From what I remember, most of them were not. At least in the early days, Pokéstops used the same locations as the portals in Niantic‘s earlier game Ingress. Those in turn could be requested by high level players and approved by the devs. If someone was playing Ingress on the island or if someone requested it as a joke, we might never know.
Shit, didn’t even have to be high level. As long as you could give a decent justification for the location, usually some sort of historical, or other type, of context making the location a general place of interest, they would almost always allow it. At least early on, I stopped playing that a little more than a year after it came out. We used to select places in the city that had historical importance, but in the modern day were hotspots for prostitution, drug sales, and other crime. Like the one Art Deco theater that was historically important to hollywood, and politics, a long time ago, but, at the time, was a porn theater that always had a crowd of prostitutes that would follow you down the street pressing you to pay for services, if you walked past.
The obvious explanation is that the stops were created by an algorithm.
Edit: Yikes, I guess I’m wrong.
Which means there were enough players around to trigger the creation.
Oh that’s bad, I was meaning an algorithm that ran just one time, not necessarily one that runs on the fly.
From what I remember, most of them were not. At least in the early days, Pokéstops used the same locations as the portals in Niantic‘s earlier game Ingress. Those in turn could be requested by high level players and approved by the devs. If someone was playing Ingress on the island or if someone requested it as a joke, we might never know.
Shit, didn’t even have to be high level. As long as you could give a decent justification for the location, usually some sort of historical, or other type, of context making the location a general place of interest, they would almost always allow it. At least early on, I stopped playing that a little more than a year after it came out. We used to select places in the city that had historical importance, but in the modern day were hotspots for prostitution, drug sales, and other crime. Like the one Art Deco theater that was historically important to hollywood, and politics, a long time ago, but, at the time, was a porn theater that always had a crowd of prostitutes that would follow you down the street pressing you to pay for services, if you walked past.
Correct, they used openstreetmaps points of interest