I'm in Australia, and I've never seen an irl viral phenomenon on the streets like this. In the inner city of Brisbane, every second person I see is staring at their phone, swiping up to catch Pokemon. Mobs of 100+ people chasing 'lures' are being moved on from parks in the middle of the night. And there was a pub crawl: https://www.facebook.com/events/267390546965461/
Same thing in America. I remember the first night it was released I was walking to the grocery store and it was almost like a low-key street festival going on. People of all ages, genders and races on the streets running around with their phones.
we had close to 250 people in a small park near my house close to all day. There were 5 points all within 200 meters of each other, and one gym. It was refreshing to see a lot of people outside that look like they don't get out much.
I just came back from a walk to a large nearby park, and there were dozens of people playing. It struck me as interesting they were mostly groups of friends, and not people playing by themselves.
I do hope they rebalance it a bit. The only way to get coins without paying money is to own a gym, which is difficult to do. And less you're willing to go farm a bunch of little Pokéstops then you probably have to buy potions. If there was something equivalent to the Pokécenter then things would be better. It be nice to be able to battle friends to train your Pokémon as well.
Niantic are either too busy or really don't care about social media. There's lots of people pointing out real problems with the game. I hope it's not like Ingress all over again, where the only way to get something fixed was to know someone at Google.
Since it has the Pokémon company's brand (and therefore Nintendo's) I really hope to be a great app. One of the things I love about Nintendo with how well they polish all their software.
Instead it's very clear to me that it's a Google app with Pokémon branding. Release fast, bugs are OK, we can fix them later. Don't worry about the fact that the iOS version feels like an Android app and is somewhat obnoxious to use.
I can't help but think that if this game had another two months of polish it would be amazing. Instead, it's in its current slightly crappy state with a serious server issue going on.
It was an internal Google startup that spun out, so I'm assuming they're used to 'the Google way' of operating.
I don't feel great saying this stuff, but I don't know how else to communicate just how startlingly bad the app can be, and how much it feels like a terribly lazy port of an Android app.
I don't know. Maybe if I use the Android app for a few days I'd find out that more or less every single issue is just as bad.
I was wondering about that. There is a 10 minute boosted board ride from home that nets me about 10 pokestops, but most of them seemed like things that wouldn't be anywhere but an urban core: public parks, government buildings, murals, etc. I would imagine even in the suburbs it is far less dense. Did they not adjust for this somehow? I still think it is a revolutionary success even if it goes tamagotchi real fast. I've met so many cool neighbors.
Nope, they haven't adjusted for it at all. I don't think they're using all the Ingress portals so the problem is quite bad in rural areas. Check /r/pokemongo for a few of the posts from users who can't really play because of their location.
I really think that this comes from Google-style thinking - there aren't any workplaces that'd have problems if we turned on cameras / sound automatically [1], there's no other timezones than California, everywhere is high density.
I live in Docklands in Melbourne. For those unfamiliar, it's basically an ex-port that was transformed into an extension of the city 10 or so years ago. It's known for being basically dead after-hours and on weekends, as there's not much to do and not a lot of culture (and the weather tends to be rubbish, since it's exposed).
This weekend was... different. Even though the weather was miserable, the area was buzzing. I've never seen so many people with a common purpose in the area, or being so friendly and connected. The connection? Magikarp spawn near the water.
The previous iteration of this concept was Ingress, by the same developer. It's an active subculture, but not to the level of Pokemon GO.
The marketing is ingenious. It manages to capitalize on the nostalgia of two generations that grew up playing Pokemon games, and the fact that the stated (virtual) premise of Pokemon was always to roam the world and catch these creatures.
Regardless of the longevity of the game, this phenomenal marriage of a popular videogame series with an experienced alternate reality company will be studied for many years.
I think people will look back on this game as important, as something special. I've been playing video games for over twenty years, and I can't remember the last time something felt quite as exciting as this. Each time I've gone out, I've seen other people walking around playing, and everyone gets the same goofy smile when you ask them if they're playing Pokemon too.
It shows the potential for AR games, and I think it will help a lot of people get in shape. I've walked around outside more in the past three days than I have in the past two months. Even hanging out with friends, rather than sitting inside watching tv or playing xbox, it's like "let's check out that lure", or, "I see a Bulbasaur, let's go get it".
When I was a kid, I remember wishing that Pokemon was real. This game really captures some of the magic and sense of adventure I felt when I first played it so many years ago.
Ingress was as exciting as this. And it was a lot of fun running into other players (friendly and enemy) and spotting them from a few dozen yards away. I still regularly talk to people I met on the Ingress scene, including one enemy player who was, at the time, my "archnemesis" of sorts. I did meetups with other local players to takeover large areas as a group and stuff as well.
But yeah, version 2 is cool too, I guess. ;)
Like Ingress, it'll be pretty busy for a few months and then it'll probably recede back to a core community of people who really really get into it.
No doubt Ingress was exciting, but it was a new AR/VR concept and an original sci-fi plot, putting it in the same ballpark demographic as a AAA video game.
Pokemon GO has the advantage of being based on an multi-billion dollar, 20-year-old franchise. Its appeal goes beyond that of a typical videogame, so has a significant leg up over Ingress in people's hearts and minds. Its popularity will eventually segment into a hardcore group and a mainstream group, but its mindshare among the wider population is likely to remain strong.
One of the big problems with Ingress was it wasn't available on iOS until maybe a year ago.
Since Google made it I don't exactly blame them, but that was a huge chunk of the market. I wanted to give it a try and I'm sure there were tons of other people but we couldn't since we didn't have Android phones.
A lot of people's lives have Pokemon deeply ingrained in them, and I'm saying that seriously. I think the core community of people who really get into it is much larger than you seem to be expecting. Remember the Pokemon craze of the 90's, and 00's, and this decade? It's all been huge since it came out.
It definitely didn't have a "catch them all" mechanic, and that alone lets Pokémon Go have much more of a feeling of personal progress.
In Ingress, everything is about taking over portals for your team. You get items with weird names that you use for taking over portals. The maximum strength of the items you get is determined by your experience level, up to 8. After level 8 all players are equal.
What Ingress has that Pokemon Go doesn't have is "linking", where you form straight lines between portals your team owns that you've visited, and if you form a triangle of links in your color, you form a "field" that claims the area within it for your team.
That was cool, but I have made enough links and fields for a lifetime. Eventually there isn't much more to do, unless you're teaming up and making elaborate plans to form crazy huge fields, for which the reward is that you get to screenshot it and gloat about it on Reddit for a few hours before someone undoes your field, possibly by cheating.
I hope that Pokemon battles become as compelling as linking, or more. (I have only had one Pokemon battle that didn't crash or glitch out so far.)
> that alone lets Pokémon Go have much more of a feeling of personal progress.
In addition to the levelling-up aspect (L1-L16) Ingress has about a dozen "Medals", each with 5-tiers. IMO, they go along way in terms of giving a feeling of personal progress.
> In Ingress, everything is about taking over portals for your team.
There are also infrequent Niantic-organized global 'Anomaly' events, which require a surprising amount of planning and coordination. To me, the reward is not taking a screenshot, but taking part in an activity that scratches that deeply human/primal "my group vs. its enemies" itch in my lizard brain in a safe way. Its like being on any kind of team really. On a meta level, it scares be how easily members of the other team get dehumanized (being called stupid, or having more money than sense, etc for no real reason). It's petty stuff mostly, but the whole in-group/out-group thing freaks me out a little.
You know, if someone wanted to generate training sets for human social behavior under a given variety of conditions, I bet a game like Ingress would be a great way to go about it. But you'd need a much larger install base, over a broader range of people, to get really worthwhile data.
Aren't the medals the same thing in Pokemon Go (i.e. no differentiation between them)?
So, the game claims that I walked a bit more than 40km so far and I'm going for the next (100km..) level of that medal.
As soon as I reach 200 caught normal type Pokemon (at ~150 now?) I get the next 'Schoolkid' level.
Was/is Ingress different?
As I stated elsewhere, for me it's Ingress vs. Pokemon Go is currently Multiplayer vs. Singleplayer, Community vs. Progression
> So, the game claims that I walked a bit more than 40km so far and I'm going for the next (100km..) level of that medal. As soon as I reach 200 caught normal type Pokemon (at ~150 now?) I get the next 'Schoolkid' level. Was/is Ingress different?
Ingress is similar - those are the tiers I was referring to. The only difference is Ingress medals are purely decorative: they don't affect gameplay. I haven't played Pokemon, but it sounds like a refinement of ideas present in Ingress.
I have played Ingress and it's definitely fun. I could never bring myself to care about the story though. I'd even meet people who have played it daily for years, but had no interest in shapers, Jarvis and all that. Sure, a game with fun mechanics doesn’t really need an engaging story, but I think a solid Pokemon theme is more than just branding.
AR game has been on mobile for many years. This became viral only because of Pokemon. I remember playing "hockey" on my phone with my friends a couple years ago on my mobile and it was an AR game.
I've never played Pokemon anything in my life and I thought it sounded interesting and possibly worth a look based on the geocaching-like functionality of it. So they have the get-out-and-go-find-something of geocaching, the branding of Pokemon, the nifty factor of augmented reality, and multiple social aspects ranging from whatever online trading, etc. exists to people meeting trying to hit the same location.
I agree, my first thought in seeing this headline, even the applicable market of people is much, much bigger for Pokemon GO. In addition to the entire market of Tinder, there's also kids and married people.
The only good reason I can think of Tinder being used is because it's a well-known app and involves real life social things. I can't think of a well-known game that has in person/real world social interaction like this.
Engagement is crazy right now. I drove home at 3am last night and stopped by a PokeStop, and as I was leaving the parking lot, another car pulled in just to play... Same at the church by my place 15 minutes later. Different car.
What will really be telling is how many people still play after a week or two.
I feel that if they don't get the server issues under control soon (I saw they delayed the European lunch) then it doesn't matter what WOULD have happened the game is going to lose players in the social/network effects won't be there.
I think more of an issue will be people hitting "completion" relatively soon. Certainly, the most interesting part right now is just catching new Pokemon, but there aren't so many that you can't burn through most of that enjoyment fairly quickly.
So far the game only includes the 151 original Pokémon, and I imagine it should be pretty straightforward to add in the later generations (700-something total). That's without adding things like shinies, gender, etc.
I was super excited but then pretty fast realized that:
a) its the same as ingress. With all but even more of the annoying bugs.
b) It eats even more battery than ingress
c) Its purely pay to win. I could have lived with free 2 play and buying some special or cosmetic items. But not selling essential items ...
Currently i mostly wonder why people don't care about that. I hate playing games where other players can just spend $10 and overtake hours worth of skilling.
>I hate playing games where other players can just spend $10 and overtake hours worth of skilling.
But you can't. Not really. I guess it's location-dependant but if you live anywhere near a student campus or town there are literally tens of pokestops in a short 10min walk. My SO has got from level 1-11 without spending a penny, just by incorporating more pokestops into her little 'route' she has going. Added to that, the cooldown on a pokestop is 5 mins iirc, so you can pretty much milk them infinitely. If there's a stop in a pub for example, you'd be able to get 12 spins in the hour it takes you to catch up with your friends. Each spin tends to yield between 1-5 poke/greatballs.
Not sure what else is p2w, I was in the same boat as you until I saw how much progress my SO made without touching her purse.
I guess arguably the incense items in the cash shop are 'p2w', but you do get these through levelling up. Haven't seen any appear at pokestops yet. I've used 5 myself and all I've obtained through it are more Weedles and Pidgeys.
That says nothing except that its easy to get started. The strategie may is to catch players 3-5 days in who already need more than a day intensive work for a single level.
Dont get me wrong. I was niantic fan from beginning, one of the first Ingress players, probably even the first in my country. I really appreciate what they are doing.
I just simply refuse to touch pay 2 win games as they always get frustrating at some point.
The amazing thing to me is that, at least on iOS, the game is pretty objectively bad.
Of course that hasn't stopped me from sinking a lot of time into it this weekend. I've spent $10 on it, which is easily a record for free to play game for me.
The server issues are one thing, but the game doesn't even get lots of basic things right. If the server goes away, or sometimes if I'm just out of the app too long, I have to log back in. It seems to forget my settings for weather I want sound and music on, or to use the AR functions. I've run into numerous crashes and graphical glitches. Input getting confused requiring app restarts. Poor handling of the (common) network/server issues.
One of the mechanics requires walking around, which it won't track outside the app despite the fact that iPhones have had motion coprocessor for years. So they offer a special mode (very poorly documented) that basically turns the screen black and tries to reduce power usage a bit. But you have to keep the Pokémon app open to track steps.
I am having fun. I REALLY hope they can fix these issues. I sought earlier today that they do plan to add Pokémon trading and expand the functionality of the various waypoints in the world. I'd also love to be able to battle my friends.
The social aspect on this just amazes me. In the last couple of days they're been numerous times when I saw a random people clearly playing this game. Guys walking around parking lots at work, cars parked at empty banks that were closed because there happened to be a gym there. Numerous posts on social media about random gatherings and flash mobs because of something going on in the game.
It's clear that Ingress had a pretty good idea. Tying it to a major brand (not unlike the way Mario kart was created) that really encourages the collecting aspect and getting it out on iOS at basically the same time have clearly made a huge difference.
I'll also say, is a Pokémon fan I'm glad that it's only the 150 original in the game. At this point there are way too many Pokémon that seem the same to me, so I'm glad to see my old friends instead. I imagine that'll change someday but this is a good start.
It's bad because it can be. Mobile apps are easily updated, so they don't feel the need to do as much testing. There's no way an actual Pokemon release would be that buggy, because they couldn't fix bugs later.
This game has been in Beta for several months, with several long standing issues not being fixed. Plus the game is built off a 5+ year old engine. If that's not enough testing, I don't know what is.
Also the 3DS has patching/software updates. The Pokemon Company could release games as buggy as they want. They have the good sense not to do that, since it devalues their product.
I know that's an excuse that lots of developer seem to use these days.
It's fucking bullshit.
I'm so tired of people releasing utter crap and claiming it's OK to fix it later. You know what happens when you do that? You turn off a huge number of people and poison the brand.
It's not like if they waited an extra months to actually fix the issues (which were apparently well known in Beta) the Pokémon brand would've been dead no one would've cared. This isn't tied to some new property that no one knows if it will succeed.
This is tarnishing a major brand and ruining a fantastic opportunity.
All because a bunch of developers don't care enough about what they're making. They don't have enough pride in their products because "people will buy crap, we can fix it later."
>I'm so tired of people releasing utter crap and claiming it's OK to fix it later. You know what happens when you do that?
Apparently what happens is your app becomes one of the most downloaded in history.
The truth is, those "lazy developers" are right. They can release utter crap and fix it later. People will put up with it simply because of their emotional investment in the brand, and it will make money regardless of its issues.
> The truth is, those "lazy developers" are right.
I don't understand why this discussion is about the developers. Do you think Tim, who writes network code for the iOS version, gets to say when they launch?
No. Some top dog at Niantic says "We're launching early to catch the summer buzz while kids are out of school." And Tim says "But we don't handle network disconnects gracefully yet." And top-dog man says "Can you still catch Pokemon and battle at gyms?" And Tim admits, "Yes, you can." And top-dog says: "We launch tomorrow, then."
Surely they can release and fix later because Nintendo (or whoever?) built up the Pokémon brand over time. They've built consumer trust but they can easily destroy that do the point that such moves will fail in the future.
I think the game would have to be unplayable for Niantic to really destroy their credibility, and it doesn't seem to be. Consumers have been trained by now to expect a poor initial offering from AAA publishers that might improve over time.
To be fair, mostly anybody would hit server issues hitting Twitter/tinder-like scales in 3 days. It's impressive that they're staying up as well as they are
It's not just the server issues, it's that the app logic is terrible. When you hit a Pokemon with your Pokeball, if there is a network error, the app just freezes. The ball drifts to the ground without blinking, and the loading indicator appears periodically, but it never progresses past that point. It just flat out cannot recover from dropping packets, no matter how long you wait. And it's not like the network is down; if you kill the app and reopen it, it is able to load the information it needs.
In many places, this happens with at least 50% probability on a mobile connection. It literally fails more often than not. The advice people are giving is to turn off LTE, which seems to help for some reason. But come on.
Yep, the hitting-with-Pokeball into a freeze is by FAR the most frustrating thing ever. But at least you successfully catch a decent amount of the time >.>
Have to kill and relaunch the app, and the app launches really slowly. it feels like the initial loading bar is also reliant of their servers, as I've had it take upwards of 30 seconds, or a few times even hang indefinitely.
Once you get in it'll still have to download locations of nearby pokestops and gyms, which is another chance to hang and require a relaunch. Network glitches are not handled gracefully.
On the hang while catching a Pokemon: my guess is it's trying to ask the server if the Pokemon breaks free of the ball. Sometimes when you exit and relaunch you'll have gotten the Pokemon, other times it's totally gone. When the game works properly you get to keep trying, but if it locked up on network issues and made you quit, you don't get the chance. People are understandably annoyed at server issues screwing them out of rare captures.
It's too bad in a way, Pokemon Go is a way better idea, Ingress always felt like some cool ideas thrown together in search of a unifying theme. It is the only AR game with any real lasting appeal that I'm aware of, until perhaps Pokemon Go, but a lot of the choices made in building Ingress are less than ideal for Pokemon, and yet they form its foundation. I was never really clear what kept Niantic afloat, I always figured they were nothing more than a cost center at Google. Perhaps Pokemon will have enough success to prompt them to evolve the gameplay, and fix some of the common bugs with Ingress.
A common speculation, but I can't fathom how much value this adds to Google Maps, if any, what with street view and other 360 degree content they have at their disposal. I suppose that the crowd-sourcing aspect of it could serve to identify small sites of interest off the beaten path? Again though, what possible value does this provide to Google maps? Plus, a lot of the sites are already well known locations (churches) or are bunk (the "big red ball" out front of a local target)
Ingress also had an invite-only launch, which meant that by the time lots of people got into the game, the portals were all super high level and playing the game was difficult.
Pokemon Go is already showing signs of the same problem at Gyms, where newer players are going to have to grind for days to take on a gym that their team doesn't already own.
Yeah I can see that. It would be good to be able to build your own gym up, so you could place a gym at your house after acquiring some kind of resource, and people could try and take you down.
It would help to add to the density of the map in less populated areas, though that might make the trespassing issue a lot worse.
Please submit this as a support request - this seems to be the only way to get Niantic to see anything as they don't seem to use Twitter, Facebook or HackerNews.
Wasn't high level portals a good thing for ingress? It made the social aspect more important. New players would meet experienced ones and quickly level up.
Speaking as someone who has helped develop two extremely successful mobile games "objective" goodness is pretty meaningless. People have more patience than you expect for a game that captures their imagination and will put up with buggyness. In the long run, if a game isn't polished it will lose because of retention. But pure technical polish is often overrated.
I can put up with a fair amount. There are some Z-buffering issues that don't really matter. I've seen occasional glitches with the way the background works in AR.
But how can you not remember if I've me that the sound? How can you not remember I logged in? With a handful of ultrabasic bugs it feels like they just didn't even try.
If they are network issues why do I get stuck in a try again later screen were the only thing I can do is force quit the app?
It's a lazy as hell and Nintendo should be ashamed that someone's dragging their name down like that.
I completely agree with this. The network issues, and the lack of tolerance for GPS issues would be frustrating but acceptable if they were handled properly. As it is they're absolutely infuriating when combined with the way the app just dies when it encounters them. It's incredible that an app that's been in beta for months still has 20 un-recoverable different freeze states that I've found in 72 hours. My girlfriend didn't even know how to kill an Android app before this app, now she can do it in seconds.
The real killer? I love the idea of this app. I'd probably end up spending a bunch of money on it if I kept it around for a couple months, because I don't have the time I need to play it the free way. It's fun (or it at least scratches that grindy type itch), and it's the only game I've ever been able to play with my partner. I'm on the verge of uninstalling right now though, because every time I get the chance to play, the app dies in my hands.
There is NO graceful handling of loss of network connection at all. Many times I've been out throwing Pokeballs at a Pidgy, then my phone catches the nearby Starbucks wifi and switches over. In the brief period of no connectivity during the switch, the game loses connection, and just... dies. All actions stop. The animations keep playing on loop, but it's impossible to throw another pokeball, impossible to leave the minigame, etc.
This doesn't just happen when in "catch a pokemon" minigame mode. This happens at all screens. The game was programming to expect full, 100% network connectivity, and if it loses that for even a brief moment, the whole thing comes crashing down, requiring a full kill and reset.
> I'd probably end up spending a bunch of money on it if I kept it around for a couple months, because I don't have the time I need to play it the free way.
Can someone explain this? Isn't the value of a game in the playing of it? If a millionaire could pay to have hundreds of Pokemons spawning in their living room so they can get more points than anyone without leaving the house, what would be the point? If you're having fun playing with your girlfriend, but don't have much free time, why would paying to catch up matter? Did they design it to be limited gameplay, where you only get a teaser if you don't play it all the time, requiring that you buy things in order to get any real gameplay time out of it?
to it I'd add that this is also the difference between the $20/hour programmer and the $200/hour programmer -- speaking in broad strokes, knowingly, and if you'll indulge me charitably. Because the difference between the commodity "let's ship something!" programmer/engineer and the one who truly knows his/her stuff, and who truly thinks about and knows about and cares about the edge cases, the big picture, the total system, all possible states in the state machine space, is what justifies those differences in (ostensible) upfront cost.
If you only want "the user is in location X and so icon Y should be rendered on their screen at point P" then you can get that pretty cheap, at globalization-plus-crowdsourced-plus-cloud-reduced prices
But if you want that above but also, with good performance, correctness, stability, scale, all edge cases handled reasonably and gracefully, and in v1.0, and well documented, and with good English, and maturity, curtesy, legality, i18n, etc... well, then you're going to pay. Or you should expect to pay. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Ever. If you think you have a free lunch, or a reduced cost lunch, then all it means is that somebody else off-stage is paying for that difference. And that difference may come back to bite you.
> to it I'd add that this is also the difference between the $20/hour programmer and the $200/hour programmer
You could have a hundred "$200/hour programmers" on the team for this app, but if management says they need to ship three weeks early to catch the buzz, or something like that, it doesn't matter. We can't say the developers were bad. I mean it's possible, given how poorly the game handles network disconnections, among other bugs. But unfortunately we don't live in a utopia where the guys writing the code get to decide when they want to release. Or if features get added in the last minute. Etc.
so many HN replies say 'you're wrong and you implied <what-you-didn't> therefore should feel bad'. yet this did not. well said, agreed. you added signal.
in many situations, an owner/manager/lead is making decisions where, frankly, the company has no revenue so they know their ostensible default spending path is equivalent to a ticking time bomb.
or... they don't truly know whether or how well the engineer can deliver, yet they do know for sure definitively what their dollar spend will be. thus, the results we see.
We totally do get to say that in this case. This game inherits issues that have been present in Ingress for years. Years! Ingress gets away with it most of the time because it's not operating in a worst-case scenario where the backend has to suddenly scale from limited beta to millions of active users, so fewer of these bugs present. The actual architecture work underneath is poor; client code should not crash, softlock, or lose frames because of a temporary connectivity issue.
But TBH, that is probably not about how much the engineering team is paid, it's about what culture they have. Nintendo's console development teams would never ship something with this many catastophic bugs. Niantic has probably decided that the way they're doing things is "industry standard" (within the context of mobile and their particular silo) and does not need substantial improvement.
Edit: How poor is this code, you ask? It does not let me rename my Pokemon. A race condition occurs where it tries to pop up the Android keyboard and close it at the same time.
Agree, just look at DayZ. Players stuck with that through extreme buggyness. Sure it might not have the same number of players as it once did but there were periods during which players were putting up with a lot of bugs.
I don't really 'get' DayZ, but I also know that it was a pay-once game, not free to play. Once you've paid the money you might as well get your fun out of it. But if you're constantly losing items and getting frustrated by bugs what's the incentive to keep playing and possibly giving Niantic money?
If you look at Imgur for example you'll see two observations by users: 1) It's amazing and 2) They have server issues. Notice that #2 is incredibly vague and almost hand-waved as a joke. We as developers see the minor flaws but most people just seem to see the good of it.
EDIT: I'm not talking about Imgur. I'm talking about Imgur's posts about Pokemon Go. My bad for the ambiguity.
I've used Imgur for years (though not wittingly anymore, due to their growingly shady practices) and have never known them to have a reputation for poor uptime. Reddit's stability issues seemed to be 100x worse.
I've had issues where I definitely successfully capture a pokemon, but either lose connection due to being underground on transit or the servers 'crashing', so I wind up not having the pokemon saved to my record. Makes me think they aren't doing much, or any, local caching.
Don't think it'd be solved by local caching. All that logic should be remote anyway. The local client shouldn't decide if a Pokemon was caught or not, the server should.
What the client should be doing is gracefully reconnecting and picking up at the state it left off in... which it certainly is NOT doing right now.
If you eliminate all the server issues, the game isn't "objectively bad".
In fact, I quite enjoy it. It's a little simple for the first few levels, but that's how Pokemon games have always been!
Once you level up your character, you'll start getting harder Pokemon to catch and you can start trying to take and hold gyms. And you'll get enough candies to start upgrading and evolving your Pokemon as well.
To put it plainly, this is the first mobile game in years to get me really excited about getting out there and doing things. Ingress was okay for a while, but never amazing. Zombies Run! had issues that I never got over, and I just quit... And it wasn't really compelling anyhow.
But this? My wife and I repaired the tires on our bikes after years of saying we'd do that, and we've been on multiple bike rides already. I'm quite looking forward to continuing that trend, and without the Pokemon aspect, I know it wouldn't happen as often, if at all.
So no, it's not "objectively bad". It's quite clearly compelling and enjoyable for a lot of people, just maybe not for you. And that's perfectly okay on all accounts.
Agreed, I like the simplicity of the game. I've tried ingress a few times and I didn't have patience going through the wall of text to understand the game. Pokemon has a lower barrier.
For those who don't want to invest too much time, they can occasionally boot up the app when they walk around and catch a few pokemon. Those who are more hardcore will probably stick around at gyms and battle away.
But there's no depth to the game. Yes it has a very low learning curve, but there's really very little progression. Even casual players get sick of a game that doesn't progress. At least candy crush gets a bit harder and introduces new mechanics.
How can I try to hold a gym? I can't interact with the players from "my" team and I don't get attack notifications to be able to react. So suddenly my gym switched color which I can actively check after the fact. In good old Ingress I got an attack notification and (remote) recharge or (locally) refill with resonators or emergency switch it using a virus, thus prevent the attack. I reached Level 14 in Go and uninstalled it. Will probably try in a few versions, again. But for now this wasn't much fun.
Aside from some basic benefits, it mostly encourages people to make judgements about important things ('human relationships') based on the most absolutely material, fleeting and trivial physical elements. Especially given the magnitude of 'choice', it commoditizes people. Even worse, it normalizes this behaviour. Far from connecting us, it actually disconnects us.
Talking recently to a female friend recently who is on Tindr ... it was pretty astonishing how numb she'd become to the profiles... absolute objectification. Even as she was fairly self-aware about it.
It's about as healthy as nicotine.
Admittedly, it's an absolutely brilliant business model, tapping into primal forces, but it's not a step forward. It's a step sideways, at best, and maybe even a little step back.
When VC meets creativity meets technology, it will induce a lot of dollars in this direction irrespective of long term positive economic or social outcomes, often taking attention away from 'better' causes. Absent reasonably enlightened consideration (and I mean just 'basic' consideration, not some holier-than-though ideology), there is no moving forward - just moving in random directions, pulled by the arbitrary forces of hyper-populist memes and trends. Some will make a lot of $$$ as the money sloshes around in a zero-sum game, but surely, but that really isn't the point. In the long run, the Valley and tech scene will lose authenticity and be about as credible as politicians, homeopaths, or Amway.
I'll bet $100 that anyone working in tech or any other industry for more than 5-8 years, will start to understand that it's not about 'a job' or 'making bling', or 'being startup famous' and that they work they do has impact across cultures and communities, and that they are ultimately responsible for whatever it is they are working on. Given that there are 10 000 projects around to chose from, it's hot hard to climb higher on the ladder than Tindr, by almost any measure, even $$$.
I don't really care about Tindr that much, I have about as much 'against it' as I do a ridiculous Transformers film (which is nothing), but it's not worth any attention either.
Making a snap decision about a person based on a 1/2 second assertion.
Of course, looks matter. We make such 'snap decisions' all day long. The problem is, absent anything else, that's the entire decision. In the real world, personality goes a much longer way than the 1000 words in a photo.
At least most online dating apps try to develop and communicate a sense of who you are, which in some cases, they do very well.
Has anybody gone through their privacy policy? The speed that this became viral and the possibilities to have an enormous amount of people take video all over the place gives me the heeby jeebies.. Some of the things in the policy sound very, very invasive.
I expect this to go quite a bit like Miitomo. Quick uptake, followed by most of the userbase getting bored and forgetting about it.
This game is pretty superficial. There isn't much to do. It unfortunately perpetuates the notion that mobile games cannot have depth or good, lasting gameplay.
Last phone game I really enjoyed was Tiny Wings. That was a while ago. Since then, anything I play on my phone has been in an emulator with a GameKlip and a DualShock 3.
The data and methodology is pretty suspect here -- Google for Pokémon Go reports 5m-10m installs while Tinder is reported to have 50m to 100m installs. This is an order of magnitude more worldwide installs. I think the 'current data' is being heavily weighted and producing a too sensational of an article.
For Tinder, about 25% of it's installs came from the US on Android. That still puts it at 12.5m - 25m Android installs range.
The terrifying thing is how the games location of items can manipulate foot traffic and could show bias of one business over the other across the street in turn manipulating be economy by moving us and our eventual spending around like lemmings....but it's just Pokemon right?
Yeah - it's definitely "new age" advertising but why jump to a "terrifying" "moving us around like lemmings" conclusion? If a company wants to spend money to drop lures good for them. People can go there if they choose or just ignore it.
If you count meeting people and possibly getting to know them to be a first step on the path to that, then yes. It's very easy to see who's playing the app nearby, and people often get talking while they're trying to take over a gym over waiting for spawns near a lure.
The crazy thing for me is the sheer explosive growth this has seen. I was walking around downtown Redwood City last night near the theater. Easily 50% of the people on the sidewalk walking or standing around were playing as verified by glancing at their screens as I passed them.
And these weren't just kids. Adults, men, women, all ethnicities, etc. were all playing. I've never seen anything like it. They've really stuck to their goal of getting people outside as summed up by this hilarious Reddit post [1].
It honestly has reminded me of when Facebook launched at my college back in 05. I remember being in the library and had Facebook pulled up, another student who I didn't know walked by and was like "Facebook! Add me!"
Immediate flashbacks when last night I was walking to my car from the grocery store with Go up on my phone. Guy yells "Pokemon go, right?"
Can someone explain how it works? I understand that it's AR- and location-based. How/where/why do you acquire the virtual creatures? Do you have to look for them aimlessly or are there clues?
Various landmarks are 'pokestops', where you can get pokeballs and other items. Some of those places are gyms, where you can pit your pokemon against others.
The pokemon themselves are spawned from random spots on the map and wander around, if you're in the area and have the app open you'll see it and can capture it by throwing pokeballs at it. There's a kind of wonky proximity indicator for nearby pokemon, and they're shown on the map by the random appearance of rustling grass.
Just played a little bit on someone else's account. You walk around looking at a map on your phone (very little detail on the map, it's just a 3d street map) and sometimes you see a pokemon running around on your block. You tap on the pokemon and a screen opens up where you have to throw a ball at it. When you hit it, you capture it. There are also these floating disks with images of local landmarks, and when you swipe on them, you get more balls or other prizes. That's about it.
You walk around until you see a Pokemon near your player, then tap it. Then the game goes into "camera" mode where you can snap a picture of the pokemon placed in the real world, or throw pokeballs at it by swiping your finger properly.
You walk around and your player walks around using the GPS.
Pokémon Go is very similar to the Nintendo DS game "Treasure World" (2009), where you collect randomized virtual loot based on Wi-Fi networks around you:
I'm just waited for the first theft tied to this. Shouldn't take a thief long to get the app and find a seedy area to drop a Lure in. Wait for unsuspecting hapless victim(s) to stand around staring at their phones oblivious to the world for an extended period of time and it would be like shooting fish in a barrel for a ride-by phone snatcher on a bike.
Having lived in Bolivia, I would never even -dream- of playing this in a third world country. People get shot for smartphones/tablets there, no respect for life.
Release in Germany is delayed due to server issues. You can download the APK and play the game if you want to. I'm sticking with Ingress until the final release.
It's pretty bad that Google can't scale this. It's not like the mass of users is unexpected. They have Ingress data to go on and there's the Pokemon factor. Makes me not want to use the Google cloud for my next project.
If Google had any sense, they would be throwing a tonne more at this. It may be Ingress with less features and a Pokemon skin but that latter part is exactly the mainstream appeal they need to make AR big. This is their big chance to create a new market. If they sort out the bugginess and roll out decent features in the next couple of months to keep retention, they're onto something big.
At near-on midnight on Saturday, there were 150-200 people sitting in a 70m stretch of the main public park area here in Brisbane CBD (Southbank). During Sunday when I walked through, that was closer to 250-300. This is purely because there's 3 or 4 points of interest in close proximity so people congregate there to interact with it. It's truly a sight to behold.
This game has captured the imagination of non-gamers better than anything I can think of in recent history. It's nearing WoW / CoD levels of ubiquity.
From what I understand, it'll ask a new login if the servers crash between usage sessions of the app. I've not had to log in today, for example, but yesterday I had to two or so times. The login bug is relatively low-priority to me - all it does is force me to switch to the 2FA app and then untick the music in settings. Compared to other bugs, that's trivial.
I'm still occasionally seeing bugs with gyms - for example, instantly kicking me back to the gym screen as soon as I try to battle - but that's fixable by going and battling another gym. I've yet to see a way to solve the other big gym bug wherein enemies stay at 1hp but never die or do anything until the timer runs out.
Otherwise, the standard client/server sync bugs (pokeballs sitting on screen doing nothing if you lose server connectivity during capturing it) and client-side bugs (battery saver mode cuasing the game to become completely unresponsive to touch sometimes when you bring it back by turning your phone upright again) are the main gripes.
The one thing which is missing (and which made Ingress the amazing game it is) is ingame notification and ingame player activity.
Based on the gym activity there are at least 15-20 players in my town but there is just no way of contacting them. If I am lucky I can manage to meet one by random chance but currently Pokemon Go is a rather single player game.
The other thing which is missing is a system which shows ingame player activity. At any given point I can open my scanner in Ingress and see exactly what's going on around me. I can see if there is a new player in town, I can see if my favorite enemy is active again, ... but in Pokemon Go I feel like I am blind.
I know that there are other Pokemon Go players out there in my town but I just can't see them or interact with them.
This game is targeting young kids, so I'm not sure there will ever be any person-identifying interaction. A lot of online multiplayer games for kids don't have interactions beyond friending/favouriting someone. P-GO would be a prime candidate for 4chan type people and you can imagine how that would work together with location spoofing and global playground. I expect that Nintendo & Niantic know this (Ingress never solved the chat spamming issues - bots advertising resources for real money)
Yes, of course you are right about the safety of the kids.
I just wish there was an opt-in system where you can choose to share your ingame actions. If you don't share it you are invisible and you can't see other players, but if you are into Ingress-like gameplay you can just enable it.
About bots and cheating in Ingress: the biggest problem is that Niantic is a small company and they just don't have the manpower to sufficiently deal with the cheating. If they were Valve or Blizzard the situation would be a bit different.
I'm not sure I'm buying the small company angle. Sure, there are always going to be very creative people who work around complex rules, but that's not everyone. They could apply very basic checks and get rid of 99% of spam I've seen. Specifically, applying "you just moved more than 20km in one go and posted the same message including {bay/sell} => permaban".
For one moving 20km to Paste a message is easy and legal - using the Intel map. If you use the chat there it uses whatever location your focus is on. Also banning the "selling items" accounts does very little, they are cheap to recreate. The thing you have to control are farming bots.
> moving 20km to Paste a message is easy and legal
Anything you can do in Ingress apart from actually hacking the players' phones, or sending threats is legal. It doesn't mean it shouldn't be filtered. At some point more than half the lines in the chat were bots trying to sell stuff. Killing either part works - production (farming) or selling.
I'm not saying it's nice and that I support those sellers, but I'd try to kill the root ... and the chat experience always was limited with Ingress. In my local groups it was good enough however to get into contact with people to get then to hangouts or slack or whatever. With Pokemon this is really missing.
Perhaps it's just easier to leave it like the way it is? This way they can easily track spam-bots and the network behind it. If they start to implement more sophisticated by systems the spammers would also become more sophisticated.
At the point where you can't really talk to people anymore because your window is just flooded with spam, no. It may be easier for Nianic, but not for the players.
Besides, are you serious with that suggestion? Would you prefer email spam filtering didn't exist, otherwise it would get sophisticated? (easier to leave it that way viagra for sale now)
If the game is targeting young kids, it's missing out on its primary audience. For one thing, young kids often do not have cellphones of their own. But for another, I was recently at a mall in a fairly major city, and I did not see one person under 18 playing, but near every Pokestop, and every lower spawn rate Pokemon, I found dozens of people. Pokemon games have had somewhat adult humor and themes for years, though the TV show is undoubtedly meant for a younger audience. Given that most of the people who really wanted this game are people who grew up on Pokemon and are now adults, not at least providing the option to have social interaction feels a bit wrong. It could be abused, sure, but I think throwing the necessary resources at keeping it from being abused, and punishing abusers would be worth keeping the game relevant to its current primary consumer.
I believe the point is that if the target audience includes kids, you get stuck with the restrictions that implies, whether or not they are the majority. Some of this is directly legally mandated, some of it is indirectly legally mandated by fear of lawsuit, and some of it is mandated by avoiding bad PR about any bad thing maybe possibly happening to some kid somewhere because of your app. By that, I don't mean to minimize concerns about the real possibility of things that could be bad, but to highlight the fact that the PR disaster doesn't even need a real bad thing to happen, just a semi-credible accusation made to the right media for any reason.
None of those three concerns can be fixed by any amount of "resource investment" that will satisfy anyone. It would just get them accused of censorship anyhow.
Nintendo has always been very reluctant to include social features within games beyond a very difficult to use friend list, hell, they removed SwapNote from the 3DS because it young players were getting inappropriate notes sent to them. Frankly, I'm surprised they haven't binned Miiverse some days, but they do an excellent job at moderating it.
I wouldn't expect Ingress-style open comms, but it would be nice to at least be able to message other players on a friend list.
AR done right inherently involves person-identifying interactions. All week almost everyone I know has made brand new real life friends while on their poké-travels. That's the draw here.
Um. I played Ingress up to level 7, at which point I gave up. The geolocation features were excellent and I enjoyed exploring my city and finding interesting landmarks that I hadn't seen before --- but I found the actual game was extremely lackluster.
The problem as I saw it was that the game (as of a few years ago) rewarded taking territory, but not keeping it. So capturing a portal scores you points. But once you've captured it, there's no point keeping it any more. In fact, you want it to be recaptured as quickly as possible so that you can retake it and score more points. I found that I'd hardly ever use the higher-end defensive items because there wasn't any point --- defending portals wasn't worth anything.
This encouraged the behaviour where you'd capture a portal, and outfit it with the cheapest possible resonators. This made it trivial for the other time to capture it, and they'd do the same thing. And then you would recapture it. Repeat ad nauseam. This wasn't fun.
I don't know what the gameplay's like for Go; hopefully they didn't make the same mistake this time.
Edit: I've just discovered that Ingress also has the field formation mechanic, which is an end-game thing and grants team points. So you want to hold portals there to maintain big fields. So there is something --- I just never got involved in it (probably because it involved talking to other Ingress players)...
> I don't know what the gameplay's like for Go; hopefully they didn't make the same mistake this time.
The "capture" gameplay is only in gyms, every day you can collect a bonus/rent of 10 coins and 500 dust for each gym where you have a pokemon. Increasing the level of a gym increases its defensive power (so less chance for an other team to capture it) and the number of pokemon which can be stored in it (spreading the wealth amongst the team)
> The problem as I saw it was that the game (as of a few years ago) rewarded taking territory, but not keeping it
I suspect that was intentional design. Niantic was born out of the Google Maps division, and IIRC, the whole point of Ingress (at least initially) was to crowd-source generation and verification of geo data for GMaps. You could think of it as Waze for pedestrians/bikes. So gameplay that encourages constant conflict == constant data stream.
Walking around my neighborhood last night on two occasions at different times of the day, I encountered a dozen or more players both times: people of all ages out in the park or walking their dog. I live in an urban area half a block from a park with four Pokéstops in close proximity, but meeting/interacting with other players is not going to be a problem.
I'm kind of on the fence here. I played Ingress quite a bit (and early), but what I disliked was that it seemed multiplayer only.
There was very little (for me) return for being a solo player and most Ingress communication at that time happened in G+ (aka I wasn't part of that).
Pokemon Go is in some ways a limited Ingress, but the collecting/evolving/upgrading part of the game is what got to me.
I'd be glad about social features in the game. But I already think that this is a better game than Ingress for me personally.
If I am on my own then Pomemon Go is currently much more exciting than Ingress. But I miss i) you can not annoy opponents by blowing up their farms/homeportals, ii) make long bike tours in order to build large fields and iii) meeting with 8+ players and building a nice L8 farm, iv) being involved in continent-wide fielding operations with 100s of other players.
tldr: Pokemon Go is the better single player game, but if you are into large-scale and coordinated multi player games then Ingress is better.
I think that's a very short-sighted judgement to say that the game is nearing anywhere close to the level of games like Wow and CoD, and sadly -- it will never get there.
There isn't very much flexibility that the game offers, and even it if will offer it in the future, the initial moon phase will be over by then.
It's a nice example of launching a product and getting people to use it, but within a few weeks Pokemon Go will be history, unless of course, people find more dead bodies or other surreal stuff while playing the game, though I wonder if that's the reputation that the developers are going for.
Yeah, I feel like they set themselves up for a tough situation in a few weeks. Ingress was in beta and invite-only state for ages, which allowed the map to be built up and people to slowly join over time. People who joined later were still excited about low-level peers starting with them.
P-GO is likely to reach its peak in a few days... If some exciting content updates don't follow they may have a problem keeping people around. They'll definitely retain many fans (people still play the original handheld versions), but it will be interesting to see what happens in the future. Also, from own experience - it was easy to play Ingress and go on long walks initially. But after a while, you really want to spend time doing other things; past some point a 1h trip to do something specific for virtual points loses the appeal.
Pokemon Go reminds me of nothing so much as the Macarena in 1995. It's a fad that will run its course. But a game getting that level of cultural penetration will be a real watershed.
Tetris wasn't that big before the Gameboy version. It was "big" in the tiny new computer/tech world, but it was gameboy which brought it into the mainstream.
Yes, but that difference is mitigated by the fact that tetris was the first mobile videogame that was popular or even socially acceptable for the post-college crowd to play.
It's going to easily pass WoW and CoD...if they get it working better fast enough. Actually, scratch that. At this point all they need to do is show an intense commitment to daily improvements. They don't need to solve everything immediately, they just need to convince people that they're making it better as fast as they can.
Pokemon Go has all the right elements at exactly the right time. It's going to be tremendous if they can keep up.
I think that highly depends on what they do. In its current form, you're probably right. If they add the right features, I think it could be big. What are those features? I'd speculate that the big one is letting people battle each other with the pokemon they've collected. Also, let them trade pokemon with one another and get them building teams. Give people a reason to interact with one another using the app, and they'll start talking to each other in these strange places they keep congregating.
> I'd speculate that the big one is letting people battle each other with the pokemon they've collected.
I haven't played Pokemon Go, but if you can't do this, what exactly are people doing in the game? Just collecting Pokemon and doing nothing with them? Honest question -- I had implicitly assumed being able to battle with collected Pokemon was the whole point.
It just feels like such an enormous misstep to me, I can't even fathom it.
Why not wait until the game was much more polished and had many more traditional Pokemon features before release?
Nobody will be playing this in a month unless Niantic are really really fast with the content updates. Like, one per week fast, until it's much more deep than it currently is.
> Why not wait until the game was much more polished and had many more traditional Pokemon features before release?
The game has all the G1 pokemon. I've had friends ask if it had "that modern garbage" before considering installing it, so having just G1 sounds like an excellent pick, it doesn't hinder younger people and recaptures the RGBY generation which didn't keep up with the series.
There's plenty of things to add and improve (including but not limited to the servers) and the rest of the international rollout to complete before there's any reason to expand to Gold and Silver.
The problem isn't a lack of Pokemon, it's a severe lack of polish. For example:
- Obviously the servers are slow, but the app freezes and crashes all the time too.
- The help text is unhelpful and leaves the user with a ton of questions as to what the buttons actually do.
- Little to no support for people in rural areas, as the Pokemon follow the XM patterns from Ingress.
- Buggy Pokemon catching (e.g. you have to throw super far to catch Zubat)
- No way to add friends, and very little community interaction (with the exception of gyms and lure modules).
- Can't rename character, change clothing, etc.
- The map on the Pokemon screen loads slower than everything else, so when you go to tap "Transfer" and the map loads it changes the layout and makes you click the app.
It feels more like a buggy beta of Farmville with geocaching than it does a Pokemon game. Pokemon Go is to the classic Pokemon games as Elder Scrolls Online is to the classic Elder Scrolls games -- tons of potential, but severely lacking in execution.
> - No way to add friends, and very little community interaction (with the exception of gyms and lure modules).
For what it's worth, here in New York City, the community interaction takes place IRL. There are literally hordes of people roaming the parks. Some people set out lures, and then sit on benches, striking up conversations with other players who walk over to try and catch some Pokemon.
I can't imagine how this game would work in rural areas, though.
I think Pokemon has more to do with success of it than the AR stuff. I see most people playing without AR on. Pokemon appeals to the nostalgia factor. A lot of us grew with these games when we were kids. Now most of us older, but we still grew with them. It also hits the kids demo as well. Pokemon is/was a good game. Its like why marvel and transformers and all these 80s/90s cartoons are doing so well.
> I think Pokemon has more to do with success of it than the AR stuff. I see most people playing without AR on. Pokemon appeals to the nostalgia factor.
I think it's both. The game isn't great on it's own, and I bet the AR will feel tiring after a while like it did with Ingress. But this is amazingly close to the real-world idea of Pokemon so many of us have wanted since childhood.
Last night I went for a walk in the middle of the night to a nearby park. I encountered a few other "pokemon trainers" on the way (it's really obvious when someone is playing), and at the park were at least 30-40 other people, spread out in small groups, some hanging out in spots, some wandering around the grass tracking a Pokemon...
Seeing Pokemon in the real world is neat and all, but meeting lots of other "Pokemon Trainers"?! Wow, that really made me feel like a little kid again. I hope the population stays active until they add battling. It seems like it would be incredibly dull playing this game by yourself without running into others.
I'm surprised there's so little talk about privacy and nuisance implications of this.
We've had a large number of "suspicious behavior" reported in our neighborhood in the past week - and, honestly, it really is suspicious, as in people crawling through the bushes on private property at dusk snapping pictures with cellphones; you know, the kind of stuff that would normally make you go "hmm, I wonder if this house gets robbed soon", and give your local PD a quick call.
But I'm pretty sure it's mostly GO, just looking at how many are around. What's worse is that the game places some of those pokemons in private yards or even inside buildings, with no way to access them short of trespassing...
Currently discussing with friends best way to crack it and make it seem like there's a rare pokemon just up ahead - for all those people who slowly clog up the sidewalks and stations staring at their phones.
Ideas welcome!
(For the official record, since you have to say this these days - I'm only joking)
It's already been noted that the application itself doesn't verify the validity of TLS certs, so it's trivial to MITM the connection and there are currently people working to learn the ins and outs of the API.
browsers generally don't pin certs. there are methods to do it but everyone is scared to do it as it's a pretty quick way to DoS your entire user-base if you get it wrong.
The intended design of PKI suggests that pinning should not be a thing. unfortunately PKI is broken and pinning is a 'patch' because it's too each to obtain a cert for a property you don't own (hi bluecoat)
There are legitimate reasons to extend the trusted root certificates (notably: corporate deployments). Admitted, I cannot come up with a reason that has anything to do with Pokemon, but - in general I think this should be possible.
Plus: Who do you want to protect and from whom? The only person able to make Pokemon Go (locally, on their phone) accept another certificate is by having full access to the phone in the first place. It's the user, 'hacking' his own device.
If this leads to exploits on the Pokemon Go server for some reason, than _those_ are the problems. The communication between app and Pokemon Go server uses TLS, even if I spoof a certificate for my very own device.
For me this is one of the examples of Raymond Chen's "If you're already on the other side of the hatch it isn't a security exploit", but I might absolutely fail to understand the risks of course.
im not interested in hacking or modifying things, but would love to get api access to the data - can you link to a forum where this stuff is being worked on?
The first pokecrime has already been committed -- criminals placed a "lure" in the middle of a night in a secluded space, and robbed teens that showed up there at 2am:
Yesterday I was browsing pictures of huge groups of players staring at their phones in public areas and thought, wow, what a perfect opportunity for criminals to steal some phones.
It seems to me that almost every other app is about to or has surpassed Twitter in Daily/Monthly active users. Twitter seems to have some pretty big problems keeping its users engaged.
Instagram and Snapchat are not just every other app. I think Twitter is used as a reference in these kind of statements because their number of active users is pretty stagnant.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadI've never seen anything like it.
Instead it's very clear to me that it's a Google app with Pokémon branding. Release fast, bugs are OK, we can fix them later. Don't worry about the fact that the iOS version feels like an Android app and is somewhat obnoxious to use.
I can't help but think that if this game had another two months of polish it would be amazing. Instead, it's in its current slightly crappy state with a serious server issue going on.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic,_Inc.
I don't feel great saying this stuff, but I don't know how else to communicate just how startlingly bad the app can be, and how much it feels like a terribly lazy port of an Android app.
I don't know. Maybe if I use the Android app for a few days I'd find out that more or less every single issue is just as bad.
I really think that this comes from Google-style thinking - there aren't any workplaces that'd have problems if we turned on cameras / sound automatically [1], there's no other timezones than California, everywhere is high density.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10577601
Which is a really great way to do it since playing this game in a rural area basically requires walking significantly further than in a city.
This weekend was... different. Even though the weather was miserable, the area was buzzing. I've never seen so many people with a common purpose in the area, or being so friendly and connected. The connection? Magikarp spawn near the water.
The marketing is ingenious. It manages to capitalize on the nostalgia of two generations that grew up playing Pokemon games, and the fact that the stated (virtual) premise of Pokemon was always to roam the world and catch these creatures.
Regardless of the longevity of the game, this phenomenal marriage of a popular videogame series with an experienced alternate reality company will be studied for many years.
It shows the potential for AR games, and I think it will help a lot of people get in shape. I've walked around outside more in the past three days than I have in the past two months. Even hanging out with friends, rather than sitting inside watching tv or playing xbox, it's like "let's check out that lure", or, "I see a Bulbasaur, let's go get it".
When I was a kid, I remember wishing that Pokemon was real. This game really captures some of the magic and sense of adventure I felt when I first played it so many years ago.
But yeah, version 2 is cool too, I guess. ;)
Like Ingress, it'll be pretty busy for a few months and then it'll probably recede back to a core community of people who really really get into it.
Pokemon GO has the advantage of being based on an multi-billion dollar, 20-year-old franchise. Its appeal goes beyond that of a typical videogame, so has a significant leg up over Ingress in people's hearts and minds. Its popularity will eventually segment into a hardcore group and a mainstream group, but its mindshare among the wider population is likely to remain strong.
Since Google made it I don't exactly blame them, but that was a huge chunk of the market. I wanted to give it a try and I'm sure there were tons of other people but we couldn't since we didn't have Android phones.
That's not an issue with Pokémon GO.
Closed beta - November 15, 2012
Open beta - October 30, 2013
General Android Release - December 14, 2013
iOS Release - July 14, 2014
Huh, I only heard about it last year.
In Ingress, everything is about taking over portals for your team. You get items with weird names that you use for taking over portals. The maximum strength of the items you get is determined by your experience level, up to 8. After level 8 all players are equal.
What Ingress has that Pokemon Go doesn't have is "linking", where you form straight lines between portals your team owns that you've visited, and if you form a triangle of links in your color, you form a "field" that claims the area within it for your team.
That was cool, but I have made enough links and fields for a lifetime. Eventually there isn't much more to do, unless you're teaming up and making elaborate plans to form crazy huge fields, for which the reward is that you get to screenshot it and gloat about it on Reddit for a few hours before someone undoes your field, possibly by cheating.
I hope that Pokemon battles become as compelling as linking, or more. (I have only had one Pokemon battle that didn't crash or glitch out so far.)
In addition to the levelling-up aspect (L1-L16) Ingress has about a dozen "Medals", each with 5-tiers. IMO, they go along way in terms of giving a feeling of personal progress.
> In Ingress, everything is about taking over portals for your team.
There are also infrequent Niantic-organized global 'Anomaly' events, which require a surprising amount of planning and coordination. To me, the reward is not taking a screenshot, but taking part in an activity that scratches that deeply human/primal "my group vs. its enemies" itch in my lizard brain in a safe way. Its like being on any kind of team really. On a meta level, it scares be how easily members of the other team get dehumanized (being called stupid, or having more money than sense, etc for no real reason). It's petty stuff mostly, but the whole in-group/out-group thing freaks me out a little.
So, the game claims that I walked a bit more than 40km so far and I'm going for the next (100km..) level of that medal. As soon as I reach 200 caught normal type Pokemon (at ~150 now?) I get the next 'Schoolkid' level.
Was/is Ingress different?
As I stated elsewhere, for me it's Ingress vs. Pokemon Go is currently Multiplayer vs. Singleplayer, Community vs. Progression
Ingress is similar - those are the tiers I was referring to. The only difference is Ingress medals are purely decorative: they don't affect gameplay. I haven't played Pokemon, but it sounds like a refinement of ideas present in Ingress.
I'm not surprised it's taking off.
Is pervasive tracking just unnoticeable now?
"When's the last time you saw some new technology or program and were honestly excited, instead of worried about the privacy implications?"
What will really be telling is how many people still play after a week or two.
The gym battles are terribly boring.
a) its the same as ingress. With all but even more of the annoying bugs. b) It eats even more battery than ingress c) Its purely pay to win. I could have lived with free 2 play and buying some special or cosmetic items. But not selling essential items ...
Currently i mostly wonder why people don't care about that. I hate playing games where other players can just spend $10 and overtake hours worth of skilling.
But you can't. Not really. I guess it's location-dependant but if you live anywhere near a student campus or town there are literally tens of pokestops in a short 10min walk. My SO has got from level 1-11 without spending a penny, just by incorporating more pokestops into her little 'route' she has going. Added to that, the cooldown on a pokestop is 5 mins iirc, so you can pretty much milk them infinitely. If there's a stop in a pub for example, you'd be able to get 12 spins in the hour it takes you to catch up with your friends. Each spin tends to yield between 1-5 poke/greatballs.
Not sure what else is p2w, I was in the same boat as you until I saw how much progress my SO made without touching her purse.
I guess arguably the incense items in the cash shop are 'p2w', but you do get these through levelling up. Haven't seen any appear at pokestops yet. I've used 5 myself and all I've obtained through it are more Weedles and Pidgeys.
Dont get me wrong. I was niantic fan from beginning, one of the first Ingress players, probably even the first in my country. I really appreciate what they are doing.
I just simply refuse to touch pay 2 win games as they always get frustrating at some point.
Of course that hasn't stopped me from sinking a lot of time into it this weekend. I've spent $10 on it, which is easily a record for free to play game for me.
The server issues are one thing, but the game doesn't even get lots of basic things right. If the server goes away, or sometimes if I'm just out of the app too long, I have to log back in. It seems to forget my settings for weather I want sound and music on, or to use the AR functions. I've run into numerous crashes and graphical glitches. Input getting confused requiring app restarts. Poor handling of the (common) network/server issues.
One of the mechanics requires walking around, which it won't track outside the app despite the fact that iPhones have had motion coprocessor for years. So they offer a special mode (very poorly documented) that basically turns the screen black and tries to reduce power usage a bit. But you have to keep the Pokémon app open to track steps.
I am having fun. I REALLY hope they can fix these issues. I sought earlier today that they do plan to add Pokémon trading and expand the functionality of the various waypoints in the world. I'd also love to be able to battle my friends.
The social aspect on this just amazes me. In the last couple of days they're been numerous times when I saw a random people clearly playing this game. Guys walking around parking lots at work, cars parked at empty banks that were closed because there happened to be a gym there. Numerous posts on social media about random gatherings and flash mobs because of something going on in the game.
It's clear that Ingress had a pretty good idea. Tying it to a major brand (not unlike the way Mario kart was created) that really encourages the collecting aspect and getting it out on iOS at basically the same time have clearly made a huge difference.
I'll also say, is a Pokémon fan I'm glad that it's only the 150 original in the game. At this point there are way too many Pokémon that seem the same to me, so I'm glad to see my old friends instead. I imagine that'll change someday but this is a good start.
Also the 3DS has patching/software updates. The Pokemon Company could release games as buggy as they want. They have the good sense not to do that, since it devalues their product.
It's fucking bullshit.
I'm so tired of people releasing utter crap and claiming it's OK to fix it later. You know what happens when you do that? You turn off a huge number of people and poison the brand.
It's not like if they waited an extra months to actually fix the issues (which were apparently well known in Beta) the Pokémon brand would've been dead no one would've cared. This isn't tied to some new property that no one knows if it will succeed.
This is tarnishing a major brand and ruining a fantastic opportunity.
All because a bunch of developers don't care enough about what they're making. They don't have enough pride in their products because "people will buy crap, we can fix it later."
Apparently what happens is your app becomes one of the most downloaded in history.
The truth is, those "lazy developers" are right. They can release utter crap and fix it later. People will put up with it simply because of their emotional investment in the brand, and it will make money regardless of its issues.
I don't understand why this discussion is about the developers. Do you think Tim, who writes network code for the iOS version, gets to say when they launch?
No. Some top dog at Niantic says "We're launching early to catch the summer buzz while kids are out of school." And Tim says "But we don't handle network disconnects gracefully yet." And top-dog man says "Can you still catch Pokemon and battle at gyms?" And Tim admits, "Yes, you can." And top-dog says: "We launch tomorrow, then."
I wouldn't blame this too much on laziness but on incompetence.
In many places, this happens with at least 50% probability on a mobile connection. It literally fails more often than not. The advice people are giving is to turn off LTE, which seems to help for some reason. But come on.
Once you get in it'll still have to download locations of nearby pokestops and gyms, which is another chance to hang and require a relaunch. Network glitches are not handled gracefully.
On the hang while catching a Pokemon: my guess is it's trying to ask the server if the Pokemon breaks free of the ball. Sometimes when you exit and relaunch you'll have gotten the Pokemon, other times it's totally gone. When the game works properly you get to keep trying, but if it locked up on network issues and made you quit, you don't get the chance. People are understandably annoyed at server issues screwing them out of rare captures.
Pokemon Go is already showing signs of the same problem at Gyms, where newer players are going to have to grind for days to take on a gym that their team doesn't already own.
It would help to add to the density of the map in less populated areas, though that might make the trespassing issue a lot worse.
But how can you not remember if I've me that the sound? How can you not remember I logged in? With a handful of ultrabasic bugs it feels like they just didn't even try.
If they are network issues why do I get stuck in a try again later screen were the only thing I can do is force quit the app?
It's a lazy as hell and Nintendo should be ashamed that someone's dragging their name down like that.
The real killer? I love the idea of this app. I'd probably end up spending a bunch of money on it if I kept it around for a couple months, because I don't have the time I need to play it the free way. It's fun (or it at least scratches that grindy type itch), and it's the only game I've ever been able to play with my partner. I'm on the verge of uninstalling right now though, because every time I get the chance to play, the app dies in my hands.
This doesn't just happen when in "catch a pokemon" minigame mode. This happens at all screens. The game was programming to expect full, 100% network connectivity, and if it loses that for even a brief moment, the whole thing comes crashing down, requiring a full kill and reset.
Can someone explain this? Isn't the value of a game in the playing of it? If a millionaire could pay to have hundreds of Pokemons spawning in their living room so they can get more points than anyone without leaving the house, what would be the point? If you're having fun playing with your girlfriend, but don't have much free time, why would paying to catch up matter? Did they design it to be limited gameplay, where you only get a teaser if you don't play it all the time, requiring that you buy things in order to get any real gameplay time out of it?
to it I'd add that this is also the difference between the $20/hour programmer and the $200/hour programmer -- speaking in broad strokes, knowingly, and if you'll indulge me charitably. Because the difference between the commodity "let's ship something!" programmer/engineer and the one who truly knows his/her stuff, and who truly thinks about and knows about and cares about the edge cases, the big picture, the total system, all possible states in the state machine space, is what justifies those differences in (ostensible) upfront cost.
If you only want "the user is in location X and so icon Y should be rendered on their screen at point P" then you can get that pretty cheap, at globalization-plus-crowdsourced-plus-cloud-reduced prices
But if you want that above but also, with good performance, correctness, stability, scale, all edge cases handled reasonably and gracefully, and in v1.0, and well documented, and with good English, and maturity, curtesy, legality, i18n, etc... well, then you're going to pay. Or you should expect to pay. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Ever. If you think you have a free lunch, or a reduced cost lunch, then all it means is that somebody else off-stage is paying for that difference. And that difference may come back to bite you.
You could have a hundred "$200/hour programmers" on the team for this app, but if management says they need to ship three weeks early to catch the buzz, or something like that, it doesn't matter. We can't say the developers were bad. I mean it's possible, given how poorly the game handles network disconnections, among other bugs. But unfortunately we don't live in a utopia where the guys writing the code get to decide when they want to release. Or if features get added in the last minute. Etc.
in many situations, an owner/manager/lead is making decisions where, frankly, the company has no revenue so they know their ostensible default spending path is equivalent to a ticking time bomb.
or... they don't truly know whether or how well the engineer can deliver, yet they do know for sure definitively what their dollar spend will be. thus, the results we see.
But TBH, that is probably not about how much the engineering team is paid, it's about what culture they have. Nintendo's console development teams would never ship something with this many catastophic bugs. Niantic has probably decided that the way they're doing things is "industry standard" (within the context of mobile and their particular silo) and does not need substantial improvement.
Edit: How poor is this code, you ask? It does not let me rename my Pokemon. A race condition occurs where it tries to pop up the Android keyboard and close it at the same time.
EDIT: I'm not talking about Imgur. I'm talking about Imgur's posts about Pokemon Go. My bad for the ambiguity.
What the client should be doing is gracefully reconnecting and picking up at the state it left off in... which it certainly is NOT doing right now.
In fact, I quite enjoy it. It's a little simple for the first few levels, but that's how Pokemon games have always been!
Once you level up your character, you'll start getting harder Pokemon to catch and you can start trying to take and hold gyms. And you'll get enough candies to start upgrading and evolving your Pokemon as well.
To put it plainly, this is the first mobile game in years to get me really excited about getting out there and doing things. Ingress was okay for a while, but never amazing. Zombies Run! had issues that I never got over, and I just quit... And it wasn't really compelling anyhow.
But this? My wife and I repaired the tires on our bikes after years of saying we'd do that, and we've been on multiple bike rides already. I'm quite looking forward to continuing that trend, and without the Pokemon aspect, I know it wouldn't happen as often, if at all.
So no, it's not "objectively bad". It's quite clearly compelling and enjoyable for a lot of people, just maybe not for you. And that's perfectly okay on all accounts.
For those who don't want to invest too much time, they can occasionally boot up the app when they walk around and catch a few pokemon. Those who are more hardcore will probably stick around at gyms and battle away.
Doesn't that mean the game is good? Lots of people enjoy Uno, not every game can be Go (nor should it). If you're having fun, you're doing it right.
Why yes, it does have very broad appeal.
Talking recently to a female friend recently who is on Tindr ... it was pretty astonishing how numb she'd become to the profiles... absolute objectification. Even as she was fairly self-aware about it.
It's about as healthy as nicotine.
Admittedly, it's an absolutely brilliant business model, tapping into primal forces, but it's not a step forward. It's a step sideways, at best, and maybe even a little step back.
When VC meets creativity meets technology, it will induce a lot of dollars in this direction irrespective of long term positive economic or social outcomes, often taking attention away from 'better' causes. Absent reasonably enlightened consideration (and I mean just 'basic' consideration, not some holier-than-though ideology), there is no moving forward - just moving in random directions, pulled by the arbitrary forces of hyper-populist memes and trends. Some will make a lot of $$$ as the money sloshes around in a zero-sum game, but surely, but that really isn't the point. In the long run, the Valley and tech scene will lose authenticity and be about as credible as politicians, homeopaths, or Amway.
I'll bet $100 that anyone working in tech or any other industry for more than 5-8 years, will start to understand that it's not about 'a job' or 'making bling', or 'being startup famous' and that they work they do has impact across cultures and communities, and that they are ultimately responsible for whatever it is they are working on. Given that there are 10 000 projects around to chose from, it's hot hard to climb higher on the ladder than Tindr, by almost any measure, even $$$.
I don't really care about Tindr that much, I have about as much 'against it' as I do a ridiculous Transformers film (which is nothing), but it's not worth any attention either.
I'm looking forward to Pokemon :)
What would those be? Whether they find the potential date attractive in the first place?
Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Of course, looks matter. We make such 'snap decisions' all day long. The problem is, absent anything else, that's the entire decision. In the real world, personality goes a much longer way than the 1000 words in a photo.
At least most online dating apps try to develop and communicate a sense of who you are, which in some cases, they do very well.
https://www.nianticlabs.com/privacy/pokemongo/en/
Edit: Heh, I went on indeed to see if there was a spike of video analyst jobs and got this awesome ad on the right: https://imgur.com/MMyjbQN
This game is pretty superficial. There isn't much to do. It unfortunately perpetuates the notion that mobile games cannot have depth or good, lasting gameplay.
Last phone game I really enjoyed was Tiny Wings. That was a while ago. Since then, anything I play on my phone has been in an emulator with a GameKlip and a DualShock 3.
For Tinder, about 25% of it's installs came from the US on Android. That still puts it at 12.5m - 25m Android installs range.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tinder
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nianticlab...
Interesting to think about what personal information they're gaining from this, as well as mapping information.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-16/nintendo-g...
And these weren't just kids. Adults, men, women, all ethnicities, etc. were all playing. I've never seen anything like it. They've really stuck to their goal of getting people outside as summed up by this hilarious Reddit post [1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongo/comments/4rwf24/pokemon_t...
Immediate flashbacks when last night I was walking to my car from the grocery store with Go up on my phone. Guy yells "Pokemon go, right?"
The pokemon themselves are spawned from random spots on the map and wander around, if you're in the area and have the app open you'll see it and can capture it by throwing pokeballs at it. There's a kind of wonky proximity indicator for nearby pokemon, and they're shown on the map by the random appearance of rustling grass.
You walk around and your player walks around using the GPS.
http://www.gamesradar.com/treasure-world-review/
Catching Pokemon in a barrel?
It's pretty bad that Google can't scale this. It's not like the mass of users is unexpected. They have Ingress data to go on and there's the Pokemon factor. Makes me not want to use the Google cloud for my next project.
I'd be pretty embarrassed at not predicting the load that a game like this would put on servers. I wonder if they got a good deal from GCE?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic,_Inc.
At near-on midnight on Saturday, there were 150-200 people sitting in a 70m stretch of the main public park area here in Brisbane CBD (Southbank). During Sunday when I walked through, that was closer to 250-300. This is purely because there's 3 or 4 points of interest in close proximity so people congregate there to interact with it. It's truly a sight to behold.
This game has captured the imagination of non-gamers better than anything I can think of in recent history. It's nearing WoW / CoD levels of ubiquity.
I'm still occasionally seeing bugs with gyms - for example, instantly kicking me back to the gym screen as soon as I try to battle - but that's fixable by going and battling another gym. I've yet to see a way to solve the other big gym bug wherein enemies stay at 1hp but never die or do anything until the timer runs out.
Otherwise, the standard client/server sync bugs (pokeballs sitting on screen doing nothing if you lose server connectivity during capturing it) and client-side bugs (battery saver mode cuasing the game to become completely unresponsive to touch sometimes when you bring it back by turning your phone upright again) are the main gripes.
Based on the gym activity there are at least 15-20 players in my town but there is just no way of contacting them. If I am lucky I can manage to meet one by random chance but currently Pokemon Go is a rather single player game.
The other thing which is missing is a system which shows ingame player activity. At any given point I can open my scanner in Ingress and see exactly what's going on around me. I can see if there is a new player in town, I can see if my favorite enemy is active again, ... but in Pokemon Go I feel like I am blind.
I know that there are other Pokemon Go players out there in my town but I just can't see them or interact with them.
I just wish there was an opt-in system where you can choose to share your ingame actions. If you don't share it you are invisible and you can't see other players, but if you are into Ingress-like gameplay you can just enable it.
About bots and cheating in Ingress: the biggest problem is that Niantic is a small company and they just don't have the manpower to sufficiently deal with the cheating. If they were Valve or Blizzard the situation would be a bit different.
Anything you can do in Ingress apart from actually hacking the players' phones, or sending threats is legal. It doesn't mean it shouldn't be filtered. At some point more than half the lines in the chat were bots trying to sell stuff. Killing either part works - production (farming) or selling.
Besides, are you serious with that suggestion? Would you prefer email spam filtering didn't exist, otherwise it would get sophisticated? (easier to leave it that way viagra for sale now)
None of those three concerns can be fixed by any amount of "resource investment" that will satisfy anyone. It would just get them accused of censorship anyhow.
I wouldn't expect Ingress-style open comms, but it would be nice to at least be able to message other players on a friend list.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/07/10/four-suspects-...
The problem as I saw it was that the game (as of a few years ago) rewarded taking territory, but not keeping it. So capturing a portal scores you points. But once you've captured it, there's no point keeping it any more. In fact, you want it to be recaptured as quickly as possible so that you can retake it and score more points. I found that I'd hardly ever use the higher-end defensive items because there wasn't any point --- defending portals wasn't worth anything.
This encouraged the behaviour where you'd capture a portal, and outfit it with the cheapest possible resonators. This made it trivial for the other time to capture it, and they'd do the same thing. And then you would recapture it. Repeat ad nauseam. This wasn't fun.
I don't know what the gameplay's like for Go; hopefully they didn't make the same mistake this time.
Edit: I've just discovered that Ingress also has the field formation mechanic, which is an end-game thing and grants team points. So you want to hold portals there to maintain big fields. So there is something --- I just never got involved in it (probably because it involved talking to other Ingress players)...
The "capture" gameplay is only in gyms, every day you can collect a bonus/rent of 10 coins and 500 dust for each gym where you have a pokemon. Increasing the level of a gym increases its defensive power (so less chance for an other team to capture it) and the number of pokemon which can be stored in it (spreading the wealth amongst the team)
I suspect that was intentional design. Niantic was born out of the Google Maps division, and IIRC, the whole point of Ingress (at least initially) was to crowd-source generation and verification of geo data for GMaps. You could think of it as Waze for pedestrians/bikes. So gameplay that encourages constant conflict == constant data stream.
Pokemon Go is in some ways a limited Ingress, but the collecting/evolving/upgrading part of the game is what got to me.
I'd be glad about social features in the game. But I already think that this is a better game than Ingress for me personally.
tldr: Pokemon Go is the better single player game, but if you are into large-scale and coordinated multi player games then Ingress is better.
There isn't very much flexibility that the game offers, and even it if will offer it in the future, the initial moon phase will be over by then.
It's a nice example of launching a product and getting people to use it, but within a few weeks Pokemon Go will be history, unless of course, people find more dead bodies or other surreal stuff while playing the game, though I wonder if that's the reputation that the developers are going for.
FYI: The statement should be the honeymoon phase, derived from the nothing-but-bliss albeit short-lived marital phase, rather than the lunar one.
P-GO is likely to reach its peak in a few days... If some exciting content updates don't follow they may have a problem keeping people around. They'll definitely retain many fans (people still play the original handheld versions), but it will be interesting to see what happens in the future. Also, from own experience - it was easy to play Ingress and go on long walks initially. But after a while, you really want to spend time doing other things; past some point a 1h trip to do something specific for virtual points loses the appeal.
Now, the adult mobile gaming market is saturated.
Pokemon Go has all the right elements at exactly the right time. It's going to be tremendous if they can keep up.
I haven't played Pokemon Go, but if you can't do this, what exactly are people doing in the game? Just collecting Pokemon and doing nothing with them? Honest question -- I had implicitly assumed being able to battle with collected Pokemon was the whole point.
Why not wait until the game was much more polished and had many more traditional Pokemon features before release?
Nobody will be playing this in a month unless Niantic are really really fast with the content updates. Like, one per week fast, until it's much more deep than it currently is.
The game has all the G1 pokemon. I've had friends ask if it had "that modern garbage" before considering installing it, so having just G1 sounds like an excellent pick, it doesn't hinder younger people and recaptures the RGBY generation which didn't keep up with the series.
There's plenty of things to add and improve (including but not limited to the servers) and the rest of the international rollout to complete before there's any reason to expand to Gold and Silver.
- Obviously the servers are slow, but the app freezes and crashes all the time too.
- The help text is unhelpful and leaves the user with a ton of questions as to what the buttons actually do.
- Little to no support for people in rural areas, as the Pokemon follow the XM patterns from Ingress.
- Buggy Pokemon catching (e.g. you have to throw super far to catch Zubat)
- No way to add friends, and very little community interaction (with the exception of gyms and lure modules).
- Can't rename character, change clothing, etc.
- The map on the Pokemon screen loads slower than everything else, so when you go to tap "Transfer" and the map loads it changes the layout and makes you click the app.
It feels more like a buggy beta of Farmville with geocaching than it does a Pokemon game. Pokemon Go is to the classic Pokemon games as Elder Scrolls Online is to the classic Elder Scrolls games -- tons of potential, but severely lacking in execution.
For what it's worth, here in New York City, the community interaction takes place IRL. There are literally hordes of people roaming the parks. Some people set out lures, and then sit on benches, striking up conversations with other players who walk over to try and catch some Pokemon.
I can't imagine how this game would work in rural areas, though.
I think it's both. The game isn't great on it's own, and I bet the AR will feel tiring after a while like it did with Ingress. But this is amazingly close to the real-world idea of Pokemon so many of us have wanted since childhood.
Last night I went for a walk in the middle of the night to a nearby park. I encountered a few other "pokemon trainers" on the way (it's really obvious when someone is playing), and at the park were at least 30-40 other people, spread out in small groups, some hanging out in spots, some wandering around the grass tracking a Pokemon...
Seeing Pokemon in the real world is neat and all, but meeting lots of other "Pokemon Trainers"?! Wow, that really made me feel like a little kid again. I hope the population stays active until they add battling. It seems like it would be incredibly dull playing this game by yourself without running into others.
We've had a large number of "suspicious behavior" reported in our neighborhood in the past week - and, honestly, it really is suspicious, as in people crawling through the bushes on private property at dusk snapping pictures with cellphones; you know, the kind of stuff that would normally make you go "hmm, I wonder if this house gets robbed soon", and give your local PD a quick call.
But I'm pretty sure it's mostly GO, just looking at how many are around. What's worse is that the game places some of those pokemons in private yards or even inside buildings, with no way to access them short of trespassing...
Ideas welcome!
(For the official record, since you have to say this these days - I'm only joking)
The intended design of PKI suggests that pinning should not be a thing. unfortunately PKI is broken and pinning is a 'patch' because it's too each to obtain a cert for a property you don't own (hi bluecoat)
Plus: Who do you want to protect and from whom? The only person able to make Pokemon Go (locally, on their phone) accept another certificate is by having full access to the phone in the first place. It's the user, 'hacking' his own device.
If this leads to exploits on the Pokemon Go server for some reason, than _those_ are the problems. The communication between app and Pokemon Go server uses TLS, even if I spoof a certificate for my very own device.
For me this is one of the examples of Raymond Chen's "If you're already on the other side of the hatch it isn't a security exploit", but I might absolutely fail to understand the risks of course.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/07/10/four-suspects-...
I am totally not shocked at this news.