I activated Incense in Pokemon Go, which usually attracts Pokemon. However, this time I didn't see one Pokemon the whole 30 minutes. So I basically wasted an Incense (and a Lucky Egg I activated at the same time).
Can anyone help explain what went wrong? The pink cloud showed up but Pokemon didn't come.
Incense should guarantee a Pokemon spawn every 5 minutes when standing still, or every minute if you continuously move more than 200 meters away from the previous spawn. (Source). In other words, with a run time of 30 minutes, Incense should guarantee 6 Pokemon spawns minimum during that time.
The issue you encountered was likely a server connection issue at the time in 2016, during the initial spike in player numbers and a lot of weird server issues plaguing the game at the time.
Happen to me once before. It turned out that since it was my first time in that specific area the app didn't recognize that area. So the game did not know which pokemons to spawn. So I went to the same area the next day, used an incense, and it worked just fine.
My advice would be to not use incense while you have the spinning white "loading" pokeball symbol on the top left hand part of your screen. If this wasn't the case when you used it and the issue persists then it might be a separate issue that I'm unaware of.
