This Town Successfully Had PokéStops Closed After Thousands Of Pokémon Go Players Swarmed A Park

We're living in a Pokémon nanny state.

The City of Canada Bay council in Sydney's west has had multiple PokéStops successfully removed from the suburb of Rhodes, which has been swarmed by thousands of Pokémon Go players in recent weeks.

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"The City of Canada Bay thanks [game developers] Niantic for closing the PokéStops in Rhodes that were creating a potentially dangerous situation," said deputy mayor Helen McCaffrey in a statement to BuzzFeed News.

"While we have not had confirmation from Niantic, we have had confirmation from gamers."

The council still plans to monitor the Rhodes area, implementing extra waste collection, putting more parking rangers on duty and fencing off the children's play area.

In early July, three intersecting PokéStops caused chaos in a small park outside a Rhodes apartment complex. Well over 1,000 people a night were rushing to the park to catch and train rare and abnormally strong Pokémon.

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Pacific Building Management’s Rhodes precinct manager, Antoni Gerick, manages one of the buildings adjacent to Peg Paterson Park, where he said Pokémon Go players had taken over.

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“You have children below five and six and they want to play but you’ve got adults on the swings and the slide,” Gerick told BuzzFeed News.

The players were keeping residents up until 2am and the council needed to “thin out the crowd”, he said.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Pokémon,” Gerick admitted. “I play it myself.”

Since its launch, multiple organisations across the globe have pressured Pokémon Go developers Niantic to remove their location from the game.

In July, a Holocaust museum in Washington DC asked to be removed from the game, and in Japan a group of Chinese Pokémon Go players flooded servers to place a Dragonite named "Long Live China" in the gym at the Yasukuni Shrine.