What is everyone’s thoughts on the current nearby/sightings system. From my perspective as a player in small city the new system is horrible. I have 3 pokestops about 800 yards from my house and 4 about 800 yards from my work. I can’t see anything that is close, and on the small chance something does flash on sightings the nearby covers it up before I can find it so I either walk blind or give up the search.
I have stumbled on some decent Pokémon walking the dog, or walking out to my car
Do you feel like the new system is better or worse than before?
I think it’s better in my own opinion.
Its better for inland city players. I currently just moved from a city bunch of Pokestops and gyms!!! You can use gym trackers and go to downtown area to find stops. I haven’t had any luck with gym tracker itself I think its down.
Nothing was as good as the 1-2-3 steps in July but pokestop tracking is a vast improvement over random in the wild sightings
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The nice thing with the wild sighting is that you can see what is close and there are tool like the one on the Silph road that allow you to narrow the search.
If you could switch between sightings and nearby it would be the best of both worlds although still not as good as the 3 step system at the games release.
I hardly ever use the sightings, just became familiar with good spawn points in the neighborhood and the times in which they appear. 
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I,know the spawn points, but the good spawns are so random I rarely see them. There was a wild Blaistoise I caught less than 100 meters from my front door last November. I know Pokémon spawn there now but I can’t see what’s around anymore.
Just frustrated because there are limited stops and all I can see is the garbage that spawns there.
So far under the nearby system has led me to one Lapras, and has caused me not to see dozens of good Pokémon that I never saw until they popped up on the screen.
Another flaw in both sightings and nearby is it gives no priority to rare Pokémon. I could care less about a pidgy or weedle when a Snorlax is nearby. Show me the good stuff first!
Eventually I see them going to a notification system alerting not only raids nearby, but maybe rare spawns. Or teammates can message one another regarding the same. The game is still fresh, I’m sure in the end it’ll be the game we all want.
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I agree that we should be able to switch between nearby and sightings. There should also be more feedback from the sightings side to allow you to know if you are going in the right direction. I think if they added the option to choose a Pokémon that is in the sightings section as a target it would be cool for them to highlight a patch on the map where they could be found. It would be similar to looking in your Pokedex to see what areas you could find the species you want to capture.
I also think they are going to have more notification options in the future and hopefully they allow customization of those notifications. I also like the option of maybe excluded certain Pokemon from the nearby feature to allow for more important information to be shown about Pokémon we care to catch.
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The nearby is the bane of my existence. There’s this park near my usual walking route but it’s closed most of the time I am walking and there are always Pokemon there and it means that I can’t see the Pokemon at the rare spawns just off my route because of the poliwag and three pidgeys at the park. They seriously need to make a tab feature where you can choose how you want to find Pokemon because for me living in a limited pokestops area it is painful when I am walking 45 mins along my rare Pokemon route to Park C and all I can see are Pokemon from park a, park b and the local church, all of which are far off my route and all of which I don’t really care about the Pokemon at. Like the time when I got really lucky and found a dragonite randomly walking through the town. I found it because it appeared on the sightings not the nearby… it ran which is really annoying it was like 2400 but I think now about how many Pokemon - rare Pokemon i have missed because of it. I did get redemption from that dragonite and this time it was one of the positives of the system and why I would rather have a tab system instead of just a removal of nearby. A dragonite spawned at the nearby pokestop just after a group of 5 of us failed a charizard raid. I caught this one and probably wouldn’t have without the nearby. I still prefer the feel of sightings though. Sightings felt more enjoyable having to track down Pokemon for yourself and the pokestop system completely ruins that aspect of the game. There are positives but there are also negatives. Adding the sightings feature as a tab would remove all the negatives.
I think that the system should work with a search tool in compatibility with the current system. Search Options could be: Nearby, Sightings, or Rare (“rare” would place the rarest pokemon near you in order of most rare to least rare, showing both sightings and/or nearby). Also, perhaps you could search to see if there is a specific pokemon neary, or a certain type. I can see how this takes out some of the fun of discovering pokemons, but it’s just a thought.
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