I guess my account has been shadowbanned since the beginning - there are only 2 PokeStops in 5 km (3.1 mile) radius and all they have is Pidgey and Rattata 99% of the time.
I am putting a strong assumption that he has the same problem that a large chunk of players like myself have called 'ruralistis' or 'farmlandempti' where if you aren't in a large city or on a coast, your pokemon spawns for the first 8 months of the game were limited to pidgeys and rattatta and once in a blue moon there might be something amazingly rare like a Weedle, because our town data wasn't in the data source they used to calculate biomes.
Many player have noticed this and have been updating openstreetmaps.org data in hopes that Niantic does a biome refresh and that OSM is actually where they are sourcing their data from.
"updating" OSM = creating parks and rivers where they don't exist. It's an annoyance for OSM maintainers, there's a Slack channel that specifically flags things that look like they might be Pokemon Go users adding bogus features.
The way they have implemented it Shadowbanning is basically sending the bots to the cornfield.
I still think the game is ridiculous in how much it punishes people for simply not living in the city. Even if you had a low density of stops out in the country they could at least have decent numbers of random spawns. This is one reason I stopped playing, seeing only Pidgies and Ratatas gets old. Also, having the game get angry at you for riding a bike is dumb, bike riding is a huge part of the lore of the game!
Yeah, it's even weirder when you realise that better Pokemon appear in the countryside in the rest of the series. That's what the whole long grass thing is all about.
So the people who live in places most like actual Pokemon regions and who travel around like trainers get worse Pokemon than those who stick to the same large city and never go anywhere interesting.
No it is not. Some gyms of my town are full of Blissey from level 40 accounts all with the same looking names. Given how hard it is to KO even one within the allocated time when playing alone, it's effectively ruining a whole part of the game for every non-cheater player.
I didn't play Pokemon Go, but the only reason I ever installed Ingress was to figure out how Android location services ran. This led me to arm shared objects decompilation and mocking and other interesting shenanigans.
Achieving internet points was not very high on the goals list
The people who are cheating aren't the ones figuring out the cheats. The people providing the cheats are doing interesting things, but also enabling cheaters to steal fun from the game from everyone else.
Blisseys are hard solo, though if you have a few folks hitting them with a Gyrados or Dragonite you can take them out. My wife and I just took down a L10 gym with 5 Blisseys, and the rest Snorlaxes and Dragonites, and with three people no gym can hold no matter what's in it. You have to know other players to do that, though. The cheating scum will just take it back after a while and play the same game though. Glad they're finally starting to try to take on the cheaters - they definitely do steal the fun from legit players.
There's some indication that this is being addressed - among other things, it seems like they may cap the number of a single type that can be in a gym.
Honestly this is the kind of thing where I could see hyper-local chat (team or public) of the sort Yik-Yak was trying to do. "Hey Instinct within 1 mile, meet in 15 to take down the gym at the fountain?"
Okay; but the people who are breaking the game are going on to "win" afterward, and are ruining it for everyone who isn't cheating.
If you want to prove to yourself that you can level up your Ratatat to level 1,000,000 - fine, do it. But don't send that pseudorodent to your local gym to lock it down forever.
I stopped within the first few days when I realized you can't actually battle your Pokemon with other people. That's OBVIOUSLY what people wanted, but luckily we had a stupid minigame at gyms?
Can't imagine a worse execution of such a successful IP on such a breakout platform.
Pokemon Company really let me down. I know it's not their fault, but they should've spoken up about the whole thing.
Yes, people are still playing Pokemon Go. About 65 million was the last reported active user count. (Not sure if daily or monthly.) The number of people you saw playing at the beginning was way more than was sustainable, and a drop was of course predictable after the fad died down.
Enough people are playing that trainers have walked to Pluto and back (~17,000,000,000 km IIRC). Even discounting drifters, bots and cheaters that's a lot of walking while running this app.
Enough people are playing that most teams are forming communities to manage controlling gyms in various areas around here and occasionally raid. Pretty much every gym in a 10 mile radius of my house is a level 10 within hours of flipping.
> The number of people you saw playing at the beginning was way more than was sustainable
Was it? A lot of people were really enthusiasts. Groups were created, friendships were made. Portable battery chargers were purchased. New phones were acquired.
A lot of people still play old pokemon games. A lot of people play new pokemon games. There was no excuse to how Niantics managed their community early on.
Don't even get me started on the bait and switch of the original trailer.
I think it was unsustainable. Especially depending on how you're defining "enthusiasts."
If we're talking about enthusiasts who still actively play the latest and greatest Pokemon games, Pokemon Sun and Moon only sold about 15 million units last year when it came out. (Probably a couple million more have sold since, but I can't find any up to date numbers.) To still have 50 million more active users than units sold of the latest core franchise game I think is pretty good.
As for the nostalgic enthusiasts that you're probably thinking of more, I would still think that those who play the old games are much fewer and farther in between. I'd be surprised if there were still 650 million people picking up old Pokemon games. Pokemon Go was a nostalgic fad that everyone and their mother (and some grandmothers) decided to pick up because it was the cool new thing.
Not saying that Niantic didn't drop the ball early on--they did. But even if they were on the top of their game, I still don't think of the 650 million downloads that they were going to be able to retain a majority of those users.
It is difficult to compare a game that costs $70 + a game console that costs $200-300 with installing a free to download app off the store on an existing device in terms of purchase numbers/MAU.
They lost a huge chunk of users (I'd be willing to bet a majority) because of the buggy launch and not because of lack of interesting in the gameplay itself.
You can't imagine a worse execution? It was the fastest mobile game ever to reach $600 million and has made well over $1 billion at this point.
I understand the design complaints--the gameplay won't resonate with anyone wanting a strategy game of any depth--but saying they did poorly is pretty hyperbolic. It obviously struck a chord with some segments as I do still see people playing in dense areas (and at the local game stores).
I also think looking into Niantic's past work or Pokemon Company's past partnerships would've revealed this game couldn't possibly have the mechanics of the core Pokemon line, but I do understand that the marketing and messaging was very vague.
Niantic initially developed Pokemon Go as a lighter version of Ingress. Except that game wasn't much fun, either.
It's as if they only had a very vague concept of what it was actually like to play a single-player Pokemon game on a handheld.
BUG CATCHER wants to BATTLE!
You catch wild pokemon by walking through the tall grass, and you make yours stronger by training them against wild pokemon and other trainers. Other trainers can test your mettle by challenging you to a battle that you cannot refuse.
At launch, the only way your kids could fight with their pokemon is if you all pile into the car and drive to a nigh-random location too far away to reach on foot and fail to displace the otaku-whale that managed to put a level 500 Vaporeon on the gym with the Rattattas, Pidgeys, and Weedles that are the only things to show up in your neighborhood.
The game still needed to be both fun and playable entirely within the bounds of a single neighborhood, and it just wasn't.
I think a lot of it is a mostly failed competitive aspect - they wanted to make it so players had to compete, which makes the game more exciting, but also motivates cheaters and prevents those with limited play time from really succeeding.
Not sure what the alternative would be though, a single player version would have been incredibly boring. Maybe some sort of co-op based multiplayer instead could be done, but I'm not sure what that would look like.
It was fun at launch to see thousands of people in public parks. I was living in Japan in city were there was an area who made it in the national news for having so many pokéstop. It was incredible. So many people were playing day and nights.
A large part of the fun came from doing silly things like all nighters with friends and drinks and... portable battery of course.
> I understand the design complaints--the gameplay won't resonate with anyone wanting a strategy game of any depth--but saying they did poorly is pretty hyperbolic.
Not just gameplay, but bugs. This game was so horrendously buggy at launch, I'm amazed it survived at all. Stupid things like having every button click wait synchronously for a response from the server before doing anything, or always trusting the client, or not implementing retry on requests, so you had a 50% chance of being permanently stuck on the catch a pokemon screen until you restarted.
I honestly can't remember a game with worse execution that actually managed to survive. If people loved it for the gameplay, they would have moved onto one of the many clones that implement the features better (and have trading and pvp). But it's not gameplay people want, it's Pokemon.
Avatar was like the highest grossing movie of all time, and it was just Pocahontas with CGI.
Just because people use it doesn't mean it's artistically meritous.
My opinion isn't subject to YOUR conditions. I've played Pokemon games since a very early age, and I had certain expectations for the experience that weren't even close to met in the final product.
The marketing was vague, but it's not like a complex concept either. It's pokemon on the go, in the real world. It's not a scavenger hunt game, and that's what we ended up getting.
I could be a bit nicer about how I explain it, but I LOVE Pokemon and this game is a giant blemish on the legacy, as far as I see it.
This is similar to an approach I suggested some time ago here for other games as well - if you detect griefers/cheaters/trolls, just let them play against each other.
Yep, this is easily the best way to deal with people who are committed to messing with an online community.. Make them think they're still having an impact when they're not..
I believe HN does something similar but I ran a small forum back in the early 2000s and we could flag one or more people into groups where their posts were only visible to each other, but not to anyone else.
Since the site was invite-only, there was no anonymous access so they had no practical way of finding this out on their own.
Eventually they got bored of "being ignored" and left on their own..
Blizzard has another cool anti-cheat tactic that's deployed alongside cheating bans. Remember that old story about how ITS had a command to crash the system to take the fun out of crashing the system? In Overwatch, one character's Ultimate is basically an aimbot; another's is basically a wallhack.
Shadowbanning seems like a technique that only worked back when it was an original idea that nobody knew about. Nowadays if you have a dedicated cheater who actually has something concrete to gain from abusing the system, it's absolutely trivial to "test" if you're shadowbanned by checking on an account in good standing, and treating that exactly the same as a supposedly-ineffectual normal ban.
If shadowbanning traps most of the casual abusers, leaving only the elite cheaters, we cannot quite say that it doesn't work, right?
Shadowbanning can be refined to deal with the situation you have identified. For instance, the abusive account's postings can be shown to an account in good standing, if their IP addresses are the same, or in the same class C, or in recent login history, those accounts did appear to some from the same machine or small network.
The system can also detect a pattern of behavior whereby some account in good standing is expressing unsual interest in accounts in poor standing, like specifically searching for their postings or looking at profiles or whatever. Or maybe some more subtle clues.
I really liked the concept of a Pokemon game for mobile.
Unfortunately, they went with the P2Win model that 99% of mobile games use nowadays, chock full of microtransactions and devoid of any meaningful content.
They stripped the game of all the elements that actually made Pokemon fun and all that was left was Ingress with a Pokemon skin.
Maybe some day we'll get an actually good Pokemon game for mobile. Until then, I'll cherish the memories of playing on my gameboy.
I feel like the number one gripe I have is that they are using the branding of one of the most simple and fun games of all time but ignoring it's design. Rather than just copying the mechanics of the Pokemon games, they just made their own game?
For example, battles obviously should be a direct rip off of the main games. Coding Pokemon battle seems super easy to do. And in order for it to be fun, they just have to copy the exact system.
Similarly with leveling, encounters, missions, everything was just designed around what was easy for the team to do rather than what people liked about Pokemon. It's embarrassing.
try to take a step back and think about what would actually be involved with coding a pokemon battle. all the possible moves, statuses, mechanics, etc of a pokemon battle is probably not super easy to do. there may be product decisions that you may not have considered. do you think pokemon GO would be as fun if each interaction with a pokemon took 2 minutes instead of 10-15 seconds it takes now?
I just want more PvE content. Right now I'm just walking around collecting pokemon, because actual gym battles have been completely impossible for me since about a month after the game came out. All gyms are 12-stacked with pokemon with super-high CP, that I can't really meaningfully interact with, unless I level up significantly. And even then, there's no strategy involved past "pick the pokemon that does well against this element" and tapping the screen really fast.
Their problem with cheaters would be mitigated much better if they focus on PvE.
I'd like to see them either revise the gym mechanics entirely or introduce "junior" gyms that would make some of the weaker Pokémon viable to use. Heck, a gym with a dynamic CP cap could work - max_CP = 1000 - (15 * gym_level) with too-big Pokémon being forced out. You could boot the strongest protectors in a gym with a flock of (weak) Pidgeys at that point as long as they raised the XP of the gym, then evolve/transfer/both all of those for individual XP.
Right now most varieties even fully evolved and with perfect IVs and movesets are simply not worth putting into gyms.
Edit:
As far as the pay-to-win aspect, I'm not really seeing that. The purchasable items can all be gotten by getting into a few gyms a day to get "coins," which would go along with a social aspect of getting together with a few friends on the same team to go take down gyms. The only item that's hard to come by and I think inconveniently priced is the Egg Incubator, which without real-$ purchases is weighted towards a LOT of walking per stop.
Lure modules and incense have never seemed to make much difference to me (and lures can be done by just one person in a popular location with everyone benefiting), and while Lucky Eggs are nice they're not really that important.
Buying Pokeballs just seems silly if there's any kind of outdoor art installation area anywhere nearby, because you can wander that for a relatively short time and stock up - or just veg on a blanket in the park between 2-4 art pieces and swipe 2-4 stops every 5 minutes.
Personally what I really want is some sort of randomly generated pokemon adventure based on your local landmarks. Just take a bunch of linked quests, scatter them around landmarks that are a good distance away from each other and let me walk to and from collecting mcguffins. Turn parks into Safari Zones. If I live in the middle of nowhere, then make up some virtual landmarks and put the quests there.
There's so much you can do if you think of it as generating a roguelike on top of the landmark, road and park data they have.
Honestly, coding a battle setup up to the level of, say Red/Blue is not hard. Lots of elements, sure, and newer games make things somewhat harder, but it's such a convenient structure that things aren't hard. It's a common sophomore/junior college assignment, and far easier than features Go already has like location management and anti-cheating.
The delay point is much better. I don't think GameBoy style fight-to-capture would have been good, the technique used (basically Safari Zone, actually) was solid for that. But I think full PvP against other players would have been a huge hit - certainly it's why I never joined.
> The delay point is much better. I don't think GameBoy style fight-to-capture would have been good, the technique used (basically Safari Zone, actually) was solid for that.
Only because the whole point of the game became grinding on simple pokemon to turn into candy to level up / evolve other Pokemon. It's a circle of crappy game mechanics requiring other crappy mechanics to work.
Sure, it would suck to need to actually fight 800 other magikarp to get a Gyarados, but that's not how any other pokemon game works. I can have my magikarp fight any other pokemon and gain xp.
I was able to do a red/blue style combat game for a homework assignment in Java. Not saying it's really easy, but it's not incredibly hard, and like you say, it's not harder than anti-cheat or many other things in the game. Also, if using a normal pokemon battle mechanic, you don't have all the issues with cheating at gym battles, and latency that the current game has.
Yeah, I think it'd be as fun. I mean, every single battle in the main Pokemon series uses those mechanics. Every wild Pokemon encounter, every trainer battle, every gym leader battle, etc.
The time it takes obviously varies based on what exactly you're battling and how strong your team is, but it's clearly something that millions of people consider fun when done thousands or hundreds of thousands of times per game.
It'd also only need to be the case for gym battles, so hey, most people wouldn't be spending tons of time on these battles anyway.
As for the coding required... I see what you mean (the amount of work they put into the mechanics in the main series is absolutely insane given all the strange possibilities for moves and strategies), but it's apparently easy enough for fan game developers to be able to copy it. If amateurs can code similar systems for fan games like Pokemon Uranium, Niantic can code it for Pokemon GO.
I was extremely excited when I heard about Pokemon Go initially.
Pokemon battling is actually a fantastic game mechanic, and one I have fond memories of. I'd love a game where I do it against other people, but the competitive scene is way too intense to appeal - I want a simple, Clash Royale style game where I could battle against players of similar intensity. Capture mechanics, like the ones Pokemon Go actually used, could keep teams feeling novel and interesting.
But instead, we got Go. No story, no battles, just captures and microtransactions. I'm honestly baffled that it ever saw such energy - it seems like Pokemon sans Pokemon.
There is an acceptable Pokemon[-style] game for mobile. It's called "Pocket Mortys".
While it is based on a show that is inappropriate for children, the game has intentionally avoided including any content that would push it past an E rating.
It has in-app purchases, but all content is available to gratis players, given enough grinding.
Everything in Pokemon Go is available freely to anyone as well, given enough grinding. The ones griping about play-to-win and microtransactions just don't want to grind.
Metaphorically, Pokemon Go grinds with jewelers' rouge, while Pocket Mortys grinds with coarse emery.
The reward to effort ratio is lower.
Besides that, when you put free-to-play players in direct competition with paid players, and give the latter an enormous advantage over the former, that's when people start griping about pay-to-win.
"We could never have expected it would become such a huge success. Our best engineers were unable to foresee the server capacity to support the players’ demand. Our biggest prediction was 50 times lower than what actually happened. We knew Pokémon was a powerful brand with 20 years of existence and over 200 million fans across the globe, but people told us this game was for kids, that it had no appeal, that people would need to get out of their homes to play. It wasn’t easy, it was a massive bet. Back then, people were already talking about augmented reality, but nobody knew when this technology would be accessible. And then what happened: within two minutes, you could access an augmented reality experience and catch Pokémon in the real world, free of charge. And this game blew up without the need to advertise it."
See, the thing is, I think that's all it was. Hype at the start. Things aren't looking so well now.
I've heard that the developers are continuously adding things, but it looks like the game has become a lot more harder to play without spending money on it.[1]
The link you posted, did you read past the top comment? There are a lot of people still playing and many of those that are are still heavily involved. I can't say I've ever played every day or every time I get my phone out, but I know enough people that play often that I still keep it around and play once in a while especially if there is an event.
Of course there was a spike at first release, like every other game. Less press after a year is hardly indicative of the game being only hype. If you can name a game that didn't get less press a year after release I'd love to hear it.
> but it looks like the game has become a lot more harder to play without spending money on it
I'd love to hear why you think this is true other than someone mentioning it with no explanation in the top comment of that link. The only thing I can think of is a slight hit to pokeball drop rates which - while annoying - only affects those in rural areas who don't have access to many pokestops. This game (like Ingress) has always been geared toward urban areas and ignored rural players. This was an issue day 1 and it hasn't changed unfortunately, but this is not a recent development.
Honestly, the game is pretty hollow and is hardly something I'd recommend everyone pick up, but to say that it was only hype and things aren't looking good now is uninformed.
I did read past the first comment. That's why I posted the link to the whole thread and not just that comment.
I didn't say the game flopped. It didn't, but the excitement the parent comment to mine talked about was just because of hype, and it is not holding up. That's was my observation.
If you look at the current numbers, I bet they aren't having problems with anticipating server capacity now.
Pokemon was a big parts of multiple generations, so the initial outburst of players; because of nostalgia. The retention rate is very low I would imagine.
There are still plenty of people who regularly play in a casual way. I regularly play and have a number of friends who do.
The people who played and quit with the hype weren't the people paying money in the first place. The people who were throwing money at the game are still playing and still paying money. And they now have corporate sponsorships rolling now as well. For example, I just saw an event this past weekend that clearly paid to have lures up at all stops in the area.
I don't think that things "aren't looking so well" yet. It doesn't have the peak playerbase anymore, but its certainly still making good money.
It would be interesting to know their current churn rate. Every time there is a new update to the app, they force you to download it before allowing you access. From a practical standpoint I've always assumed this lobs off large portions of their audience (it's a big download and isn't trivial).
But if they are still gaining new users, perhaps that doesn't matter. Be interesting to know what that gain/loss math looks like.
If the game had been playable at launch, it would have retained a lot more of its initial userbase. The constant crashes and long outages turned a lot of people off.
In general, "the game has become a lot more harder to play without spending money on it" doesn't mean that the game is doing poorly - it's a sign that they have gotten the user growth/initial advertisement that they wanted, and are working on the revenue part.
After all, for such games, if you're not going to spend money, then you're not a customer - the only reason for allowing you to play is to use you to advertise the game to potential customers; making it harder to play freely might be the only way to turn you from an user to a customer.
> Back then, people were already talking about augmented reality, but nobody knew when this technology would be accessible.
I still don't get why people talk about Pokémon Go and AR. As if one had anything to do with the other.
Pokémon Go has zero actual AR; it's just overlaying a 3D animation on top of a camera feed, with no relation to reality other than readings from a shitty smartphone gyroscope. When playing, I would actually disable that feature anyway, because it made catching Pokémon harder (performance issues + no "AR" means no gyroscope input, which makes the game no longer care about you maintaining constant orientation).
The AR we've been promised for decades now was about overlaying computer data that's related to what you're looking at in the real world. At this point, even those "point camera at the printed tag, see a 3D model on your phone" have more AR in them than Pokémon Go.
Sure, but then that's not anything new. Any persistent-world multiplayer game would qualify, and if you want to focus on real-world locations, then there's at least Ingress.
Also, last time I checked, Pokémon spawning wasn't synchronized. There's close to zero shared world state between the player (only the static - spawn zones, Pokéstop locations, Gym location and status - and lure).
Anyway, to be clear: I'm not complaining about the game itself - just about abusing the term "AR" to describe it.
I might be mistaken about what you mean by "spawning wasn't synchronized" but if I see a Pokemon pop up, I know that whoever I'm playing with will see the same one in the same place. That's a huge part of the fun of the game.
I'm not sure if that is true now; it definitely wasn't true a few months ago when I played it. Spawn locations are shared - i.e. everyone sees the same probability distribution of finding a particular Pokémon in a given spot. But if you saw one spawn, your friend won't see the same one because this was not synchronized. It was entirely local to a player. So you couldn't e.g. steal a Pokémon from someone else trying to get it too.
I think ever since it came out Pokemon spawned in the same exact place for everyone (hense cheating tools came about like maps that showed where all the pokemon are), but yeah you couldn't "steal" pokemon, everyone can catch the same pokemon which makes for videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-XnTDcQZjY
"Recently I went with my nephew to hunt Pokémon. We were walking down the street and a bunch of kids approached us. They were also hunting Pokemon. My nephew and these children got into a bit of a fight because they were trying to capture the same invisible creatures. It seemed strange to me. But these Pokémon were very real to the children.
And then it hit me: This is just like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict! You have two sides fighting over something that I cannot see. I look at the stones of buildings in Jerusalem and I just see stones. But Christians, Jews, and Muslims who look at the same stones see a holy city. It’s their imagination, but they are willing to kill for it. That’s virtual reality, too."
Doubly interesting given that, unless they were fighting for the ownership of a gym, there were no "same" invisible creatures - each player has their own Pokémon spawning, and that state is not shared between players.
What a weak comparison. The Israelis and the Palestinians are fighting over a homeland. Humans have been fighting over land since the beginning of time.
> Pokémon Go has zero actual AR; it's just overlaying a 3D animation on top of a camera feed, with no relation to reality other than readings from a shitty smartphone gyroscope.
Isn't it also positioning the Pokémon based on the camera feed ? I was under the impression that it was detecting objects in the picture and was trying to position the Pokémon in a way that made sense, but I was never sure.
Not in my experience. I believe the placement is random (in particular, that the distance from you to the Pokémon was simply randomized). It does "feel" like they're placed "in a way that makes sense", because the image is an overlay on top of camera feed - which guarantees it is on top of everything in the camera feed, and the brain will play tricks to make sense of the picture. It works especially well if you don't have the feel for how big the Pokémon should be compared to the environment (most of us don't). See also, "perspective optical illusions" as a search keyphrase.
Also, again from what I remember when playing ~6 months ago, the Pokémon placement in AR mode locks orientation and distance. So walking forward is literally the same as standing still - only the background camera feed changes, but Pokémon and its animation isn't affected in any way. This again supports the theory that placement is random and totally unrelated to "real world".
Shadowbanning was in place from very early on - we noticed it during the initial attempts at decoding the original protobuf syntax. Specifically, "moving" around very quickly would often get you shadowbanned very quickly.
When I first discovered Ingress it was a revelation. I played it for hours, walked everywhere etc. Then I discovered cheaters and that's it. A pity really, it was a cool concept for millions completely broken by a few dozen morons.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadMany player have noticed this and have been updating openstreetmaps.org data in hopes that Niantic does a biome refresh and that OSM is actually where they are sourcing their data from.
Which it isn't - they use Google Maps data. Tho GM uses OSM as one of their sources (apparently) so... YMMV
I still think the game is ridiculous in how much it punishes people for simply not living in the city. Even if you had a low density of stops out in the country they could at least have decent numbers of random spawns. This is one reason I stopped playing, seeing only Pidgies and Ratatas gets old. Also, having the game get angry at you for riding a bike is dumb, bike riding is a huge part of the lore of the game!
So the people who live in places most like actual Pokemon regions and who travel around like trainers get worse Pokemon than those who stick to the same large city and never go anywhere interesting.
Seems kind of backwards if you ask me.
Achieving internet points was not very high on the goals list
Honestly this is the kind of thing where I could see hyper-local chat (team or public) of the sort Yik-Yak was trying to do. "Hey Instinct within 1 mile, meet in 15 to take down the gym at the fountain?"
If you want to prove to yourself that you can level up your Ratatat to level 1,000,000 - fine, do it. But don't send that pseudorodent to your local gym to lock it down forever.
Flooding live production servers with requests to figure out the location of Pokémons isn't "white hat" either.
I stopped within the first few days when I realized you can't actually battle your Pokemon with other people. That's OBVIOUSLY what people wanted, but luckily we had a stupid minigame at gyms?
Can't imagine a worse execution of such a successful IP on such a breakout platform.
Pokemon Company really let me down. I know it's not their fault, but they should've spoken up about the whole thing.
Was it? A lot of people were really enthusiasts. Groups were created, friendships were made. Portable battery chargers were purchased. New phones were acquired.
A lot of people still play old pokemon games. A lot of people play new pokemon games. There was no excuse to how Niantics managed their community early on.
Don't even get me started on the bait and switch of the original trailer.
If we're talking about enthusiasts who still actively play the latest and greatest Pokemon games, Pokemon Sun and Moon only sold about 15 million units last year when it came out. (Probably a couple million more have sold since, but I can't find any up to date numbers.) To still have 50 million more active users than units sold of the latest core franchise game I think is pretty good.
As for the nostalgic enthusiasts that you're probably thinking of more, I would still think that those who play the old games are much fewer and farther in between. I'd be surprised if there were still 650 million people picking up old Pokemon games. Pokemon Go was a nostalgic fad that everyone and their mother (and some grandmothers) decided to pick up because it was the cool new thing.
Not saying that Niantic didn't drop the ball early on--they did. But even if they were on the top of their game, I still don't think of the 650 million downloads that they were going to be able to retain a majority of those users.
I understand the design complaints--the gameplay won't resonate with anyone wanting a strategy game of any depth--but saying they did poorly is pretty hyperbolic. It obviously struck a chord with some segments as I do still see people playing in dense areas (and at the local game stores).
I also think looking into Niantic's past work or Pokemon Company's past partnerships would've revealed this game couldn't possibly have the mechanics of the core Pokemon line, but I do understand that the marketing and messaging was very vague.
It's as if they only had a very vague concept of what it was actually like to play a single-player Pokemon game on a handheld.
You catch wild pokemon by walking through the tall grass, and you make yours stronger by training them against wild pokemon and other trainers. Other trainers can test your mettle by challenging you to a battle that you cannot refuse.At launch, the only way your kids could fight with their pokemon is if you all pile into the car and drive to a nigh-random location too far away to reach on foot and fail to displace the otaku-whale that managed to put a level 500 Vaporeon on the gym with the Rattattas, Pidgeys, and Weedles that are the only things to show up in your neighborhood.
The game still needed to be both fun and playable entirely within the bounds of a single neighborhood, and it just wasn't.
Not sure what the alternative would be though, a single player version would have been incredibly boring. Maybe some sort of co-op based multiplayer instead could be done, but I'm not sure what that would look like.
A large part of the fun came from doing silly things like all nighters with friends and drinks and... portable battery of course.
If they pulled some real social-interacting game, pokemon-like, at the scale they currently have...
Not just gameplay, but bugs. This game was so horrendously buggy at launch, I'm amazed it survived at all. Stupid things like having every button click wait synchronously for a response from the server before doing anything, or always trusting the client, or not implementing retry on requests, so you had a 50% chance of being permanently stuck on the catch a pokemon screen until you restarted.
I honestly can't remember a game with worse execution that actually managed to survive. If people loved it for the gameplay, they would have moved onto one of the many clones that implement the features better (and have trading and pvp). But it's not gameplay people want, it's Pokemon.
Just because people use it doesn't mean it's artistically meritous.
My opinion isn't subject to YOUR conditions. I've played Pokemon games since a very early age, and I had certain expectations for the experience that weren't even close to met in the final product.
The marketing was vague, but it's not like a complex concept either. It's pokemon on the go, in the real world. It's not a scavenger hunt game, and that's what we ended up getting.
I could be a bit nicer about how I explain it, but I LOVE Pokemon and this game is a giant blemish on the legacy, as far as I see it.
I believe HN does something similar but I ran a small forum back in the early 2000s and we could flag one or more people into groups where their posts were only visible to each other, but not to anyone else.
Since the site was invite-only, there was no anonymous access so they had no practical way of finding this out on their own.
Eventually they got bored of "being ignored" and left on their own..
For the Something Awful forums, this is called hell-banning.
Shadowbanning can be refined to deal with the situation you have identified. For instance, the abusive account's postings can be shown to an account in good standing, if their IP addresses are the same, or in the same class C, or in recent login history, those accounts did appear to some from the same machine or small network.
The system can also detect a pattern of behavior whereby some account in good standing is expressing unsual interest in accounts in poor standing, like specifically searching for their postings or looking at profiles or whatever. Or maybe some more subtle clues.
Start at 27:45 but you should watch the entire thing.
Unfortunately, they went with the P2Win model that 99% of mobile games use nowadays, chock full of microtransactions and devoid of any meaningful content.
They stripped the game of all the elements that actually made Pokemon fun and all that was left was Ingress with a Pokemon skin.
Maybe some day we'll get an actually good Pokemon game for mobile. Until then, I'll cherish the memories of playing on my gameboy.
For example, battles obviously should be a direct rip off of the main games. Coding Pokemon battle seems super easy to do. And in order for it to be fun, they just have to copy the exact system.
Similarly with leveling, encounters, missions, everything was just designed around what was easy for the team to do rather than what people liked about Pokemon. It's embarrassing.
Their problem with cheaters would be mitigated much better if they focus on PvE.
I'd like to see them either revise the gym mechanics entirely or introduce "junior" gyms that would make some of the weaker Pokémon viable to use. Heck, a gym with a dynamic CP cap could work - max_CP = 1000 - (15 * gym_level) with too-big Pokémon being forced out. You could boot the strongest protectors in a gym with a flock of (weak) Pidgeys at that point as long as they raised the XP of the gym, then evolve/transfer/both all of those for individual XP.
Right now most varieties even fully evolved and with perfect IVs and movesets are simply not worth putting into gyms.
Edit: As far as the pay-to-win aspect, I'm not really seeing that. The purchasable items can all be gotten by getting into a few gyms a day to get "coins," which would go along with a social aspect of getting together with a few friends on the same team to go take down gyms. The only item that's hard to come by and I think inconveniently priced is the Egg Incubator, which without real-$ purchases is weighted towards a LOT of walking per stop.
Lure modules and incense have never seemed to make much difference to me (and lures can be done by just one person in a popular location with everyone benefiting), and while Lucky Eggs are nice they're not really that important.
Buying Pokeballs just seems silly if there's any kind of outdoor art installation area anywhere nearby, because you can wander that for a relatively short time and stock up - or just veg on a blanket in the park between 2-4 art pieces and swipe 2-4 stops every 5 minutes.
There's so much you can do if you think of it as generating a roguelike on top of the landmark, road and park data they have.
The delay point is much better. I don't think GameBoy style fight-to-capture would have been good, the technique used (basically Safari Zone, actually) was solid for that. But I think full PvP against other players would have been a huge hit - certainly it's why I never joined.
Only because the whole point of the game became grinding on simple pokemon to turn into candy to level up / evolve other Pokemon. It's a circle of crappy game mechanics requiring other crappy mechanics to work.
Sure, it would suck to need to actually fight 800 other magikarp to get a Gyarados, but that's not how any other pokemon game works. I can have my magikarp fight any other pokemon and gain xp.
I was able to do a red/blue style combat game for a homework assignment in Java. Not saying it's really easy, but it's not incredibly hard, and like you say, it's not harder than anti-cheat or many other things in the game. Also, if using a normal pokemon battle mechanic, you don't have all the issues with cheating at gym battles, and latency that the current game has.
The time it takes obviously varies based on what exactly you're battling and how strong your team is, but it's clearly something that millions of people consider fun when done thousands or hundreds of thousands of times per game.
It'd also only need to be the case for gym battles, so hey, most people wouldn't be spending tons of time on these battles anyway.
As for the coding required... I see what you mean (the amount of work they put into the mechanics in the main series is absolutely insane given all the strange possibilities for moves and strategies), but it's apparently easy enough for fan game developers to be able to copy it. If amateurs can code similar systems for fan games like Pokemon Uranium, Niantic can code it for Pokemon GO.
Pokemon battling is actually a fantastic game mechanic, and one I have fond memories of. I'd love a game where I do it against other people, but the competitive scene is way too intense to appeal - I want a simple, Clash Royale style game where I could battle against players of similar intensity. Capture mechanics, like the ones Pokemon Go actually used, could keep teams feeling novel and interesting.
But instead, we got Go. No story, no battles, just captures and microtransactions. I'm honestly baffled that it ever saw such energy - it seems like Pokemon sans Pokemon.
While it is based on a show that is inappropriate for children, the game has intentionally avoided including any content that would push it past an E rating.
It has in-app purchases, but all content is available to gratis players, given enough grinding.
The reward to effort ratio is lower.
Besides that, when you put free-to-play players in direct competition with paid players, and give the latter an enormous advantage over the former, that's when people start griping about pay-to-win.
But the Switch was a smash hit and Nintendo gets to keep their Pokemon IP platform exclusive for another decade or so at least :(
From an interesting interview with a Niantec Exec on the linked sub, stating they're adding PvP aswell: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/6e3qt2/legend...
I've heard that the developers are continuously adding things, but it looks like the game has become a lot more harder to play without spending money on it.[1]
[1]:https://redd.it/6dn5kp
Of course there was a spike at first release, like every other game. Less press after a year is hardly indicative of the game being only hype. If you can name a game that didn't get less press a year after release I'd love to hear it.
> but it looks like the game has become a lot more harder to play without spending money on it
I'd love to hear why you think this is true other than someone mentioning it with no explanation in the top comment of that link. The only thing I can think of is a slight hit to pokeball drop rates which - while annoying - only affects those in rural areas who don't have access to many pokestops. This game (like Ingress) has always been geared toward urban areas and ignored rural players. This was an issue day 1 and it hasn't changed unfortunately, but this is not a recent development.
Honestly, the game is pretty hollow and is hardly something I'd recommend everyone pick up, but to say that it was only hype and things aren't looking good now is uninformed.
Major nitpick, i know, but you said game not app so i guess Minecraft[1] got pretty much a stable news coverage throughout the years
[1]https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=minecraft
I didn't say the game flopped. It didn't, but the excitement the parent comment to mine talked about was just because of hype, and it is not holding up. That's was my observation.
If you look at the current numbers, I bet they aren't having problems with anticipating server capacity now.
Pokemon was a big parts of multiple generations, so the initial outburst of players; because of nostalgia. The retention rate is very low I would imagine.
The people who played and quit with the hype weren't the people paying money in the first place. The people who were throwing money at the game are still playing and still paying money. And they now have corporate sponsorships rolling now as well. For example, I just saw an event this past weekend that clearly paid to have lures up at all stops in the area.
I don't think that things "aren't looking so well" yet. It doesn't have the peak playerbase anymore, but its certainly still making good money.
Yes, it is no where near what it was at launch, but that is because the launch stats were astronomical.
I agree it is a huge success, but it could have been much more.
But if they are still gaining new users, perhaps that doesn't matter. Be interesting to know what that gain/loss math looks like.
The adult contingent has dropped off a lot but I bet once they add PvP it'll pick up.
It's still a cute game, but there is little depth atm.
At this point I honestly lost hope that they'll ever add it.
After all, for such games, if you're not going to spend money, then you're not a customer - the only reason for allowing you to play is to use you to advertise the game to potential customers; making it harder to play freely might be the only way to turn you from an user to a customer.
I still don't get why people talk about Pokémon Go and AR. As if one had anything to do with the other.
Pokémon Go has zero actual AR; it's just overlaying a 3D animation on top of a camera feed, with no relation to reality other than readings from a shitty smartphone gyroscope. When playing, I would actually disable that feature anyway, because it made catching Pokémon harder (performance issues + no "AR" means no gyroscope input, which makes the game no longer care about you maintaining constant orientation).
The AR we've been promised for decades now was about overlaying computer data that's related to what you're looking at in the real world. At this point, even those "point camera at the printed tag, see a 3D model on your phone" have more AR in them than Pokémon Go.
Also, last time I checked, Pokémon spawning wasn't synchronized. There's close to zero shared world state between the player (only the static - spawn zones, Pokéstop locations, Gym location and status - and lure).
Anyway, to be clear: I'm not complaining about the game itself - just about abusing the term "AR" to describe it.
"Recently I went with my nephew to hunt Pokémon. We were walking down the street and a bunch of kids approached us. They were also hunting Pokemon. My nephew and these children got into a bit of a fight because they were trying to capture the same invisible creatures. It seemed strange to me. But these Pokémon were very real to the children.
And then it hit me: This is just like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict! You have two sides fighting over something that I cannot see. I look at the stones of buildings in Jerusalem and I just see stones. But Christians, Jews, and Muslims who look at the same stones see a holy city. It’s their imagination, but they are willing to kill for it. That’s virtual reality, too."
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/the-pos...
Isn't it also positioning the Pokémon based on the camera feed ? I was under the impression that it was detecting objects in the picture and was trying to position the Pokémon in a way that made sense, but I was never sure.
Also, again from what I remember when playing ~6 months ago, the Pokémon placement in AR mode locks orientation and distance. So walking forward is literally the same as standing still - only the background camera feed changes, but Pokémon and its animation isn't affected in any way. This again supports the theory that placement is random and totally unrelated to "real world".
Programmer: "What?"
Manager: "No scroll bar..."
Programmer: "Hmm..."
Manager: "... For a website that you need to scroll."
Programmer: "Genius!"