The reason I ask is I recently joined a server and before the update it seemed like everywhere I went there was a fair amount of pokemon spawned already or regularly spawning if you wandered an area long enough. Since the update spawns are way down, and it seems like there's huge areas with no spawns at all. Occasionally if you wander far enough you come across places with a lot of stuff spawned, but even those areas can't be counted on to constantly have spawns.
My guess would have been that things only spawn in areas where people currently are since chunks would be loaded there (not sure if chunk loading is the same on servers as it is in single player...?) but someone on my server the other day kept saying that pokemon only spawn in places where people haven't been, and once people go there the spawns go down. That seems counter intuitive to me since that would mean if you want to make a home, or a main town on a server, those places would quickly have no pokemon spawning and you'd have to travel pretty far to find any, especially on a bigger server. In the last few days I've seen things that really could suggest either, from ares with tons of stuff spawned that someone happened upon far from normal activity areas, to areas that I know get traffic and have spawns build up when people are around.
Anyways, sorry again if this has been answered, just really wondering how spawning work so I can figure out the best way to find pokemon since it's been so hard after the update! Do I need to wander aimlessly to find new places people haven't been before, or if I want a specific pokemon can I go hang out in the right biome even if it's right next to a busy area?
Thanks!
First Episode of my Pixelmon Adventure Series, with a custom map, custom trainers, and CustomNPCs is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH-6Qx6OUM4