would increase QOL for players with likely very minimal effort on Niantic's part.Any other suggestions? I appreciate the many advancements in the game since the days of the three-step tracker, and bravo to Niantic for addressing many other player concerns, but the tracker has been sitting mostly untouched for quite some time now. With Gen3 about to arrive, I'm hoping the tracker is something they still plan to address. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2xMbK1u