Reviews by spg

Pokémon Go is a free-to-play location-based augmented-reality game developed by Niantic for iOS and Android, released in July 2016. In its first month of release it was downloaded by more than 100 million people worldwide.

Pokémon Go has gotten mixed reviews. It’s been applauded for encouraging players to go outside and be social. But it’s been criticised for weak security, for being buggy at launch, for leading to accidents and robberies, and for having poor internal scaling.

Here are some tips for playing:

1. Below level 16 is just grinding: capturing pokémon and visiting pokéstops. Don’t buy anything from the shop at this stage, except for incubators if you want them. Don’t power up or evolve/train your pokémon: save that for when you’re catching better ones later. You can use incense and lures if you want (there is no reason to save them), but if you’re in a city you won’t need them. Your fastest route to XP at this point is walking among several lures in a densely-populated area. Catch as many pidgeys, weedles and caterpies as you can, to maximize XP gains later.

2. Use pokémon radar to see what pokémon are near you, but not to try to track down individual pokémon. The radar is legendarily a mess and doesn’t work very well.

3. You will get eggs every time you have visited 10 unique pokéstops, and sometimes more frequently. Eggs are a major source of new pokémon. Once you have nine you’re capped until one hatches, so always incubate eggs immediately and buy new incubators when you need to.

4. Keeping the game open when you’re in a vehicle will help you incubate eggs faster and let you unlock pokéstops. You won’t get incubator credit when you’re traveling faster than 20 kph, but you will at lower speeds.

5. If you don’t manage your inventory it’ll fill up, especially between levels 10 and 20. Keep low-level potions and revive medications pruned. Once you start getting razz berries, use them with every pokémon: you can’t trash them outside of a pokémon encounter. I sometimes toss ordinary poke balls at pokémon for a while just to get rid of them, to make room for the higher-quality great balls and ultra balls.

6. Around level 15 you should be ready to use your first lucky egg. Use a pokémon calculator like http://www.pokelevel.com/ or http://www.pidgeycalc.com/ to figure out how to maximize your XP gains.

7. At around level 20 the experience required to level up skyrockets and the game becomes a lot less fun. It’s rarer to find a new pokémon, you aren’t gaining any new abilities, the pokémon break free much more easily, and the XP requirements to level up increase exponentially. This is a time of sad grinding. You will probably flatten out for weeks.

Webpass is awesome. Over six years with them, I’ve had consistently fast internet with only one outage ever. I pay once a year, and never hear from them until it’s time to renew. When I moved buildings they transferred my old account to the new place for free, and if I remember right they gave me a day or two of overlapping service while the move happened.

I’ve lived twice in buildings that didn’t offer Webpass. The first time I had Comcast, which was a nightmare of outages and billing errors and upselling and ridiculously bad customer service. The second time I used Sonicnet, who is a great back-up choice, but not as consistently excellent as Webpass.