State of your local Pokemon Go scene?
We are several old players that have been amazed with this last summer and autumn.
With the exception of the first summer and early autumn, there have never been so many active players before.
I play in a mid sized town (60k people) in an area with 3-5 months of snow cover and fierce winter storms.
We have a stable core of about 30 lvl 40+ at age 30-60, that have played continuously since the start.
But this summer we had a big influx of people below 30, many who had played a short while the first summer and now came back.
At the same time several hard core players have reduced their playing, me included. Most got burnt out during the gift rush.
Today we are probably 200+ semi regular players, with 50+ showing up at the last ex-raid.
Should be interesting to see how it develops during this winter. First snow fall came a month ago and we hit freezing the last two days, after a period of heavy rain.
Answers
My local towns admin decided to boot me from the group, because someone else got booted and complained to me, so i got booted aswell. No joke, that's literally what happened. Needless to say i don't say any complimentary words to the admin on the rare occasion i see him. He never says anything at all to my face.
Fortunately i live only a few miles from the capital of Wales, which has a active community. A 5 star raid there is pretty much guaranteed to have enough people at any time of day, and i have made quite a few friends there.
Goes to show you can have bad groups and good groups. I'm fortunate to live near a good group, so my local bad group is irrelevant.
Disjointed would describe where I live best. I'm close to a few universities that have their own groups, there's a couple Facebook groups for my county, there's a Discord for my area of the city, and there's a WhatsApp group for the more dedicated players, myself included. Of all the above the WhatsApp has been the most reliable for finding raids. As a result I see pretty much the same faces for raids but I do see other randos playing now and again. Community Day in my area always brings out a massive amount of players.
It's pretty steady where I am, and a very nice atmosphere. We're an almost exclusively adult group (ie: over 30, full time jobs, many with kids) and we have an extremely polite section of the local Discord server.
I can't vouch for other area's on the Server, but the place where I'm most active is extremely polite and the only drama comes when someone new to the server doesn't tag someone who is in a Raid and ends up missing the raid. Normally only happens once, then we apologize for not checking the Discord and advise them to tag people next time. Or when new people complain about gyms being taken down "early" - we have a bit of an honour system here were we don't take down gyms that haven't been held for at least a few hours. It's not enforced, but when we're out raiding we'll normally say something like "I was about to take down Gym A, but I saw you had only been on it for 4 hours, so I left it." so it's kind of socially reinforced to let friends get their coins.
When it comes to raids, we've grown accustomed to having raids start 10min after the posted time. It's rare that we don't accommodate other players who post that they're on their way and give an ETA, and normally when that happens we make it explicitly clear in the Discord so that the people posting they will be late can change plans.
And after the Friendship XP Bonuses came out, we started DM'ing one another when we were a few days away from the 50,000XP bonus, to coordinate opening Gifts or doing raids. So far, the only problems have come from people who don't have the same Discord name as their Pokémon Go name (super, SUPER annoying when it comes to this) so someone posts in the Discord "Pokémon Go Name X, we're 1 day away from the 50,000xp! DM ME to coordinate!" and they don't see it because the discord gets cluttered for raids.
As for Spoofers? There are a few. We... tolerate them. Mostly because lots of us play from our cars, so trying to coordinate Private Raids is a hassle. As long as the Spoofers are not delaying the raids (we had one Spoofer try to delay a raid at a gym that was literally on a hill in the middle of an acre-sized open field park, where you had to get out of your car and walk 15 meters in an open field to get within range of the Gym. When we accused them of spoofing, they stopped posting that they were coming to our raids. Not sure if they stopped coming as their Discord name was different than the Player Name, but they stopped posting) we look the other way. The Spoofers we really despise are the ones taking down and GR'ing gyms for days at a time. We had a whole squad of Mystics who did that for a few months, which pissed off the local Mystics who couldn't get their Pokémon into Gyms in the area, and led to many of the Mystics in my area creating secondary accounts to kick the Spoofers out of the gyms. But as long as Spoofers aren't taking up "our" gym spots or delaying our Raids, we're willing to look the other way.
Again, this isn't for the entire Area or the entire Discord server, just on the areas I normally take part in.
Fairly similar situation. There are a lot of dedicated, hardcore players well above 40. I’m level 38 myself, nearly 39. Came back to the game in February at level 19 and I started raiding with discord and Facebook groups at level 30 with Regice. The community here is great, most people are really helpful, we coordinate raids, help people get Pokémon they need, etc. it’s a mid-sized city (200,000 people according to Google), but we have very long and harsh winters. I’m sure many of the players who came back this summer will slowly stop playing during the winter. Unfortunately I’m moving from here to Vermont which definitely doesn’t have as many players.
Yeah, that sounds a lot like it has been here, only we have maybe 200 40+ active players, a lot of semi casuals inthe 35-39 range, and a whole lot of new players.
I think it's important to make the new players feel comfortable. The level 40 players here are very friendly and helpful. It's more important to help a new player connect with Discord for example, than it is to rush off to the next raid.
We have about 30-40 known regular players in our town with 18 gyms, although normally we only manage to gather about 6 or 7 players for higher tier raids after the initial hype of a new legendary being released has died down. We have a large Facebook messenger group that keeps tabs on raids, research tasks, interesting spawns, news, and good IVs, and practically all of us are aged 20+, so coordination is good and we don't have too worry too much when it comes to banter. We also have an arrangement where we avoid knocking players out of gyms between about 22:30 and midnight when they only have one gym (most gyms being close enough to view at once).
The use of multiple accounts isn't frowned upon, and most players who are level 38+ have started up a second or even a third account in order to help out more at raids, which is essential the majority of the time. When it comes to gyms, multiple accounts are permitted to be entered, as we all need our daily coins and there are enough gyms for those who defend gyms daily to put into.
There is still a large number of players in our town who aren't in the group, either because they are yet to be encountered or they don't wish to interact with the rest of us in passing. Either way, we try to remain inviting and friendly and do sometimes approach them when we can and ask if they wish to join the group. We have found over the past few months that a -lot- of new players have arrived in our area, which has thrown a spanner in the works when it comes to earning coins and maintaining gyms before midnight, but a few have contacted us through our main Facebook page and joined us.
We have zero tolerance when it comes to spoofers taking gyms, and it's frowned upon when we find them popping into our raid lobbies. Some spoofers we have met and they have ceased and become active members of our community - others we are unsure of the legitimacy of and are yet to meet, and one in particular we have met in person, but they have intentionally avoided us and denied that they play. This person in particular is notoriously known for taking groups of gyms several times throughout the day and doing so late into the night. I've spoken to this guy in the past, but he just outright denied that he played (which is their loss - when I did this I was on my way to an Entei raid and was going to ask if they wanted to join!) We've had numerous occasions where he's taken gyms from us from right under our noses, and recently we've noticed he's been hopping into our lobbies as well. There have even been occasions where several of us have been out late at night and stationed ourselves at different gyms to scout out whether anyone has approached them to battle them, but this only confirmed our suspicions until someone in our community started a new job and actually found that they were one of their new colleagues!
Unfortunately we don't have an ex-raid gym in our town, so we have to visit a nearby community if we want to participate in ex-raids. Although most people aren't too bothered by this considering Mewtwo has now been publicly distributed.
