MAD Walkers - madBeavis/PimpMyAtv GitHub Wiki

Foreward

Walkers are the orders you give a device on how to operate. They can do many things over the course of a day. But they can be easily messed up, so I have written up a quick guide on how I setup my walkers that are involved in questing. The remainder of devices on main instance are mon-mitm from 00:00-23:59 on coords using PrioQ.

Ever see the movie 50 First Dates? As much as I hate to admit watching a chickflick, I liked it. Walkers are best to be treated like someone with zero recall of what happened the day prior once time crosses midnite. If you haven't seen the movie, treat them like your stupidest cousin when setting out their day, keep the orders simple, in order of time while being concise and explicit.

There are probably other ways to accomplish what I have set forth here. I like the KISS principle to get data obtained I want/need with the least amount of work on my end in the long run. If you find yourself thinking about doing anything that violates the KISS principle for walkers, it is probably time to think about more devices or utilizing the MAD addon to increase the quests per hour a worker can accomplish. I don't use the addon as I use just 10 workers for quests for my ~600 pokestops I scan. I have 56 ATVs, one leveling accts, 47 mon scanners available to do quest work and 8 strictly on another instance.

My thinking may evolve over time and I will keep things up to date.

Things to avoid

There are a few things that trip up people repeatedly and generally should be avoided. The following are some examples and general guidelines for how I choose to setup walkers:

  1. Do not cross midnite, such as have a period of 23:00-01:00. This is one things that many people having issues with walkers insist on doing. Just like chubby chasers. You have a friend that chooses to do it, even though it flies in the face of reason and common sense. They only make good wingmen, don't be that guy/girl.
  2. A busy worker is a happy worker, make sure they always have something to do at all times
  3. Start your walker's day at 00:00
  4. End you walker's day at 23:59
  5. Avoid the explicit idle mode, historically sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Better to just have them do invasions, raids or mons close to where they are to start questing if staging them to begin work in outlying areas.
  6. Basically, treat them like your retarded cousin. Outsmarting him doesn't work if there isn't something to outsmart, so keep things simple.
  7. I don't repeat areas in same walker. I make up dummy ones that are exact copies for areas if you need to do such.
  8. Build in redundancy to questing, which is outlined further below
  9. Mega quest areas with a large amount of workers can be inefficient. Say you have a 20 square mile area with spread out stops and you throw 50 workers at it. As each worker joins, the routes get recalculated, stops get reassigned to workers and workers get moved around. This can cause unnecessary teleports and subsequent cooldowns for devices. They may just end up bouncing around after getting a new route and enjoying cooldowns while not doing any meaningful work. Instead, do a little work yourself and make more areas with fewer workers to keep them busy doing the work they should be doing, which is scanning quests.
  10. As of 2021, PD will clean out your quests for you.
  11. Historic Note: Stay aware of quest rewards. Some will come up once in a while that get completed before MAD will clean on the usual spin 3 stops and cleanup quests. I got bit by that in Oct 2020 and had to cleanup my workers manually, so I just left my quest areas on cleanup after every spin. I lose efficiency, but I don't have to worry about troublesome quests.

An example walker scenario

It is probably easiest to start with an example from my quest scanning walkers. Let's just say I run 10 walkers to scan quests, starting with suburb/outer areas for an hour starting at 1am, move to inner areas until quests starting at 2am and monsters the remainder of the day.

Notes on quests:

  1. Not all stops reset at the same time
  2. Daylight savings time will change when they reset
  3. The latest quests reset for stops is 2am
  4. Only scan areas you care about starting at 2am
  5. Have a "scan poi" in your worker quest stack and have end users of data do the same

Workers:

  1. 10 workers for quests

Areas:

  1. Suburb 1, 2, 3 & 4 - S1 to S4 (some are 10+ miles away from main part of town)
  2. Raid area for main part of town - R1
  3. Inner areas (main parts of town proper) 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 - I1 to I5

Walker areas:

  1. All set to coords

The general entries and rational are as follows:

  1. 00:00-01:00 I stage up my workers with a raid/invasion area in the suburb that they will scan stops in the next walkerarea.
    1. I was having trouble with quests not getting done before 2am when starting transiting to area at 1am. I determined from watching the worker that they were wasting much time with cooldowns (wait time before interaction to spin first stop) when going to the area.
    2. I don't give two shits about the data coming from this entry and the cooldown must be respected, so I choose to waste the time doing nothing that harms the data procurement
    3. Set them to raid mode with stops to just collect invasion info due to being in the night
  2. 01:00-02:00 Workers 1, 2 & 3 are assigned to area S1. Workers 4, 5 & 6 are assigned to area S2. Workers 7 & 8 are assigned to S3. Workers 9 & 10 are assigned to S4. I assigned 3 workers to the two biggest areas and 2 workers to the smaller areas.
    1. They scan quests in outer areas for this time period. As they are outer areas, I don't care about redundancy nor would it work well for transitting and subsequent cooldowns, one set of work by 2-3 workers in each area is enough to satisfy my requirement of finishing in an hour.
    2. I also do the outer areas first so that quests that I care less about end up at the top of the Discord channel. As a courtesy to end users of data, I do provide them with quests by area.
  3. 01:20-02:00 Return workers to main town, set to raid/invasion in order to keep them busy and chew up cooldowns so they can start quests at 2am sharp
  4. 02:00-21:00 Workers are spread out, with all five areas getting two workers to start off.
    1. First things you notice is the time range, this does cause a slowdown if restarting mad and the quest completion get checked again, but also allows me to just stop MAD, empty trs_quest table, empty trs_status and restart MAD to do quick rescan of quests whenever events switch.
  5. 02:00-21:00 Repeat x4 for all other inner areas
    1. See below for a more visual representation
    2. This adds redundancy, i.e. if i lose a device, the others will eventually get to it and cover it
    3. If there is a problem with a stop (like when we first got invasions) another worker will hopefully pass over it later and have no issue
  6. 03:00-23:59 Once quests have all finished for inner areas, the walker will go to scan monsters until the end of the day at 23:59
    1. My quests are usually finished by 0330, so set a time before so no gaps in walker activity

Specific walkers:

  • Walker #1
    • 00:00-01:00 Area D1 dummy staging
    • 01:00-02:00 Area S1 doing quests in outer areas
    • 01:20-02:00 Area R1 doing raids/invasions in main area of town
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I1 doing quests in main area of town
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I2 doing quests in main area of town
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I3 doing quests in main area of town
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I4 doing quests in main area of town
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I5 doing quests in main area of town
    • 03:00-23:59 Scanning mons
  • Walker #2
    • 00:00-01:00 Area D1 dummy staging
    • 01:00-02:00 Area S1 doing quests
    • 01:20-02:00 Area R1 doing raids/invasions
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I1 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I2 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I3 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I4 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I5 doing quests
    • 03:00-23:59 Scanning mons
  • Walker #3
    • 00:00-01:00 Area D2 dummy staging
    • 01:00-02:00 Area S1 doing quests
    • 01:20-02:00 Area R1 doing raids/invasions
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I2 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I3 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I4 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I5 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I1 doing quests
    • 03:00-23:59 Scanning mons
  • Walker #4
    • 00:00-01:00 Area D2 dummy staging
    • 01:00-02:00 Area S2 doing quests
    • 01:20-02:00 Area R1 doing raids/invasions
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I2 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I3 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I4 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I5 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I1 doing quests
    • 03:00-23:59 Scanning mons
  • Walker #5
    • 00:00-01:00 Area D2 dummy staging
    • 01:00-02:00 Area S2 doing quests
    • 01:20-02:00 Area R1 doing raids/invasions
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I3 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I4 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I5 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I1 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I2 doing quests
    • 03:00-23:59 Scanning mons
  • Walker #6
    • 00:00-01:00 Area D2 dummy staging
    • 01:00-02:00 Area S2 doing quests
    • 01:20-02:00 Area R1 doing raids/invasions
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I3 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I4 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I5 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I1 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I2 doing quests
    • 03:00-23:59 Scanning mons
  • Walker #7
    • 00:00-01:00 Area D3 dummy staging
    • 01:00-02:00 Area S3 doing quests
    • 01:20-02:00 Area R1 doing raids/invasions
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I4 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I5 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I1 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I2 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I3 doing quests
    • 03:00-23:59 Scanning mons
  • Walker #8
    • 00:00-01:00 Area D3 dummy staging
    • 01:00-02:00 Area S3 doing quests
    • 01:20-02:00 Area R1 doing raids/invasions
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I4 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I5 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I1 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I2 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I3 doing quests
    • 03:00-23:59 Scanning mons
  • Walker #9
    • 00:00-01:00 Area D4 dummy staging
    • 01:00-02:00 Area S4 doing quests
    • 01:20-02:00 Area R1 doing raids/invasions
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I5 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I1 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I2 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I3 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I4 doing quests
    • 03:00-23:59 Scanning mons
  • Walker #10
    • 00:00-01:00 Area D4 dummy staging
    • 01:00-02:00 Area S4 doing quests
    • 01:20-02:00 Area R1 doing raids/invasions
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I5 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I1 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I2 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I3 doing quests
    • 02:00-21:00 Area I4 doing quests
    • 03:00-23:59 Scanning mons