Highlights
- In downtown Gdansk, there are over a hundred PokeStops in close proximity, sparking mixed reactions from players.
- The abundance of PokeStops in urban areas highlights the longstanding issue of imbalanced distribution, disadvantaging rural players.
- Poland has other areas with a high number of PokeStops, potentially due to abuse of the Pokemon GO Wayfarer tool in the past. It remains to be seen if Niantic will address this issue.
One Pokemon GO player has recently stumbled upon a metropolitan area with an unbelievably large number of PokeStops. They subsequently took to social media to share their discovery, having done so just as Pokemon GO debuted another legendary Pokemon as part of a new event.
Ever since Pokemon GO launched in 2016, players have been able to submit PokeStop suggestions to Niantic. But the U.S. developer was historically more inclined to accept such landmark submissions in urban areas, leaving rural locations at a disadvantage. As a result, Pokemon GO players in rural areas have been complaining about this imbalanced PokeStop distribution for as long as the game itself existed.
This disparity only grew over time, as most recently illustrated by Reddit user Hj_the_boyoYT, who stumbled upon a metropolitan location with well over a hundred PokeStops within a short walking distance of one another. The area in question is located in downtown Gdansk, a city on the Baltic coast in Northern Poland. The screenshot of this PokeStop-rich Pokemon GO location later went viral on Reddit, prompting mixed reactions among the fandom.
Namely, while some players expressed their amazement at the unbelievably large number of PokeStops in downtown Gdansk, others labeled the location as yet another piece of evidence showing how unfair Pokemon GO is for rural players. Others still characterized the area as being illustrative of the game's overall map design issues, not least because the area in question features just a single gym, despite having a triple-digit number of PokeStops.
Some Polish fans reacting to the newly viral screenshot said that Poland is full of such PokeStop-filled areas, speculating that this state of affairs was shaped by the abuse of the Pokemon GO Wayfarer tool. Back when this service first launched in 2019, the rules for creating waypoints were much more lax, allowing players to spam submissions with virtually no limits. About a year later, Niantic introduced a hard cap on the number of waypoints per a single such grid unit, sometimes called an S2 cell. However, the damage was already done at that point, and Niantic struggled to clean up the areas that were the hotbed for early Wayfarer abuse ever since.
It remains to be seen whether the developer manages to make significant strides toward balancing the game's overworld map design moving forward. Ever since Pokemon GO launched, Niantic was primarily focused on consistently adding new content to the popular mobile game, with balancing changes being more of an afterthought for the developer.
Pokemon GO is available on mobile devices.