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I average two balls per catch now, roughly (level 6). I take my time and aim and it works pretty well. I find if you watch the pokemon for a minute, you can see what it does, like whether it dodges or swings.

The ball goes in something of an arc, too. I've hit a few pokemon off screen, if they appeared to be further away.

Huh, the circle being smaller thing doesn't work for em or my friends, it seems to work better when its larger for us. o.O And you were lucky to even get your pokemon onto a gym, I tried to grab a gym that was for my team (Valor) but by the time I got to it it had been grabbed by another team. ^^; I've had no luck with getting a single gym, all the pokestops in my town are in a bad area (my friend didn't even want to get out of the car the one time we went there, he doesn't like going there during the day, let alone at night). And I'm out of balls because I forgot to grab them at the one spot this morning and then a truck was parked where I pull over to get it on the way home. =(

Yeah, I was lucky, the gym had just changed over to my team, and I was able to get my guy into an open spot as there were only two other trainers there. That's probably what helped. Not a lot of trainers there but the ones who were there had tough Pokemon. I wouldn't have been able to get in by actually beating anyone.

Got another bulbasaur! EEEEE! Evil thing escaped about 5 times. Took about 7-8 tries since I missed a couple times (got to level 7 while I was out). If dark orange isn't a thing (it wasn't yellow) than it was a red circle. I found it harder to judge if it escaped any faster if the circle was smaller when I hit it.

My 5km egg hatched into a Staryu while I was picking up dinner for later at a sushi restaurant.

Question: does anyone know if the eggs are determined when they are gained or when they are hatched as far as pokemon inside? I'm wondering if I should hang onto my 10km egg until I'm higher level, or if it won't make any significant difference.

It's easier to hit the inner circle when it's bigger, which makes it easier to get a Nice! throw, and Nice! throws do give you a bonus to your catch rate, but you don't HAVE to hit the inner circle -- the catch attempt will fire as long as you hit the outer circle, and the smaller the inner circle is when you hit it the higher your catch rates are. The BEST result is to hit the inner circle with the ball while it's small, getting both Nice!/Great!/Excellent! bonus and the higher base catch rate for the smaller circle.

Gyms have major balance problems, unfortunately. If you didn't get into the game pretty much immediately at launch, you can forget having a meaningful gym experience until you're level 15+.

Yeah, saw that one becoming an issue rather fast. Looks like one of those things where, for later players to have a shot, earlier players need to make some space. I suppose the single pokemon per gym thing is supposed to help, but with the sheer number of playing, not really.

I'm rank 16 and still having issues. T-T Some people already have 2k CP pokemon on their teams because there's a park I don't know how to get to that have like 20 pokestops in it and everyone goes there to get rank 20+ in like one day. T-T

Yick. The pokemon at the gyms here are fielding 1000+ CP Pokemon. My niece has been playing longer than me and her top Pokemon is 300+, and mine is just over 200+, though that might shift once I evolve some guys.

Does anyone here have a metapod or kakuna that they can tell me how many candies they need to evolve? I want to evo my caterpie and weedle but I feel like doing it in one go, give me time to get the highest little dude I can find while earning candy.

I think it's 50 for Metapod->Butterfree and Kakuna->Beedrill. Not sure off the top of my head.

I live in Los Angeles, so I've seen 2900+ Dragonites holding down gyms. ._.

I hope this hype dies down soon so that I can grab some gyms. >>; I'm not going to stop until I can catch all of the pokemon except legendaries (Mew, Mewtwo, Moltrese, Zapados and Articono) because those ones might be special ones I might not be able to grab anyways. >>;

The other one you can't get yet at all is Ditto, and there are a few (Kangaskhan for example) you'd have to travel internationally to get.

Travel or Hatch

You can hatch any of the regionally locked pokemon out of eggs.

Ah, that's true, you could get lucky and hatch one. Would be stupid hard to train, but you could at least complete your Pokedex that way.

Which is why I'm hoping they implement trading soon and that you just need to know the person's account name. >>; I don't like giving out my number.

@coda I get it to the smallest circle possible. They break out every time.

They won't ever use phone numbers for that -- that would be incredibly risky from a legal perspective due to COPPA and the fact that the game targets children. Not to mention that not every device that can play Pokemon Go is an active cell phone -- my son plays on a phone without a SIM card using wifi tethering to my own phone, and I've got a tablet that I COULD (if I wanted to) activate a data plan for and install Pokemon Go on and it wouldn't be able to make phone calls.

It's almost certainly going to use your display name, because that's separate from your login credentials.

Confirmation bias. They don't break EVERY time, but you get more upset when they do. It's easy to fall prey to superstition -- "oh, I caught something, so the last time I must have done something right!" but then when those things you think are supposed to work don't result in a caught Pokemon the same mental bias goes "I didn't catch it, so it must not work!"

Catching Pokemon is, at its core, random. Things you do only influence the randomness. It's been verified by decompiling the code and by statements from Niantic that Nice/Great/Excellent throws increase catch rate, that curveballs increase catch rate, that smaller inner circles increase catch rate, that better balls increase catch rate, that higher Pokemon levels decrease catch rate, and that rarer Pokemon and evolved Pokemon have fundamentally lower catch rates. But even a 10CP Pidgey with a perfect throw doesn't have a 100% catch rate, so sometimes it's just not going to work.