Ever since launch, one of the best parts of Pokémon GO has been the brilliance of its global community, which takes this game's relative opacity and turns it into a strength, a puzzle box for trainers across the world to tease apart and put back together. Most of this is headquartered at the Silph Road, where people both mine the app for data and collate data from a global network to try and figure out just what's going on inside of a game that changes mile by mile and day by day. And Silph Road just figured out something I've been wondering about for a while: the best place in the world to catch the most Pokémon.
Mind you, right now I'm not talking about a single location with a ton of Pokémon spawns: places like Central Park, Santa Monica Pier and other high cell traffic, high Pokéstop density areas still do well on that count. We're looking at the place where you can get the most Pokémon, period. Certain Pokémon are limited to different parts of the world, something that's been true ever since launch but has changed slightly since. Now we've not only got the original continental regionals, but also a few more in addition to Pokémon that only spawn in one of two broad, global divides. Given all of that, there must be a border somewhere, where you can easily hop over and grab the regionals from the other half of the world.
And it looks like the best place to catch Pokémon in the world is in the United Arab Emirates.
The Arabian peninsula has been a crossroads of trade and culture between Europe, Africa and Asia for centuries, and so it's not really a surprise that Pokémon GO's divisions would reflect that. Apparently, there's a town called Al Sila'a that sits over the major east/west border for the game, and so while there aren't a whole lot of Pokéstops there, trainers can go there to collect the Regionals from the other half of the world. In addition to that, the UAE has access to two standard regionals: Tropius, exclusive to Africa and the Middle East, and Corsola, exclusive to certain latitudes the game deems "tropical."
So if you're planning a trip to grab some regional Pokémon, you could do worse than the UAE. Paul Tassi has criticized the regionals system in the past, saying that it unfairly prevents the vast majority of players from ever being able to "catch 'em all," which has been the series tagline since the beginning. I've always liked it, however -- the real world proposition is what sets this game apart from everything else on the market save Ingress, and the regionals are one of the best ways the game has to communicate that these are creatures that "live" in particular parts of the world.
