Source
r/pokemongo•
NoseKey

Rant/complaint about in game distance tracker

Complaint

One of the things that bothers me the most and is killing all the fun out of the game is the wildly inaccurate completely messed up tracker in game in which you walk an entire route or path that is well known and measured to be 3 km and in game it says you walked 0.8 km.

Whenever you want to hatch an egg or get a candy for a buddy mon it takes way more effort than it says. It really angers me after walking for 40 min nonstop, seeing the completely inaccurate distance and realizing I'm going to have to walk 3 or 4 times that amount to hatch an egg.

I would use adventure sync as it's way more accurate but then I cant spin stops or catch random mons that pop up. The tracker is one of my biggest annoyances, more than anything else.

Posted Dec 11, 2018, 1:31 PM UTC

08
Unapologetic_CanuckValor Level 40 Eh‽•

Stop walking in circles.

7
A_Level_12_Mage•

It's measured by displacement, so how far away from your last position relative to where you are now when it does it's check. If you walk in a complete circle and it checks your spot when you are back where it was when it last checked you didn't walk at all.

5
chadder_b•

Are you walking in a straight line? Everyone knows since it’s GPS based tracking in game that it’s measured as the crow flies

4
lilfunky1Instinct•

are you walking in circles?

4
NoseKeyOP•

Usually I walk down a path and then walk back along the same path. The paths are always in a straight line.

Maybe since it measures displacement it deletes the distance I just walked?

1
Apt_5•

That is exactly what happens. IIRC the location updates every 4 minutes. So if you run 1km away in a straight line in two minutes, then walk halfway back toward where you started from in another two minutes, you’ve only moved 1/2km from your starting point as far as the game knows.

Similar for walking in a circle. The game tracks the distance you’ve traveled in certain time intervals, and will do a straight line from dot to dot. So the extra distance of an arc gets lost.

1
Ryusei24•

I usually get credited for more distance than I actually cover...also, as others have mentioned, are you walking in a straight line?
I -think- how it works is that it isn't real time and that it updates distances every so often. it then measures your current location from where you were the last time it updated.

2
Extraacct2016•

I’ve gone to not playing while walking and just starting the app when I get to a pokestop (relatively rare where I am). The new AS works much better at tracking distance. Of course since all I can get from 10k is MORE freakin trapinches I just go for buddy candy now.

1