I live in a rural area with the closest pokestop of 30 kilometers and a 40 km to the town with two gyms. I am playing game from the very first week, every day, usually walking 15-20 km and right now I am heading to level 25. The only way to catch Pokemon is buying incense (with real money as haven't succeed to add my mon into the gym) which usually gives me up to five pokemons – usually Pidgey and with Gen 2 also quite often the Sentrinel. My best Pokemon is Snorlax with maxed CP 2380. I hatched it from 10 km egg – the only one so far which I got in a town in September, that is nine months ago ( I have 810 snorlax candies but can't use them :( ).
With the current solstice event I hoped to gain the level at least to 25 and hopefully to 26 but even I tried few incenses each day no pokemons appear anymore – I happened just when the event started. Anyone from countryside and with same issue that incense doesn't work? I heard that the pokemon should appear each 2-3 minutes when walking with incense but with me were max. up to 5 pokemons in half hour. I have a 3G – H+ connection with full bars.
This happened to someone I know in one of the Facebook groups I visit.
Don't know what the exact solution was, but he reported the problem to Niantic who got him to change a few settings on his phone which fixed the problem. They also replaced the incense he wasted, and gave him a few extra as an apology.
One tip might help you. It happened to me I've seen 0 pokemon in 1 hour car (slow) in the city. I know that was wrong but I was just going by some gyms or pokestops not actually actively playing. Anyway my problem was I set Phone time to MANUAL. If you do that NO pokemon will appear at all. You should get the time from the network. Usually I get bad signal and the time is crap. I already complained to the provider and mehh..
