Is it possible to go from level 26 to level 32 in 5 days?

Question

I was one of the highest level players in my area. Until one guy, who initially levels up in a similar speed with me from level 20 to level 26. But then this guy goes from 26 to 28 in one single day, and from that point he levels up with the speed of 1 level per day and he's currently level 32. I don't know if this is possible without cheating. Hope some players with high level can answer me.

update 7/28/2016 Now two days past. This guy gains two more levels. He's currently level 34.

That means he gains 1750k XP in less than two days! I don't think that is any close to doable without a bot. For those of you who think lure + pokemon stop + evolving + lucky egg can achieve this, I think it's probably because your level is too low to understand how hard it is to leveling up in such high levels (30 above).

Answer 1

Let's math this.

First of all, are you 100% confident in the data you've shared with us? Are you sure it isn't two different people with similar nicknames etc? I'll assume you're correct for now, but bear in mind that it's easy to get this stuff wrong.

http://www.serebii.net/pokemongo/trainer.shtml gives xp values for the following levels:-

• 26-27: 200,000
• 27-28: 250,000
• 28-29: 300,000
• 29-30: 350,000
• 30-31: 500,000
• 31-32: 500,000

for a total of 2.1M XP over the course of six days. That 500k for level 32 looks suspicious to me, but we'll go with it for now.

Let's be charitable and assume your rival is playing 8 hours per day, and using lucky eggs for the entire duration (at a cost of about $40). This means he needs to sustain about 45k XP per hour (or about 22.5k XP before the lucky egg bonus).

Currently the most effective (legitimate) way to gain XP is to mass-evolve pidgeys/caterpies/weedles. It costs 11 candies to evolve one (12, and you get one back). You get 3 candies for a catch, plus one for transferring (either pre- or post-evolution). This means that you can evolve four pidgies, caterpies, or weedles for every eleven you catch.

Thus, one catch gives you a maximum of:-

• 100 XP (Catching a pokemon)
• 100 XP (Excellent throw)
• 10 XP (Curveball bonus)
• ~182 XP (4/11ths of an evolution)

= ~400 XP per catch. Doubled for a lucky egg is 800 XP. Realistically you aren't going to get an excellent curveball on every throw, but this certainly gives us a reasonable upper bound.

45k XP / 800 XP per catch = around 55 catches per hour.

In order to have gone from level 26 to level 32 over the course of six days, your rival would have to have done at least the equivalent of catching roughly one pidgey, caterpie, or weedle every minute, eight hours per day.

You may draw your own conclusion.

As per the comments, you can see there are some situations where you can prepare in advance to achieve very high XP/h over short periods. In particular, the famous evolve-pidgies-with-a-lucky-egg trick peaks out somewhere around 150kxp/h (for 30 minutes...). However these tricks all rely on a previously-collected stash of pokemon/candies, and so cannot be used to sustain high XP/h indefinitely.

You'll notice I've stopped short of accusing your rival of cheating. It's not for me to say whether or not he's capable of throwing 100% excellent curveballs, or whether or not he's found a nest that genuinely lets him catch a pidgey a minute (or whether he's playing for 18 hours a day and thus "only" needs to catch a pidgey every 150 seconds...) The math here is simply to give you an idea of the level and quality of activity necessary to sustain the claimed XP rate, and thus to empower you to make your own decision about whether or not you think it's more likely that a) your rival is actually sustaining that level of activity, or b) your rival is cheating.

Response to update

To have gone from level 32 to level 34 in 2 days would require our rival to be catching a pidgey/caterpie/weedle with 100% excellent curveballs under the influence of a lucky egg once per minute for eighteen hours per day (800 XP/m * 60 * 18 * 2 = ~1.75M XP)

Answer 2

There are a few possibilities:

1. Money (buy Incense, Lures, Lucky Eggs = win)
2. A lot of time (just do a lot of stuff)
3. Saved Lucky Eggs for mass evolving a full Pokémon zoo. (This method nets you about 60k XP per egg/30 min easily, more if you prepared it properly.)
4. Cheating

Answer 3

The most efficient way to earn exp is to save all low evolve cost common pokemon (pidgey, ratata, weedle, caterpie) and use a Lucky egg (2x exp) and evolve all at once, in a span of 30 minutes you can probably evolve around 50+ pokemon each yielding 1k exp (evolve = 500 * 2).

If he had abundance of lucky eggs and candy, he could have done it. It is very boring (as you can't skip evolve animation) but legit way to power evolve.

Answer 4

Suppose the player levels up to level 26 without evolving pokemon.

They collect the first 50 candy for 50 candy pokemon evolutions, and unlimited candy for 12 and 25 evolution pokemon. After they have 50 candy for a high-cost pokemon, they skip that creature.

And they bias towards the 12 evolution pokemon.

Each pokemon is melted down to candy, for 4 candy/pokemon. Every 4 pokemon they collect, on average, generates an evolution.

They spend money on pokeballs instead of using stops. So for every 400 XP they have 1 evolution "saved up".

At level 26 they have 900,000 XP, so 2250 evolutions "saved up". They also have 400 pokemon in storage ready to evolve.

Using lucky eggs, they first evolve all 400 of those pokemon. That is 400000 XP in 2.5 hours, 50,000 XP short of level 28.

They do this on a bike with 9 incubators running. They move at a modest average speed of 10 km/h, generating 4000 xp/hour/egg, or 36000 XP.

If they don't care about lucky eggs, they also catch pokemon during this time. Running incense and biking near two lure'd pokestops they will run into almost a pokemon a minute. Suppose they run into an evolve-able pokemon every 2 minutes, and a non evol-able pokemon every 3 minutes. This costs them time to evolve, but lucky eggs are just money.

Over 4 hours they have picked up 120 pokemon and had 400 in storage, for 520. 520 * 1k + 36k/h * 4h = 664,000 XP. Plus 40k from lucky-egg enhanced pokemon capture.

They are now level 28, almost level 29.

At this point they slow down. Over 4 hours they still earn 144k on eggs and 120k on pokemon and 40k from capture, or 304k per 4 hours.

It takes 1650k XP to reach 32 from 28, or 5 and a half 4 hour xp-fests.

Do you have enough candy? Well, you saved up 2200 evolutions, which is 2 million XP worth of evolution. 120*5.5+520=1180 evolutions are used above. So you don't need to have nearly as many evolutions saved up by level 26 as I initially planned -- half even.

This neglects the requirement to get better-than-pokeballs to reliably catch pokemon at this level. And probably the pokemon rate is too fast. But with enough money and a bit of prep and willingness to play for many hours per day, this is possible.

As an example, drop the pokemon capture rate in half and play for 8 hours/day.

This strategy isn't cheap, but 16 eggs 16 incense and 32 modules for an 8 hour day for 5 days comes to 300-odd dollars. So not infinite money either, and as noted above this has fudge factor. And if they find a spot that is reliably modules by other people, or do lure cooping, they cut their costs way down. And as egging during the hatch-fest is the important part, they can massively reduce egg costs.

Naturally it is far easier if you cheat. 1 pokemon/2 minutes * 24 hours is 720 pokemon/day. If each pokemon is matched with a pokestop spin (to get the balls), the throws are all excellent curveballs, we get 100+100+10+50=260 XP/pokemon.

If it takes an average of 24 candy to evolve, that is an evolution every 6 pokemon. Assuming evolution occurs in a lucky egg, that is another 160 XP/pokemon, for 420 XP/pokemon.

420/2*60*24> 300k XP/day.

Mix that with a daily egg-fest and some saving up of candy from prior to level 26, and that also matches the players XP curve.