Hiding Spawn Information: Why It Hurts More Than It Helps, and How to Potentially Fix It

Introduction

Hiding spawn information is, in my opinion, ultimately harmful to the game and its player base.
That said, I want to be fair and acknowledge the arguments that could be seen in favor of this change and explain why I think they don't hold up.

The Upsides — With a Grain of Salt

Hiding information about spawns has three upsides that in my opinion come with a grain of salt.

1. Community Interaction

Without readily available information, players are pushed to interact with each other — asking around, trading knowledge, being active in Discord.

That's a genuine plus for community health.

But it assumes everyone wants that.

This is an MMO, sure, but like every MMO, part of its population is made up of players who prefer to play solo, at their own pace, without depending on other people to progress.

Forcing interaction as a side effect of information scarcity isn't the same as fostering organic community engagement — it's closer to a toll gate.

2. The Joy of Discovery

Discovery has a real psychological reward — that moment of finding something yourself is genuinely satisfying.

The problem is that hiding information doesn't let players opt into that experience — it forces it on everyone, regardless of whether they want it or not.

A player who'd rather look something up and get on with their session no longer has that choice.

Discovery stops being a bonus for those who enjoy it and becomes a mandatory task for everyone else.

3. Making Content More Attractive for a Longer Period of Time

Hidden information stretches out how long content stays relevant. If everything about a spawn — location, timing, repel requirements — is known on day one, players burn through it in an afternoon and move on.

Scarcity of information keeps people engaged with the same content for weeks instead of hours, which is valuable for a game that needs sustained playtime to stay alive.

But this benefit is easy to mistake for something it isn't.

Stretching engagement by withholding information isn't the same as making content actually last longer — it's making the same content take longer to consume by adding friction, not depth.

The "longevity" here is measured in "hours wasted searching", and not "hours spent enjoying".

And it can just as easily backfire: a player who hits an opaque wall with no clear path forward doesn't necessarily stay engaged longer — they might just get frustrated and leave.

Retention through obscurity is a gamble, not a guarantee, and it reads more like a "metric driven" incentive (keep playtime/player numbers up) than a "player experience driven" one.

Major Downsides

There are actually many more downsides to this as you might think at first.

1. Respecting Players' Time

An MMO inherently demands time investment — that's expected and completely fine.

But there's a difference between content that takes time and artificial friction that wastes time.

A game that respects its players supports their time commitment instead of manufacturing extra roadblocks that add nothing to actual gameplay depth.

2. Efficiency and Player Choice

Not every player is optimizing for the same thing, and that's fine — but for players like me who do want to play efficiently, this system actively works against that.

I have a list of other games competing for my time, and getting stalled by a mechanic whose sole purpose is to artificially create discovery and interaction — rather than offering meaningful gameplay — isn't a good trade-off.

Efficiency-minded and exploration-minded players used to be able to coexist, each choosing their own approach.

Now one playstyle is forced onto everyone.

3. Guilds Gatekeeping Information

It's well known that guilds already gatekeep advantageous information.

General spawns are still broadly shared, but repel-spawn locations in reworked areas aren't public anywhere — they're either unknown to most of the player base or deliberately withheld by guilds to keep their advantage.

In other words: hiding information doesn't eliminate the advantage information provides — it just shifts who holds that advantage.

Solo players and small groups lose access, while large and active guilds with more players to brute-force discovery simply absorb the cost and keep the payoff for themselves.

4. Fragmented, Inconsistent Knowledge

When information isn't public, what circulates informally is often incomplete, outdated, or just wrong. There isn't a single point of truth anymore.

New or casual players end up relying on guesswork, secondhand claims, or bad advice, while the "real" answers stay locked elsewhere.

That's a worse experience than either full transparency or well-designed in-game discovery mechanics — it's the disadvantages of secrecy without the benefits of genuine exploration.

5. Enabling Misinformation and Scams

A lack of public, verifiable spawn data doesn't just create gaps — it creates opportunities to fill those gaps with fake information.

Without an official source players can check claims against, there's nothing stopping a seller from misrepresenting a spawn's actual rarity or exclusivity to inflate its trade value.

An uncommon spawn gets passed off as rare — and the buyer has no way to verify any of it, because the real data simply isn't public anywhere.

This isn't a hypothetical edge case. It's a predictable outcome of the current system — one only possible because there's no accessible, official source of truth to check against.

6. Hiding Rarity Itself Serves No Clear Purpose

Unlike spawn locations or repel conditions, a Pokémon's rarity isn't something players are meant to "discover" — it should be baseline information, not a puzzle.

Nearly every game with a rarity system displays it directly, because knowing what you're looking at is basic UX, not a spoiler.

Hiding it doesn't create discovery or interaction — it just makes trading and evaluation harder for no clear gain, and it's what makes scams and spreading misinformation like Point 5 possible in the first place.

How To Potentially Fix It

There are surely a few ways to solve this without keeping the current downsides, ranging from a quick patch to an actual structural fix.

A Proper Fix: Bring the Information In-Game

The core problem isn't that information exists — it's that it's unofficial, incomplete, and unevenly distributed.

Solving that means making it official, complete, and evenly distributed:

1. Improving the existing Map Spawn UI by displaying time-of-day and level ranges for each spawn directly in-game.

2. Highlighting repel spawns directly on a Pokémon's page.

3. Displaying rarity directly on a Pokémon's page.

A Temporary Fix: Delay the Public Spawn Dump

A simple fix is delaying the public spawn dump by roughly two weeks after each content update.

This doesn't eliminate the effort of finding repel spawns during that window — but two weeks of temporary scarcity is a fundamentally different problem than permanent gatekeeping, since it resolves on a fixed timeline instead of indefinitely.

Players who want to discover things early can still do so organically or by interacting with the community during that window.
After two weeks, the data becomes public and everyone converges on one accurate source of truth.

Conclusion

Hiding spawn information doesn't actually create the discovery or engagement it's meant to — it just relocates who has the advantage, shifting it from every player equally toward whichever guilds have the playerpower to brute-force it.

Genuine discovery and community interaction only mean something if they're chosen, and not forced. Information scarcity doesn't create either, it just makes both mandatory.

Making repel and spawn data official and accessible in-game doesn't remove discovery or interaction as options — it just stops forcing them on players who'd rather not engage with either, all while leaving them fully available to anyone who still wants that experience.

~Caenneth