Well, this isn’t Niantic’s problem. If you really want them, try it once; I joined a raid group and I was nervous the first time, but it turned out to be fine and now I know every person.
If you feel uncomfortable going alone, bring a friend with you. They make things better and less awkward (personal experience; this is what happened to me!)
Regarding the other half of your post: I do understand your struggle, because I go through the same thing. But, as @Larian has said, give the Ingress method a go and see if that changes your situation.
Niantic gets a bad rap for rural play and there is room for improvement, but given the massive scope of the game it’s a daunting task to know where to put Pokestops. Churches and post offices are a staple of communities but if there are not both of those exists where you live you should probably temper your expectations.
I have caught some of my best Pokémon from rural areas. My first wild Rydon, Rapidash, Arcanine, Nidoqueen, Charmilian and many others came from towns with populations under 2000 people. Even my best dragonite (98%) was from an egg collected in a town of 1800 people.
I am fortunate to have played in dozens of cities in the US, and have scene a variety of spawns and setups ranging from Santa Monica Pier to a few pretty sad places with few stops. I know there is a variety a places and conditions, but a community of 150 people in a town with no church or post office should not expect a such as many spawns or opportunuties as a town of 500, 50000 or 500000.
Hydro, i can only offer a small glimmer of hope and a suggestion. Try to get up with the ingress community and ask for portal submission help. Maybe offer a brew or small bite to eat so some level 11 players can come over and do some subs in your town. It’s a long shot, given niantic rolled back pokestops and i have not seen any transfer over since the 11th of october. Look at your ingress cell and message players some may help. Better to try and fail then complain and fail… But if you succeed well it all gets better.
There’s a village which I visited has barely anything in it but is quite far from anything else (30 mins drive - not ideal) but I saw it after gym rework and it had one gym in it. It made me notice that if anyone in this town before the gym rework was playing the game they had one gym to use, if they didn’t want to drive. This probably meant they all quit because of a lack of Pokestops, and because of a lot of other people quitting and the game not having as many players they likely never heard of the gym rework, adding a Pokestop … kind of sad
I am a rurual players as well. Luckily we have a bunch of historic stuff around so we had 15 stops or so and 6 gyms from day one. So its not as bad as some others have it. We got some more a while ago but on the other hand a bunch of spawns disappeared. Some areas that had cluster’s of pokemon were gone.
I checked ingress two months ago and I noticed that they had atleast 10 more portals that I hope will be added as stops to Go soon. I have been thinking about mailing Niantic about this. Asking them to implement the Ingress portals to Pokemon. Anyone else tried asking them this?
Yeah but its a 15-20 km walk between stop 1-15. Not really worth it in subzero temperatures. I am trying to get atleast 90 % of the ingress portals to pokestops. There are roughly 30 portals that arent stops in my town.
Things are just getting out of hand this days…
Last week Hanke Does a blog post on improving PoGo and it’s been almost a week from then still nothing did we hear.
The things as per original games should have been like more gyms and pokestops in Cities and more spawns in rural areas and more rare spawns too.
Cmon is Niantic trying to challenge Natural Biology thesis with this game, actually we all know that we get to see more species and animals in rural and less inhabited regions than urban. Atleast my common sense tells me that majority animals try avoidin urban landscape and if im not wrong then pokemons too are living animals/monsters and Niantic wants me to find a Dragonite in a pub/hotel rather than in some remote mountain Area.
The setting of the game itself is a disaster, Urban players keep getting more pokemons - rare/High CP and rural players keep catching rattatas and pidgeys until their patience runs out.
And now see they just freakin stopped the pokestop submission system for all over a year not thinking on how to make it work again because they just want rich Co.'s sponsor their stops so that they can earn more money so why invest in rural areas??
Pokemon Go was a project by Niantic to earn some good money, not make a good game and community out of it.All that Niantic wants is some good profit from using the name of a popular franchise so a rural player’s pleas are just tooo much negligible to them.
Niantic is just trying to siphon a huge profit from a popular franchise so i dunno if anything good ever will happen in pokemon go…
Exactly as Watcher said. They are milking a well known franchise. Now the milk has run dry. The lack of stops and gyms is frustrating in smaller areas. Plus the spawns are scarce. These are old problems that should have been fixed a long time ago.
Nothing happened. No trading or atleast a decent pvp. Step one to improve the game would be to convert portals to stops. After that maybe let players over lvl 35 send stop requests. After that add more spawns. Then start planning other features.