The scanners are down. How do you feel about it?
Just a couple poll questions in the comments. I know it was pretty well hashed out in the previous thread, bit of you have new insights, feel free to add them.
Answers
Here in Thailand (perhaps Asia in general) most trainers I know use scanners for IV and raids. Thus, the status quo is a big blow to the local trainers here who are very very active AND spend a lot of money on raid passes. I am not a fan of IV scanners as they take a lot of excitement out of the game ... although the in game "appraisal function" is ridiculously long and obnoxious it is quite a rush when using appraisal to find you have a potentially high IV catch. Those using IV scanners don't get this and feel pressure to rush out to catch their beloved 100% something ("my precious, my precious") and somehow they feel that makes their life better. Hope so, I don't understand that. The loss of raid scanners is a bigger problem as it is hard to find those gyms / raids that we need to jump on a train or boat (in Thailand of course) to get there in time. Those who live by Twitter, Facebook and similar will find another way, but for those of us who disdain social media ... we are destined to do fewer raids.
I use them sometimes to scout which Pokemon, gyms and stops I may find in certain new areas, but it does not give me a huge advantage.
I don't mind if full-time Pokémon alerting services go offline, as those give players unfair advantages.
I found a new Pokéstop added this evening in my village, I wanted to use pokemongomap.info to scan if there were more beyond my horizon...
I live in an area, where our CBD is the prime density of PoGo activity. With that, the playing population is already not that big. The gyms are quite spread out, and public transport is horrendous.
Without a scanner to plan ahead of time, finding suitable raids is really difficult. It will be expensive to take transport laps around the city, and most of the rail network is underground so there is no GPS. Basically, legendary raid success is now left to chance and spoofers who can casually cruise the city from their airconditioned seat.
If anything, this change has probably given spoofers a bigger advantage and killed the mid-tier players.
How do I feel? Annoyed.
I gained access to a scanner when I joined the local discord when raids first started last summer. Since then, I've probable caught a total of 5 Pokemon specifically because of it. It's gone, and I feel no worse off for it. However, our community is small, and it's difficult to catch all the raids "manually". Plus, not everyone has interest in tier 3 raids, so those frequently get skipped. I'm the end, I want my raid scanning back, but I'll survive without it.
I'm in two minds really.
In terms of finding Pokemon, I am all for scanners being down.
But in terms of finding raids, I am leaning more towards it being bad.
I am fortunate to have a local community who really help eachother out when it comes to raids. People tell others about upcoming raids, even if they aren't going to do the raids themselves.
But there are others who really need the scanners to find raids and especially rural areas might depend on them to be able to do raids.
Also, even in my area there are gyms located in remote locations, where we need scanners to know if there are raids there or not.
So I think that scanners being down will lead to less raids and less money for Niantic.
The best way for Niantic to discourage Raid scanning is to offer a better solution in-game. The infrastructure is ALREADY IN PLACE
Click a Gym Badge....BAM
Edit: I used an image with a defender but a defender shouldnt even be necessary to show an Egg and a timer, or the Raid Boss and a timer if it's already hatched. It's not rocket science
If you only get the information when you tap on the badge, it will not substitute a map and most ppl won't use it. It will be too tedious to check 20-30 gyms once every hour. For this to work there should be an egg or boss icon on the screen where you see all the badges. This way you can quickly see where the raids are similar to a map.
Hey I like that idea too. The less taps, the better. Any kind of visual cue on the Badges would be fine. Then if you are interested, tap the badge and get more information. The other obvious benefit is people won't be using raid maps, which frees up their servers.
See, we just solved the problem with a few comments. Why can't they???
we used them for raids. it kind of sucks for our small town. we don't have a lot of gyms (9) and they are spread out over town. we would usually look for other raids while we were waiting on one to hatch, and coordinate a plan. now raiding has pretty much come to a halt.
don't really use them to look for pokemon.
I hope scanners are gone forever. Should have been killed the moment they started cropping up. It's dishonest gameplay, plain and simple, and not what Niantic intended when they started the game. Those using scanners are wrecking gameplay balance, using a cheat tactic to gain an advantage over honest players. I don't give a flying Farfetch'd if the in-game tracking system is so flawed, it's not an excuse to resort to cheating. Walk around and catch what is near you - that's the whole damn game, as it's meant to be.
Nobody walks anymore. My nearest pokestop is 800 meters away. Why walk around the block to have weather boosted trash break out of balls that I was lucky to get 2 every five minutes at the stop.
The game was not worth the time and effort in the suburbs. Until scanners. If they keep breaking scanners they will lose millions of users.
A few things:
1) "Gameplay balance." If everyone in a given area is using a scanner, then it's balanced. There's not really a means for groups of players in different regions to compete. The imbalance between regions is hardly the fault of scanners alone.
2) "Not what Niantic intended." I'm not even sure where to start with this. Niantic has made misstep after misstep with the way this game has been implemented and continues to be extremely lax in fixing known bugs, implementing new features, and communicating with players. They clearly aren't the ultimate resource on what does and doesn't make for compelling gameplay, so I don't necessarily feel any obligation to be beholden to their 'vision', whatever that is. Also keep in mind that they recently came out and said that PoGo is only 10% of the game they want it to be (paraphrasing). So I guess by 2030 we'll finally see what their vision is.
3) "Walk around and catch what is near you." I do, every day, and it's 99.9% trash. If catching trash is compelling enough for you, then that's great. A lot of players find that monotonous and pointless. The Go Plus exists precisely because grinding in this game is boring and even Niantic seems to acknowledge it.
I've worded this a little strongly and honestly I don't feel as passionately about the scanner issue as I've conveyed above. I mostly play for free; if Pokemon Go becomes too boring, I'll stop and find something else to occupy my time. People in my community are significantly reducing their play time in the absence of being able to see raids and hunt for rare Pokemon, and I can't say that I'm not one of them. The scanners are bringing more legitimate (by my definition: non-spoofer) players to the table who have money to spend on the game. Are they too powerful? Yes. Does getting rid of them severely hamper spoofers? Yes. However, the lack of a good in-game system for tracking raids and spawns is precisely the problem. Even in the original games, your Pokedex told you where most Pokemon were likely to spawn (although the encounters themselves were guided by RNG). You're literally in the dark in PoGo. That's bad design.
Yeah, the scanners don't seem to hinder community-building as far as I can tell. Also, I've actually had more success in getting full lobbies than I expected since the outage; I think spoofers in my area are just randomly walking around and/or coordinating with each other to locate raids, which they can do more effectively than legitimate players. So, not having maps doesn't solve spoofing and the advantage is still theirs.
As much as I don't like the idea of scanners, the whole reason that they exist is that Niantic refuses to incorporate in-game features like pokeradar, a nearby filter, or even gym badge raid notification. Players want these features. I don't see how shutting them down without a sanctioned alternative is cash positive for Niantic. We would have these features if they spent as much time developing the game as the do shutting down scanning sites.
I can no longer identify raid eggs to travel to, so the only raids that I may do are those I stumble on by chance; only Tier 3 and below unless I join a spoofing group to request air support (but legendary raids are less fun with nobody to chat with). Without nest farming or checking for rares nearby, I have little incentive to walk. Will just farm stardust and distance with long bus rides.
I was lucky enough to see 4 legendary raid eggs in 3 hours from my house. I only did 1 though, as I'm very picky about gym control (and even number of yellow players in lobby), and none of the 4 were my team, all blue. I never use premium passes on non-yellow T5 raids, besides EX gyms and double XP events.
I can only see one gym from my house, but there are a lot more just out of range by a few blocks. I previously would check GymHuntr before leaving on a walk to see which direction has the highest density of enemy colored gyms. With several potential gyms available, I could then be selective by only attacking gyms with defenders that have been in for a long time.
Without being able to see the colors of gyms, I have lost a lot of motivation for going on long walks. I don't want to walk a mile to the busy part of town just to see that all the gyms are already my color and filled.
