My neighborhood has about 5 small parks within 1/4 mile of each other or so (clearfield). Each of them have between 2 and 7 pokestops and each has at least 1 gym. Every single night they are packed with cars and people from about 5 until well after midnight. It is insane.
Also, some of the people playing the beta (who were some of the original ingress players, which is also by Niantic and google) were invited to a closed beta for pokemon go, including me and my son, and we had the chance to win beta eggs from pokestops. I hatched 2 of the 3 legendaries from these eggs (Articuno and Zapdos). They were supposed to reset everything after the beta but the legendaries and anything we had evolved to full evolution remained. Of course you cannot find any more of the legendary birds to further evolve yet so for now they are an oddity at best as there are better pokemon currently in the game. For example until the first full server crash/update a couple of weeks ago you could evolve an Arcanine to well in excess of 2700 CP, which is nuts. I have one and so does my son. We can place them both on a gym, battle low levels between each other to power-level and to level up the gym, then add the variations of vaporeon that are also over 2000 and hold that gym for a long time. We held a single gym for 7 days straight with 6 pokemon on it with the lowest at a CP of about 1800. It took a concerted effort by team urine (the yellow team, of course we are team valor, the only legit team =) to take the gym from us. We took it back in a half hour.
But it has reached the point of the grind that most games like this tend to reach at some time or another. Spin the pokestops, run out of pokeballs and greatballs, run out of potions, wait or go find another pokestop, get a ton of razzies, never enough pokeballs. And now the experience required to level is insane. There are a few tricks to powerlevel but it just gets you to the grind portion faster which then makes the game boring.
Anyone that has been our experience so far. I think this game may have staying power depending on how they adapt to the problems/glitches/stalls in the game. It is well over 3 years later and I still play Ingress on the reg so I think Pokemon go has a chance. But if you get few high level players on the same faction that work at it you can own some serious real estate for a long time. The best our team has done (about 8 of us) is held 12 gyms for 4 consecutive days before losing a single gym. So the potential is there for a fast playing faction to crowd others out in a local area. Luckily the collecting and evolving factor make for a semi-interesting side-game.
By the way, once you hit around level 20 you start to see pidgies starting at over 300 CP, found one as high as 405 or so. They evolve pretty well. And there is enough randomness to the game that occasionally you get some fairly rare pokemon at higher levels than you would expect for your play level. At level 12 or so I found an eevee at 385 base CP. He turned into a very nice vaporeon before I even hit level 15.
