Mister Coffee's Research Journal (aka, Rezzy64)

Mister Coffee's Pokemon GO Research Journal

Welcome to anyone who may be interested in reading my research!

As I have been playing pokemon GO for the last couple of weeks I have been listening to the rumors and have been so glued to my phone screen while playing, I can't help but pay attention to various things within the game that seem to be interesting or seem to stand out as game mechanics with very little information revealed on them.
Some of you may have noticed my various posts about revealing how certain game mechanics work or my fascination with various weird rumors that seem to have varying results. At first I thought I would just start posting threads all over the place about my various observations but then i thought, maybe it would just be smarter to have one personal thread where I can post various theories and tests I am doing while playing the game.

So this thread is going to be an accumulation of every interesting thing about Pokemon GO that I notice and want to share with as many players as possible so that we can have a solid understanding of how to properly play this surprisingly mysterious app game that we all love so much.

My first topic that I want to open my Research Journal with is:
"The Blue Shadow"

So as I hope some of you have noticed from collecting pokemon, some pokemon have a strange blue glow around their bodies but not all of them have this strange color around them. I have noticed today that thios strange blue coloring is actually actively affecting the power and overall "potential" of the pokemon that has it. Sometimes the boost is significantly obvious and sometimes it's a lot more subtle or hard to detect at all.
Today I was able to definitively see a distinct change between similar pokemon that have this strange blue shadow versus ones that don't have the blue shadow.



As you can see in the above picture I have two Weedle here. From this menu you can see a normal Weedle with a CP 201, and the other Weedle just below it has a "Blue Shadow" and it has a CP 198.
So based on this picture, what we can see is that the CP 201 is clearly a larger number than the CP 198. So obviously the higher number is better, right?



Alright, so here are the two Weedles side by side. The same still sits true with who has the superior CP number, but take a look at the "Line of Potential"! The 198, although a much smaller number than the 201, has the potential to evolve into a significantly more powerful Kakuna and Beedrill! As we have seen with other pokemon in the past, the line of potential seems to provide and determine the type of boost a pokemon will achieve upon evolution as well as it seems to deeply affect the overall final CP number a pokemon will have by the time it has been maxed out on it's stat points; this is obviously further affected in small increments by power ups while spending Stardust.
This is proving that the "Blue Shadow is somehow affecting how a pokemon will grow overall, but I also have looked at a few other pokemon of the same species with similar CP's while one has a blue shadow and the other does not, and yet the blue shadowed pokemon shows little to no difference from the pokemon without the shadow. This is making me believe that the Blue Shadow's alteration in power for a pokemon differs from species to species. For example:


Here I'm working with two Hypnos. As you can see, Peon is a CP 1167 with no Blue Shadow and Stimpy is also a CP 1167 with a Blue Shadow. This first fascinating observation to notice is, I have all my pokemon lined up based on CP organization Greatest to Smallest number. Notice how although Peon and Stimpy are both the same CP number the organizer lists Stimpy with the Blue Shadow as being more powerful on the organizer list. So the Shadow is in fact influencing the power level reading from the organizer based on some kind of statistic that can not really be tracked by the stats provided at face value.
Here's where we start getting confusing:


So what happened? Where's the change, the boost in power? Honestly, I'm not sure, but I hypothesize what we are seeing here is the "Line of Potential" and the "Blue Shadow" must be affecting some unknown factor and/or statistic that we are not allowed to have gauged by a number based on the available information for players currently. It also is somehow completely unique across differing species of pokemon, some can be observed based on how obvious the boost seems and some incredibly minuscule and hardly observable.

If you haven't read my research on the "Line of Potential", I have posted it below in spoiler tags along with a link to the thread where I first really talked about it. I'm still trying to learn more about it and trying to research how the potential lines affect pokemon of the same species with differing CP numbers. As I find out more I will continue to update this thread.


I hope you guys are interested in my Pokemon GO research, and please spread my information to as many players as possible! I want to shake off as much mystery from this amazingly fun and interesting game as I can in order to make it as user friendly as possible for as many people as I possibly can!

Feel free to leave comments and ask me questions or possibly suggest me something interesting that you think I should research! :D

So I feel kind of stupid.

I decided to search around on google a little better than I did before. I read in multiple different websites that the only thing that the Blue Shadow indicates is how recently you caught it... So I went on to GO, put my listing as most recent, and sure enough all of the blue shadowed pokemon went to the top. :/

So, I looked around a bit harder and found this you tube video which pretty much makes my entire thread look like a humongous waste of time. Sorry my thread is off to such a poor start. Hope this video helps some people out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z_dPbWgyMQ

Mister Coffee said:

So I feel kind of stupid.

I decided to search around on google a little better than I did before. I read in multiple different websites that the only thing that the Blue Shadow indicates is how recently you caught it... So I went on to GO, put my listing as most recent, and sure enough all of the blue shadowed pokemon went to the top. :/

So, I looked around a bit harder and found this you tube video which pretty much makes my entire thread look like a humongous waste of time. Sorry my thread is off to such a poor start. Hope this video helps some people out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z_dPbWgyMQ

Click to expand...

I was thinking that whilst reading your first post so I feel bad for you spending so much time on this but it was an interesting read nonetheless and I enjoy your research methods haha. Unfortunate that this one wasn't a huge success but I'm sure next time will be better - what'll your next topic be, any ideas? :o I do really love the concept of your research journal and definitely don't give up, you'll find out some really cool stuff for us soon!

I'm interested in what happens to a Pokémon's moves as it evolves and if there's a set correlation between the base form's moves and the evolved form's moves? This'd be useful to know so that you can know whether the evolution candy would be a waste to spend on them or not. Have you ever looked into this?

So I came on to another experiment that I want to play around with that although I feel will be confirmed with little to no effort, I want to sort of test how much it can be controlled by the players as well as I'm hoping that it will be a makeshift solution to the issue that rural players are having with not being able to find pokemon, until it can be further worked on by Niantic.

Spawning Pokemon in the middle of Nowhere

So obviously one of the hugest complaints lately is how pokemon do not spawn in rural areas outside of towns and cities and how this is negatively affecting people who live incredibly far away from areas of frequent cellular activity.
In case any of you do not know, Pokemon spawn based on the amount of people within a single area that are using their phones to actively connect to their network, this does not mean that the people nearby must be playing Pokemon GO as you are to spawn pokemon, it just means that the people in your area need to be actively using their phone service whether they are web surfing, texting, or making phone calls. The larger the population of people concentrated within a single area that are using their phones the increase of likelihood that pokemon will show up. This is also why Lure Modules are so genius, besides attracting pokemon to spawn within the area, the lure modules attract more players which attract more active phone users which greatly increases the lure's spawn rate.

My extremely obvious experiment is going to be, in order to compensate for the lack of active users within a rural area, I'm going to go to a couple of "Pokemon Black Holes" within my area and I'm planning to gather a decent sized group of people with multiple experiments varying in the number of people within my group that are playing Pokemon GO. I want to try starting with a group of 3 Pokemon GO players, 30 minutes of no incense, then 30 minutes of everyone using incense. Then I will move up to 5 players repeating the same method and then a third test using 10 players repeating the same method.

I'm hoping that this test will prove that rural spawn rates can be tweaked by the player's actions so long as the player can travel with a decent sized group. I think this will encourage players to better organize groups within their low populated areas specifically for making their lackluster GO experience into a more pokemon filled one.

I might need a few days before I can truly put my experiment to the test, but as soon as I get some testing done, I will post my results here.

Squirrel said:

I was thinking that whilst reading your first post so I feel bad for you spending so much time on this but it was an interesting read nonetheless and I enjoy your research methods haha. Unfortunate that this one wasn't a huge success but I'm sure next time will be better - what'll your next topic be, any ideas? :o I do really love the concept of your research journal and definitely don't give up, you'll find out some really cool stuff for us soon!

I'm interested in what happens to a Pokémon's moves as it evolves and if there's a set correlation between the base form's moves and the evolved form's moves? This'd be useful to know so that you can know whether the evolution candy would be a waste to spend on them or not. Have you ever looked into this?

Click to expand...

I wanted to let you know, that actually does fascinate me, especially when it come to playing around with Eevee evolutions, I will put it on my list of things to observe. Also thanks for being interested in my journal despite its rough start. :)

Mister Coffee said:

So I came on to another experiment that I want to play around with that although I feel will be confirmed with little to no effort, I want to sort of test how much it can be controlled by the players as well as I'm hoping that it will be a makeshift solution to the issue that rural players are having with not being able to find pokemon, until it can be further worked on by Niantic.

Spawning Pokemon in the middle of Nowhere

So obviously one of the hugest complaints lately is how pokemon do not spawn in rural areas outside of towns and cities and how this is negatively affecting people who live incredibly far away from areas of frequent cellular activity.
In case any of you do not know, Pokemon spawn based on the amount of people within a single area that are using their phones to actively connect to their network, this does not mean that the people nearby must be playing Pokemon GO as you are to spawn pokemon, it just means that the people in your area need to be actively using their phone service whether they are web surfing, texting, or making phone calls. The larger the population of people concentrated within a single area that are using their phones the increase of likelihood that pokemon will show up. This is also why Lure Modules are so genius, besides attracting pokemon to spawn within the area, the lure modules attract more players which attract more active phone users which greatly increases the lure's spawn rate.

My extremely obvious experiment is going to be, in order to compensate for the lack of active users within a rural area, I'm going to go to a couple of "Pokemon Black Holes" within my area and I'm planning to gather a decent sized group of people with multiple experiments varying in the number of people within my group that are playing Pokemon GO. I want to try starting with a group of 3 Pokemon GO players, 30 minutes of no incense, then 30 minutes of everyone using incense. Then I will move up to 5 players repeating the same method and then a third test using 10 players repeating the same method.

I'm hoping that this test will prove that rural spawn rates can be tweaked by the player's actions so long as the player can travel with a decent sized group. I think this will encourage players to better organize groups within their low populated areas specifically for making their lackluster GO experience into a more pokemon filled one.

I might need a few days before I can truly put my experiment to the test, but as soon as I get some testing done, I will post my results here.

Click to expand...

Very curious to see the results of this experiment - it could potentially be a very useful tactic for people like me who live in a rural area to finally catch up to all those city folk with their fancy 2000 CP teams haha. Keep us updated!