An incisive and very scientific look at the dangerous Pokemon Go pokestops in NY.

Pokemon GO almost instantly became one of the most popular mobile games of all time. In cities all around the world, you can see people searching for Pokemon and fighting with other players in Poke Gyms. While exploring this new augmented reality world, it’s trivial to forget about the dangers of the real word. On a daily basis, news sites report on Pokemon Go related incidents like child abandonment, reckless driving, or trespassing. Earlier this month New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo even banned sex offenders from playing the game.

These incidents gave me the idea for this article about PokeStops in potentially unsafe areas where caution is advised. My goal was to analyze public data to identify PokeStops in New York City which are close to crime scenes and registered sex offenders.

First, I used PokemonGOMap.info to get the locations of the 24 thousand PokeStop in NYC and download all reported felonies of 2015 (103k) from the NYC OpenData portal. For this analysis, I exclude the offenses burglary (15k) and grand larceny (49k) because they’re less a potential threat to players in the area. The following map shows all PokeStops as blue dots whereas incidents of felony assault & robbery (37k) are represented by green dots and murder & rape (1.5k) by red dots.

Next, I loaded the raw data into R* to count all crimes that occurred within 150m (492ft) of each PokeStop. I had to choose this rather large area because the public data doesn’t show the exact location of the incidents due to privacy reason. Instead, it only provides the midpoint of the street segment on which they happened.

The map below shows the top ten PokeStop in which proximity most major felony incidents occurred. For this map, the offenses murder and rape are weighted by the factor five and only the top PokeStops of an NTA are included to reduce regional clusters. You can find the total number of murders & rapes in the areas of the PokeStops in the red boxes and total number of felony assaults & robberies in the yellow boxes right next to them. The average number of incidents of all NYC PokeStops stands at 0.15 for murder or rape and 4.00 for felony assault or robbery.

 

 

In the previous months, Niantic has decided to remove dangerous or inappropriate Pokestops from the game through “reporting” tool that enabled both players and non-players to report the location for possible removal. This action has resulted to another tragedy – the missing Pokestops presumably removed for no reasons at all.

Pokemon GO players took to social media their frustration on the alleged removal of Pokestops and Gyms for no reasons at all. As reported by Forbes, just recently, the Governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley who posted series of tweets expressed her frustrations over the removal of Pokestops in the State Capital building. Another one is a college student who allegedly reported all the Pokestops in a rival school and got them all removed.

It’s worth mentioning that since the game was launched in different parts of the world, many issued have been noted such unstable servers, app is freezing and bugs that usually caused glitches in the game. These incidents of reporting Pokestops without further validating the extent of the report send the players into deep trouble. However, there is a recommended fix or solution for the problem.

According to the website Heavy, a player can actually request a new gym or Pokestop to be added in a specific location or business through submission of requests for Pokestops and new gyms location. It can be done through the official support page and then click the “How do I create a new PokeStop or Gym?” link. From there the player can file a request for new location including an image or picture of the area, exact name of the Pokestop, the address and they type of location. Since the page was flooded with lots of submissions, unfortunately the page has taken down according to Gamestop.  As a result, players resorted to sending out help requests to Niantic Labs through twitter but there are no updates whether the requested Pokestops have been added.

For players not totally lose hope, Niantic announced that they will add sponsored locations to Pokemon Go through Ingress. According to Chief Executive John Hanke, “There is a second component to our business model at Niantic, which is the concept of sponsored locations.”

 

Pokemon GO has truly transformed how the masses play games. Powered with the geographical technology made possible by its predecessor Ingress, a seemingly endless stream of intrepid Pokemon trainers are now exploring their neighborhoods and beyond in search of PokeStops and illusive Pokemon. While Pokemon GO does a good job for the most part when it comes to selecting these PokeStops, sometimes it completely misses the mark in what makes a sensible location.

Players have already been in well publicized battles to take over the likes of the Trump Tower, the White House, or even a variety of  churches (which may attempt not approve of any kind of evolution, Poke or otherwise), but on the scale of things those locations are still pretty normal buildings. This isn’t always the case when it comes to Pokemon GO PokeStops, which can certainly stray into the strange and potentially dangerous on occasion.

We’ve compiled a list of six different Pokemon Go PokeStops that take the cake when it comes to strange places to find oneself trying to catch a Hitmonchan at 3AM.

 

Source

https://pokestopgym.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/pokemon-car-derick-flickr-1024x576.jpghttps://pokestopgym.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/pokemon-car-derick-flickr-150x150.jpgeditorFeaturedPoke StopPokemon GOPokestop MapHackAn incisive and very scientific look at the dangerous Pokemon Go pokestops in NY. Pokemon GO almost instantly became one of the most popular mobile games of all time. In cities all around the world, you can see people searching for Pokemon and fighting with other players in Poke Gyms. While...Gym Locations