[chatmasta]

I suspect one reason for heavy traffic is that a lot of the logic you would expect to implement on the client, actually needs to execute on the server, in order to avoid client based hacks. For example the logic of whether the poke ball successfully catches the Pokemon. Sure you could implement that on the client but then you'd have third party apps cheating at the game without any verification from the server.

[throwawayReply]

You can have both, if it's just randomness then you can have shared seeds which the server will verify but the local client can sample too. If they de-sync then the server wins, but the client can feedback quicker before the final response from the server.

I suppose that would enable further cheats such as not wasting pokeballs on ones you know will fail by peeking into the future.

The throw itself is client-side though, so I suspect it's already possible to cheat with "perfect throws" every time.