It's doable. It's just a different game. You get to know usernames who take or join gyms, you can recognise people on the rare occasion you party up for a raid.
A friend of mine GPS spoofs the game and it's a completely different game though. I'm having to use external tools to remote raid for cool mons as an organised party, but they just tip up to any major city centre raid location and do whatever they need to do whenever they want. That said, gyms turn over within minutes, so getting free coins is a pain in the ass whereas a lot of rural folk repsect the 8hr rule to maximise coins.
If I'm honest, I'm just a guy who let his youngster sign up for an account, so that my boy could play the game while I banged in the buddy miles daily when out running, but I've quite enjoyed it too being out in the sticks.
That’s so much work for something the developers should just have enabled by default. Has anyone stopped to think about the kid in the wheelchair that wanted to play this game?
The PokeStops and events are plentiful and raids are easy to win and great.
But gyms, man. They don't change because of the smurf accounts. I stopped being able to get free coins because people would walk around my city with corkboards with 6-8 phones, and any time I knocked out a Pokémon at a gym, a new one was immediately in its place.
I always thought it would have been cool if Pokemon were only found in environments that were "realistic" to that type. Like, if you had to go to a river to find water Pokemon, or if Geodude was only in the mountains. Seems like they didn't do that, though.
I did think that was going to be the original idea. To encourage you to actually explore your environment and to actually go outside the city.
Doing that would require some fairly robust and sophisticated trading mechanics though so I actually could get a sand type even if I didn't live near a desert, in exchange they could have a grass type that I had captured on open morland in Northern England.
It would have been cool if they've managed to get the market density required to pull it off
This system is in the game. You can look up info for Pokemon biomes. TL;DR is that open street maps lists zones related to terrain, and Pokemon GO has always had separate spawn pools related to these. The major ones are forest, mountain, waterside, and urban.
As of several years ago, this distinction was heavily reduced, and it largely flattened the spawn pools worldwide.
But in 2016-2017 I'd specifically seek out rivers to find Magikarp and lakes to find Poliwag.
I feel you bro, and the saddest thing is that I don't even feel comfortable playing it when on vacation because it drains the battery as crazy lol, and I don't enjoy using powerbanks.
Because it wasn't a game, it was a gamified data collection app. If someone actually wanted to make a game with this concept, it could turn out well, but that was never Niantic's intention.
I had a ton of fun playing Ingress in highschool/college – exploring parts of my city I had never been to before, walking around a ton, meeting new people and making friends.
But yeah, it's a data collection service for Google Maps.
I was emulating this on bluestacks, cause it was way too hot out. Got banned on that phone plus the emulator. Stopped playing since then. Besides I'm not gonna keep spending money on space for inventory.