COVID-19, how does it affect your pokémon go Community?

How does the new Coronavirus affect your daily life and your Pokemon o community?

Well, over here people do raids slightly less than they used to do.

Stay safe, and respect the decisions of the authorities.

Well, today it was announced by the government that every event in the Netherlands with 100+ people will be cancelled or postponed.

The numbers participating seem lower; but there are a number of factors contributing to that, and it’s not clear how much can be attributed to the virus. The mind-numbing variety and frequency of specials – a day here, an hour there, a weekend overlapping, etc – has given rise to a broader variety of complaints, which has led to smaller numbers for over a year. But our PoGo community has never featured much contact (an occasional handshake or high five, but no hugging or hand-holding outside of couples). So playing PoGo seems not to be given to increasing our risk of contracting the Wuhan Funk (as I’ve overheard some call it).

Maybe Niantic should roll with the punches and permit spoofing until this blows over, to encourage players to stay home during how ever many weeks people around the world are being quarantined or told to shelter in place. I’d love to sit at my desk and explore the gyms, spawns, and stops online while this mess is playing out.

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Yeah its hard to tell. Last wednesday had the biggest turnout of raid hour since a while but thats not hard considering the last 4 weeks (look at you Tornadus). Like @Brobraam said, The Netherlands just announced some new measurments today, but i dont see those directly affecting anything ingame. 100+ people at raids has been months since, and on CD were all spread out alot so even if theres 100+ people arround, they wont be close together.

Well see how the next few weeks/months go. If it gets alot worse we will shut down our raid tool. For now, buisiness as usual +2 meters distance.

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I’m hoping Philly Safari Zone won’t be cancelled.

It hasn’t done much here beyond what has already been postponed–Abra Community Day. We’re taking it in stride here.

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Same campuses are famous spots for CD, but now they don’t allow massive groups of people playing there, so players need to find alternatives in future CD’s.

Raid hours etc. have had lowering numbers of players for months now here where I am. So in most cases it was just my husband and me playing (and yes, I finally admit it: we both have alt accounts for easier raiding), with occasional visitors and, since moving to another town, also air support. The local community doesn’t care about spoofers, so we accepted that.
So this all has not been a result of the virus.

But of course the decisions Niantic makes do have an enormous impact on my personal playing.
I have been looking forward to Abra CDay. But I understand and respect the decision, although CDay would have been the event with the lowest (!) social interaction, at least how people play it around here. (Walking around individually meeting someone at a lure shortly, chatting for a minute, off to the next lure…).

About the Safari Zone(s)… I guess if that whole COVID-19 thing doesn’t slow down at least a bit, they will postpone/cancel ALL those events. It would be stupid to encourage travelling, and I mean, especially for the US Safari Zones: Europeans wouldn’t be allowed into the country at the moment anyway…

That 30 incense for one coin is nice though :star_struck:

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That was my first thought upon seeing news of the cancellation, too. But the confusion didn’t stop there.

Cancelling the CD implies that having lots of players walking around is risky for transmission. Yet, they offer such a deal on incense that everybody buys it (but since walking around is what makes the incense work, that means they hope lots of players will buy it, and go walking to use it – kind of like a CD without the feature Pokémon, 3-hour lures, and exclusive move?!)

I have heard, but I have yet to test myself, that incense will now spawn a Pokémon every 30 seconds even when not moving.

No s?!!

But getting the box just added 30 to my existing incense count. (It didn’t even pretend to segregate this, the way our incubators show multiple sets of them separately though they have the same number of uses left.)

So that accelerated spawn timer has to be based on the current date and time – not a different kind of incense.

Around 30s to 1min for me

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Got a chance to test the incense behavior and confirmed that it does produce spawns on about a 30-second interval I’d love to just let it work for a few minutes to create a crowd of spawns and then sweep them up periodically. But the spawns don’t hang around very long; I haven’t seen more than two by me at a time before the next spawn comes and the oldest of the two before it despawns. (So we gotta catch 'em pretty quickly.)

I called in sick to work today. Feel awful

We kinda stopped playing anyway so the only impact was the Abra CD

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Our government is just nuts. They caused a mild hysteria with their confusing press conference and than say, we don’t test people unless you go to a hospital really sick… Or you have to be 70+, or have lung, kidney or an immune disease… Artificial number manipulation.

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The House of Representatives of the Netherlands will decide today wether all the schools will be closed or not

Every time I hear ‘coronavirus’ I translate it to ‘flu’, to keep it in perspective, as this is essentially a strain of flu that we haven’t seen jump from animal to human before. Like others in recent decades - swine flu a couple of times, and a couple of different bird flu outbreaks. Remember ‘H1N1’?

When this has run its course it will turn out to have had fewer cases than the ordinary flu. We hear a few dozen times during every NBA season that a particular star is sitting out a few games with the flu, or that a team has had several players and coaches laid-up at the same time because the illness is going through the team’s locker room. Perhaps Michael Jordan’s greatest performance came in a game that he played despite being sick as hell with the flu and wound up scoring over 50 points.

We never shut down the league for a dozen cases of flu before, though. Seems like an overreaction to me.

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It’s all a problem of shureness… maybe your right, maybe not. Better overreaction than many people on the boothill? I really don’t know which way is the correct, but in the moment we will stay at home here in Spain, as the government told us to do. Additional because with my age I’m in the group of risk.

I’ll respect your worry about this, being only a few years behind you and having multiple prominent risk factors, as well. I wish I could reassure you; but I don’t have the persuasive credentials to accomplish that. I look forward to when we can all get back to catching them all (all, except the dreaded Gen 51 Virusaur, that is).