Johnson's first piece of advice: Buy a comfortable pair of walking shoes. He walked around 8 miles a day, every day, after work in search of distant Pokémon. And he says the game is better at recognizing a jogging pace than a slow walk.
If you're trying to hatch eggs, walking should be done in a straight line. As Johnson explains, the game measures distance by periodically checking in on your distance and calculating the straight-line distance between where you were versus where you are.
So if you just walk in little circles, the game won't accurately measure how far you've gone, and you'll have wasted your time and energy. "I learned that the hard way," Johnson says.
If you're trying to level up quickly, you want to focus on relatively common Pokémon like Pidgey and Weedle, Johnson says, because they only require 12 or 25 candy to evolve — versus the 50 or more candy it takes for rarer, more powerful beasts.
If you're going to spend real money on Pokémon Go, he says that egg incubators are the best bang for your buck, working out to about 33 cents per egg hatched.
But above all else, Johnson says, the key is to work with other people. "There aren't many social features built in, but its a very social game. If you don't know where to find a specific pokemon, ask your fellow trainers! They're usually happy to help out."
For instance, Johnson says he spent days being totally unable to find Dratini, a rare dragon-type Pokémon. But a random fellow player he talked to on the street told him of a secret Dratini nest in Jersey City, and within a day he had enough to evolve it into Dragonite.
(He says that Dratini nest is in Jersey City near the Newport PATH train stop, right off the pier, if that helps any locals.)
Johnson also used the "PokemonGoNYC" communities on Facebook and Reddit to swap tips and leads with other players.
Johnson was also a regular at Central Park's Grand Army Plaza, the same Pokémon Go hotspot that attracts hundreds of players — including Justin Bieber himself. Some of those players (not Justin Bieber) stay well into the night, watching for Pokemon.
Johnson says that "at least at Grand Army Plaza," he's noticed that rare Pokémon tend to appear every thirty minutes on both the hour and the half hour. So his strategy was, be there right as the hour changed...
...then jog to Central Park's other areas with clustered-up Pokéstops, like the flagship Apple Store on 5th Avenue or the pond to check them for new Pokémon appearances...
...then jog back to Grand Army Plaza before the next half-hour shift.
(He likes Battery Park for catching Pokémon, too.)
Johnson says it also helps if you have a second phone you can borrow while you play. After his girlfriend would get tired of all that Pokémon adventuring and go to bed, he says he'd use her phone as a "radar" to make sure that he didn't miss any Pokémon appearances while he was in a gym battle, or vice versa.
Finally, here's an advanced tip for the super-dedicated, so bear with us. Before they made Pokémon Go, developer Niantic was responsible for a very similar map-based game called "Ingress." A lot of "Ingress" data moved over to Pokémon Go.
See those white dots on the "Ingress" screen here? In that game, they're called exotic matter, or XM. Areas with high concentrations of XM clouds in Ingress correspond very tightly...
...with the areas in Pokémon Go where rare Pokémon appear. So if you're having trouble finding a rare Pokémon, and you're really dedicated, you can switch over to "Ingress," find a concentration of XM, and then switch back to Pokémon Go to make it appear.
I found more than a few rare ones by spotting them on radar, then ignoring the radar and using the 'Ingress' in-game map to navigate to those hotspots," Johnson says. "May not work 100% but definitely helped me.
