In Pokemon GO news... Well there's a promotion for fire and ice pokemon, which is kinda meh. Though I did get a couple more Ponytas. Previously had only seen one.
Thing is, I got a *lot*, because in non-news... The game is even less balanced than I thought. Visiting family:
Whereas in my city (yeah city!) we don't even have that density downtown. It's mainly because my hometown-area is *crazy* into Ingress, which has in-game incentives for submitting freakin everything as a "portal". There's one lovely example where a "mural" is 7 portals... and inside a restaurant...
I'm not exactly mad though, just flabbergasted? Logically it makes me feel better- no wonder my dad is 5 levels ahead of me. I'm not *just* lazy, it's that my idea of hardcore farming is to loiter at the nearby church or synagogue, each of which have three stops aaaaaalmost in range at the same time.
It was also a bit lame. It was an Ingress meetup at the same time, 8 of us there (which lets us level the portals to max, and farm them). We didn't move from the spot, just sat on some benches and chatted as we constantly farmed portals, pokemon, and pokestops. Since I use GO as an excuse to walk a .5-3 miles daily, it was bizarre and kinda sad.
(To illustrate how intense and widespread Ingress play is in the area, an enemy player arrived and destroyed the portals about 30 minutes after we upgraded them. There's a lot of weird software just for identifying situations like this and deploying players raid-style. It honestly is like real-world WoW, which is both amazing and a bit unsettling sometimes. For one thing, lots of people unashamedly play while driving, since the speed is less restricted than in Pokemon)
Back on point: I'm so sorry, people in actual rural areas. But if you suggest portals in Ingress, they'll probably get approved because there's basically no quality control, and many of those will become pokestops.