You’d better watch out, Pokémon GO fans from Long Island. The Big Apple area is currently playing host to a big swarm of one particular (hugely-irritating) Pokémon.
Now, there are many players that have precious little luck with Pokémon GO. That’s just how super-low spawn rates work. One player will nab a Dragonite right there in their front yard, and another won’t see as much as a darn Dratini after two years of play. One will find several shinies, another won’t see hide nor hair of a single one.
For all its shortcomings, Pokémon Go remains incredibly popular. It’s certainly a tough game to love, though (last month we saw a glitch that erased multiple high-level accounts from existence). Just like Pokémon proper, all the luck involved with catching good, meta-relevant Pokémon makes it a major slog.
With no EV training, breeding or any of those mechanics, getting great GO Pokémon for PvP and raids is very difficult. Especially when you’re only encountering valuable creatures once in a blue moon in the first place. Candies for key species can be very difficult to come by.
This is where nests can be (can be) a huge help. As Lifewire explains, these are specific areas that spawn particular species. They’re separate from Pokémon that may simply be common in that particular biome, and can grant you an excellent candy haul. Or, in the case of unfortunate ‘meganests,’ they can leave the whole of Long Island (and parts of Brooklyn and Queens) drowning in Wobbuffets.
A meganest, as explained by HAWAII on Reddit, is:
“[a] nest spanning a large area. They are created due to, in most cases, unintentional OSM markings/designations/features that bind a large area together. Berlin was/is home to one, I believe the theory is because a large chunk of the city is on some Urstromtäler (a type of broad glacial valley), that designation on OSM binds the ‘biome’ together.”
Needless to say, they aren’t a natural phenomenon, and because they can ‘cancel out’ other potential nests, they don’t tend to be a welcome one either. Which brings us to Long Island (and the surrounding area) and its current proliferation of Wobbuffet.
Now, if you’re a competitive Pokémon player, you’ve probably fallen foul of this thing’s trapping/Counter-ing/Mirror Coating shenanigans before. You probably want no part in a Wobbuffet catchathon. If you’re playing in the affected area, all you can really do is wait it out. In the meantime, over on Twitter, GO Global Community Manager Liz George has stated that players filling out bug reports helps the team resolve these issues.
