14

I've been playing Pokémon GO for a few months now. I live in a major metropolitan area in the US, and pretty much since I started I have 4-5 PokéStop in range of me when I'm sitting in my apartment.

In the past two weeks, I got super busy and didn't log in. Today, when I logged in, all the same PokéStops are present, my avatar is in the same location, but I'm only "in range" of two of the PokéStops.

Has the algorithm Niantic uses to detect if you're in range of a PokéStop changed? Does this happen often? (I've only been playing since February, and this is the first time for me.)

I took a screenshot to demonstrate. In the below screenshot the two PokéStops highlighted in green are the only ones that I am now "in range" of. (For some reason the one on the left is out of range at the moment.) The two circled in red were previously consistently in range as well. The one in yellow was sometimes in range if there was some GPS drift.

Pokémon GO screenshot

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
33

Update:

Niantic has reverted their plans again. According to their Twitter post the default distance is 80 meters from now on.

You were just used to the COVID-19 bonuses.

According to this article Niantic started to revert some of the changes made to take lockdowns and curfews into account. Since these are no longer a thing Niantic has decided to change some interaction ranges again in select countries (including the US).

The article also quotes a twitter post with the following image to visualize the changes:

interaction range changes

Improve this answer
1
  • 5
    As of August 25th, the distance was rollback to 80 meters. Niantic plans to release a summary of changes/updates on September 1st.
    – Wondercricket
    Aug 26, 2021 at 12:15

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .