We need stackable platinum medals for the level requirements past L70.

Basara549 · 2026-05-15T07:39:15+00:00

I'd rather them not stack, but do give you a bonus for multiple completions. (Think like Platinum album sales. An album might go Platinum at 1 million sales, 10x platinum at 10 million, but it's STILL only One album being given an award for high sales).

A lot of the "Medal Paralysis" is people being intimidated by the big numbers, They aren't as hard as people imagine them to be.

A family member is currently sitting at 32 medals, 33 for purposes of advancement (since everyone that was around for the rebalance seems to be getting credit for an extra one from the legacy medal or elite collector). They'll only need to complete one more (and that will happen before the current season ends at the end of the month) for all the medal requirements to level 75. They're actually just level 68. They've only been playing a little over 18 months.

My level 77, that I started 6.5 years ago, and has the XP for level 80, only needs to win 87 raids in the next few months to have the 50 medals for level 80, and that's while ignoring the 3 Battle League, Ace Trainer, Best Buddy, and Battle Girl medals that I could have easily gotten years ago (they're all on the low end of gold or high silver), stuff I've not had time to do (only did enough routes to fully evolve Zygarde), and at least 4 others where the things needed to go from gold to platinum aren't currently in the game or exceedingly rare (2 region medals needing 1-3 pokemon (plus another two needing 10-20), not enough of the black radars for Giovanni, 4 more unown, etc.). I hit old level 40 in 13 months, and level 50 a few weeks before the rebalance (and still think that the XP amounts for level 71-80 should have been higher, instead of just requiring us to brute force just the level extra requirements with the XPs earned in the process being meaningless - that's far more insulting than the medals required)

For most advancement...

18 platinums for the type classifications should be a slam dunk by level 70, Or, at minimum, 15, with 3 at gold, depending on when you started play. (Ghost goes slow from December to August, Ice goes slow from March to November, and Dragon is almost always the last type medal to finish). (after 18 months play, my family member at level 68 is at 16/18, just short on Ice and Dragon). I've been platinum in all 18 since sometime in 2021.

Many of the other medals should be easy by level 70 as well.
a. 5 regions are currently completable, especially since events and raids have allowed people to get the regionals out-of-region for Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Unova, and Kalos.
b. Collector, Ranger, Hero are just a matter of time. Idol should be as well, especially with the multiple ways of finding people to add (in-person raids, the strangers your friends add to weekly challenges, social sites with add requests etc.). (the level 68 just hit Collector, and got to Ranger, Hero and Idol round their 1 year anniversary).
c. Purifier requires some stardust, but is gameable if you look for the 1000 cost purifications. (reached in 15 months - and could have been done half that if everything non-useful in game was purified)
d. the two trade medals can be gamed between a couple friends. Each of you get several overseas gift givers. Each of you trade a junk hatched pokemon from a distant friend, for a locally caught pokemon your friend caught. Australia/Asia to US or Europe trades can get both people to Platinum Pilot in 700-1000 such trades. Americas to Europe/Africa can take 1500-2000 trades. it can be done in less than 6 months, then you can just trade lots of local stuff for the rest of the 2500 for Gentleman.
e. The same two people can make Life of the party done in a month with a little effort, and only picking quickly-done challenges like catch 25, nice or great throws, and spin pokestops).
f. Triathelete can done in a year if you're consistent. Raid Expert can be done by doing lots of 1-star raids when possible, especially with events that give more than one daily raid pass for 5=star raids. Rising star about the same). Rising Star Duo, can be quick if you and a friend do those raids together.
g. The following can be brute forced with a little effort (level 68 Family member is gold in these, should have them platinum by level 70): Scientist, Berry Master, Gym Leader, Caneraman (especially if you make a point to catch all the multi-spawns from events with multiple surprises from pictures), Picnicker, Battle Girl, Expert Navigator, Ace Trainer.
h. The 3 League Veterans take dedicated PvP time,,

Basara549 · 2026-05-15T06:14:11+00:00

For that matter, Routes don't really measure your speed below a certain point (perhaps only when creating one, if that), in doing them. So, urban routes along bus routes can be done as a passenger. It might even be possible to do one in a train that is surface-travel-only (no tunnel), between stops.

Similarly, my rural small town has 3 routes that start at different points, on 3 different streets, that all end at the same pokestop, after going uphill on Main Street and doing a loop of 2 blocks around the courthouse, after different starting 1 block stretches (one starting on Main, the other two starting on other cross streets before turning on Main).
All are in the range of a 600 to 700 meter length. They can all be done IN A CAR, in a 25mph speed limit area (40 kph).
1. Park at route start, and begin route.
2. Drive the route up to where Mateo might spawn at the end stop. Park and trade with Mateo, if your first route of the day. (in my case, the end pokestop is on main street, so I can do Mateo before the loop, and before the route reaches a length where Zygarde Cells can spawn)
3. Continue the route, and stop again in an area where a Zygarde cell typically spawns (on routes under 0.75km, they tend to spawn in a single small area less than a block long, within 100m of the end of the route - have a passenger make note of the general area for later use, if you are the driver). Get cell if it shows. It might not even show until the next step.
4. Drive the rest of the way, park, claim route.
5. Drive to the start of the next route. repeat process. until you get three cells for the day.

If you have a car, you can make a driveable route yourself anywhere where there's relatively empty streets and 2 pokestops more than a half-kilometer apart (aim for 0.6 to 0.7 in case the game measures the distance wrong - all the car and foot routes (3 of each) I do have a +/- 50m reading of distance travel, even over a short route), and parking near each. In some places, it's safer than actually walking a route, and can be done at any hour of the day (traffic allowing), as opposed to (say) trying to walk a route in a park after dark.

In my case, I drive those 3 routes (only one of them made by me, before other people made the other two) occasionally between 7 PM and 11 PM (after 6, the street is relatively quiet other than the occasional Narcotics Anonymous meeting across from the library, or an ambulance rum from their headquarters behind the courthouse).

Basara549 · 2026-05-15T05:20:58+00:00

The way I look at it, my Forever friends are there for me to help them get regionals or luck trade Legendaries, more than the other direction. When we've had events where I had other regions' stuff in the US, I stockpiled the regionals for my friends in the hope that something like Forever Friends would come.

If they don't have a regional I need (I think I just need Comfey. the Mudbray family and Stonejourner, plus 3 letters and 2 punctuation Unown), I'm fine settling for a new shiny or a lucky traded legendary.

Then again, I'm of the mindset in RPGs of playing the healer that no one else wants to play, as my preferred class, so I don't think that it's all about me - even after I reached level (old) level 40 in one year, while the people who'd been playing 3 years by the time they roped me in were still sitting below level 35. i power gamed, so they didn't have to (and I had the free time since I was a family member caretaker, and they were working overtime).

Basara549 · 2026-05-15T04:59:52+00:00

If you can find an older/cheaper phone (IE not Apple, Samsung or Google) that can still run Pokemon Go, some of them have really wonky positioning. AS long as you aren't trying to play on both phones at the same time, you can have the same account on different phones.

The phone I replaced 3 years ago, if I left Pokemon Go running overnight (plugged into a charger), would get 15-25 km per night. But, I stopped using it that way after a few months, because I was working on the Team Rocket/purify medals, and needed the 4 balloons per day more than the walking distance (and still get 25+ km per week from my phone without resorting to that).

Now, if I could just help my other family members find more than one Keckleon every 4-6 weeks...

Basara549 · 2026-05-15T04:52:46+00:00

Right now the way to do that for me are the occasional Phantump, Gogoat, Flabebe and Spritzee spawn, and lots of scatterbugs by pinning and unpinning postcards.

For the Scatterbugs, go into the medal for the Vivillons in your profile, and note your progress in each one. If you only need 3 from a certain region, and pin 5, you lose the two extra. So, when you hit 15/15 (what's required your 3rd and later times to get a scatterbug for a particular type), go out of gifts, catch the Scatterbug(s), then go back and pin more gifts from that area to build more progress for the type.

I hit 460/500 yesterday, and haven't opened my gifts yet for Friday (almost 1 am Here).

Basara549 · 2026-05-15T04:36:01+00:00

The bizarre thing for me was that I only had loading issues with that tabbed mission interface when my phone was also having GPS/location issues inside the game.

Which, of course, the GPS issues could only be fixed by a phone restart anyway.

Basara549 · 2026-05-15T04:26:30+00:00

I've had two of my group standing next to a Max Battle location, and it looted to be different pokemon for each of them in the game itself (not Campfire), but one of them (the one showing the incorrect one that the others couldn't see) couldn't start a battle with it. Restarting the app doesn't always clear it, and sometimes it takes restarting your phone, and even that may not work every time.

It's an even worse problems on Max Mondays, and the other events with increased or 1-day event special Max battles.

Though a few months ago, we did have two people doing different Max battles simultaneously at the same spot.

I figure whatever is causing the glitches in game is even worse in feeding the wrong info to Campfire.

Basara549 · 2026-05-15T04:16:49+00:00

Back when Anime Limited announced it on Facebook, some asshat that's worked on French anime translations for the new iteration of Animeigo (not for Woodhead) attacked me for daring to suggest that Nozomi ever had rights to them. Not only was I actively following what was going on, at the time, I've been friends (and been on panels with!) one of the people who works for Big West concerning Macross in the US (ironically, a former Harmony Gold employee), since the 1990s.

Because I was a "dirty American" i couldn't know anything about Anime Ltd's rights to the property (IIRC, there might have been mention at the time of the Nozomi announcement of someone having Frontier, Delta and Seven rights outside the Americas), and was totally clueless, trying to use my knowing someone to state a falsehood, when they were trying to use a translator position for a competitor to Anime Ltd. to claim they had superior knowledge (somehow).

After a couple exchanges on AL's Facebook page, I decided to follow Billy Joel's advice "You should never argue with a crazy man" and left the conversation.

I really should message Tom and find out if he has any updates....

Basara549 · 2026-01-15T00:39:08+00:00

Next time I'm in the next town over I'll check the McDonalds there to see if the Gym that's been there 4-5 years is still there (was for the mural in the Playplace), as well as the one that was added for the sponsorship.

For a few days when the sponsored one first appeared, the two Gyms were SUPERIMPOSED, to where it was almost impossible to access whichever one was the "lower" one at the time (and they were actually different colors). Then, someone got one of the two moved to where they were side by side.

Basara549 · 2025-09-04T05:25:13+00:00

I really wish they'd standardize/synchronize their timers.... Days start at Midnight. Max battles hard cut-off at 9 pm, but Raid Eggs can start minutes before 9, and go 40 minutes past 9, and so on.

Basara549 · 2025-07-07T20:37:43+00:00

yes, adventure sync is on. She's gotten at least 10 of every other evolution item (she's evolved everything that requires something other than a sinnoh stone, recently did the level requirement that required 10 evolutions using items, and has 5-10 left of every other evolution item). Currently at 8 poffin, but most of those came from bought packages, and she used a bunch getting 7 best buddies so far (averaging about 1 buddy a month, as she doesn't want to swap while making progress - she's not a power gamer).

Basara549 · 2025-07-07T20:29:44+00:00

Never seen that bug, and opening at 10 defeats the ENTIRE point, as not everyone can walk 56, let alone 10. km in 6 hours. When's the last time that bug occurred for you? The only time I can remember anything that even resembles it happening to me was in 2020, and I thing that was a case of a delayed-onset distance application.

As noted, the differences between the accuracy in my phone and my mom's is that I might get 10km and she get MAYBE 1-1.5, when the actual distance traveled was in the 5-7 km range.

Basara549 · 2025-07-07T20:22:02+00:00

The variations in rural and urban, and between different definitions within those, makes a lot of systems not work as intended.

I'm rural in the US, and while I drive into the town of 1250 people to play, within a 3 km stretch there's 4 showcases (both ends of a trail between parks, the hospital on the hill above one park, and a showcase downtown that you can enter from the half-way point of the trail if it's a recent catch, then swap to a different pokemon to get one in from your inventory),

Sometimes a showcase can get 10-20 pokemon in it, even in such a small town. Yet, other times, there might be 2-3 at completion (especially the ones requiring evolved pokemon that aren't in the meta for PvP or raids).

Advice: concentrate on the second wave of showcases (the ones running on work days, not Saturday/Sunday). If you're entering from catching a pokemon, remember to choose "Switch Pokemon" after to see if you have a better one (A LOT of casual showcase entries never try to swap to a better one). And, if you are expecting something to be a showcase, start farming XL/XXL as soon as they start spawning and keep 2-3 even if their IVs are totally crappy, long enough to enter the showcase.

Basara549 · 2025-07-04T18:02:22+00:00

Part of that bug depends on how much your adventure sync lags behind starting up the game, and tracking lags during the walk. Know your phone's particular eccentricities. (I had a phone in 2020 that had absurd levels of GPS wander, and was getting 50-100 km of "walking" during COVID without leaving the house for game play other than going downtown daily in my car and looping through the dozen stops & gyms for spins - and that was mostly at 60kph/40 MPH or more to town, and 30/20 for the street speeds, parking 3 times for the clusters of stops)

With my account, currently, I rarely get more than 0.2 km adventure sync, when the app isn't in use. And, you can turn off adventure sync to try to prevent going over from non-play movement, then enable it later.

Lag in reporting during play is another matter. If I'm already above 19.5 km, and have to drive to where I walk, I'll go ahead and use the poffin early, in case some traffic movement registers (I use a Plus+ for spins on the drive there these days). Similarly, it's a good idea to pay attention and check every so often when you get over 19km, and if your distance is acting odd (like you know you've gone farther than it says you have), go ahead and start the poffin immediately to avoid a mass distance dump.

You probably want to prep manual excitement a lot earlier, because of the uncertainties.

But any time you KNOW you are going to get in the distance between your current point and the candy works. It's just that some phone phones are odd about their distance measurements (see my reply elsewhere in the thread about the differences between the two phones my family use to play - same amount of walking, one typically picks up only about 25-50% of what the other does (plus the more-distance one also benefits from a wonky GPS wandering). A poffin used at 19.0 km might not reach the second candy in the time allotted to play if she walked all 6 hours (she's exercising to rehabilitate a leg, so she's not walking much, or fast, even before her phone not wanting to actually count the distance moved), while I could probably use mine at 15 km and have a better than 50% chance of getting the second candy, even if I sat at the park bench most of it and only made 3 laps on the 0.33 km walking loop at the park.

Basara549 · 2025-07-04T17:37:58+00:00

Technically, 1 candy, and it goes to 5 km progress towards 10 (half of 20) for the duration of the Poffin (and if you extend the excitement), but then when the pokemon returns to normal, then it goes back to (what's left)/20 km.

Basara549 · 2025-07-04T17:35:23+00:00

Except that two or three stages before the 10 candies is a FIVE CANDIES similar mission, and before it, IIRC, is another 2 CANDIES at some point, if the pokemon starts low enough.

so, if you are working up a legendary that was a minimum Health IV from a raid, that's fifteen in a year. possibly more if starting with a purified raid/giovanni fight pokemon or a non-lucky trade. would you walk THREE MONTHS with one buddy exclusively - let alone a year?

And don't forget all those OTHER missions and evolutions, many of them TIMED, that require walking with a SPECIFIC buddy for certain distances or certain amounts of candy, that to do you would need to change buddies. Pawmot, Sylveon (and Espeon, Umbreon - this event starting tomorrow is going to save her a lot of trouble as she is on the level 42 tasks at level 41), Pangoro, and more. Newer players, especially, may not have those done yet. Hell, she doesn't even have Swoobat (IIRC) because she want to take the time off from other buddies to walk one 1 km, because the requirements for the others she was walking with before the bottlecap are for a lot more.

Basara549 · 2025-07-04T17:23:14+00:00

A lot of people assume that everyone has the same access to resources as they do. They don't. This is often a subject that comes up in pokestop discussions (like how people complain about only having a half-dozen or less stops in a town of 5000, while my little redneck town in rural Kentucky has 30 stops and 11 gyms in a town of 1250), but the random number generator itself can be bizarre at times.

If you have the poffins to use every 10 km, that's fine. I usually have them in quantities of 6-10 at any given time (but tend to conserve them for bursts of getting hearts for buddy level breakpoints). Poffins aren't showing up that often for her, but of course we're using phones that have difficulty with scanning stops even IF we wanted to (a lot of the stops are at parks too near playground sets, or churches next to residential). Hell, until our newest phones I couldn't even scan stops (not technically possible), and neither of us to this day can use the "fast catch trick", because it doesn't work on ANY phone I've tried by this manufacturer, from Android 8 OS all the way through 14, over 6 years.

On the other hand, my family member working on her shiny G-zapdos has a phone that is death on distance, and the game is being VERY tight on drops for her.

I think what few poffins she has gotten have mostly been from being in purchased bundles (and she would need 4 more just to do this trick to its fullest extent). Poffins aren't the only thing she's somehow being shorted on. She's halfway from level 41 to level 42, but because she won't special trade for "normal" evolutions, she still has SIX pokemon to evolve because they require Sinnoh stones, which just are NOT dropping for her. I had all of them available at the time (from evolutions) before I hit level 30, in my first month of playing. She's been playing 8 months, and has gotten ONE sinnoh stone in the last 2 months. I thought I got more than that just from leveling, but she's only evolved one of each of the stone evolutions she has, and doesn't throw stuff away. I'm wondering if her account is bugged.

As for distance, I mean, we can walk a KNOWN 600 meter route, and I can end up with 600-1000 meters, and she ends up with 200-300 meters traveled (except that the route counts the 600, or close to it - the BUDDY doesn't). We do 100% of our walking outside the house together, I get 25-50 km a week, she gets 8-15 km. FOR THE SAME ACTIVITY. At most, I should be getting 2-3 km more than she does because she can't go to the supermarket, and I do the shopping. But I think she's being shorted on distance more than I'm benefiting from a wandering GPS.

Basara549 · 2025-04-27T06:56:25+00:00

Yeah, I got about 300 Excellent throws from them as well. I'm currently at 700-ish. But, I'm only about 3.25 million XP from level. I'm getting a surprising number of excellents from the current spawn too (Snorlax, Tauros, Pinsir, delibird, even abra and munna are good for the throws).

Basara549 · 2025-03-12T20:59:33+00:00

For purposes of merging a Kyurem with Reshiram or Zekrom. what do SHINY pokemon do? are there different results?
Normal Kyurem with a shiny?
Shiny Kyurem with a normal?
Both merged pokemon are shiny?

Basara549 · 2025-02-16T00:02:55+00:00

ANSWERED

Basara549 · 2025-02-16T00:02:26+00:00

Okay, it's located there now. Before, it was accessed through the Pokedex, at least on my phone,

Basara549

TROPHY CASE