f13.net

... is out. Kind of. Not officially but it can be downloaded and installed and it works 1000%.

Here's the link: http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/niantic-inc/pokemon-go/pokemon-go-0-29-0-release/pokemon-go-0-29-0-android-apk-download/

In case you have no idea what this is, it's the new game from the people who made Ingress. You become a Pokemon trainer and you get around in the real world to catch Pokemon. It works, I am playing it right now. This is also a bit scary. I can see a lot of children becoming dangerously obsessed and getting hit by cars all over the world.

Downloaded it and it works fine. You don't seem to have to battle wild Pokemon though, just throw a ball and hope, which is pretty lame.

Servers seem to have shit the bed. Got kicked off ~4 hours ago and haven't been able to get back on since.

And now it's up on Google Play for real (and the Apple store, according to GameFAQs) and working again. Shame because I had to drive around a good deal today and it was down the whole time. Oh well, I'm working 2 hours away so I should be able to catch some good stuff tomorrow.

To say nothing of the number of people who are apparently wandering into unfamiliar neighborhoods late at night. Games do funny things to people. I'm not sure I want to install this one and give it a shot.

It's not really playable now anyway; got DC'd 2 hours ago and still can't get back on.

Yeah. Been up and down for the last 6 hours. Still though -  this is kinda fun. Having more fun with this than in the 2 months I tried to play and enjoy Ingress.

Upon further review, aside from typical server capacity issues, this game is quite fun and is the IT thing right now. GF and I are playing it together and were out all last night walking around and 'site seeing.' She's hooked even though this is not quite her style. Either way, we ran into so many other players all with their phones out tuned to the same maps and images that it was almost surreal. And it was everyone... couple gay guys walking their dogs chatting about the hope of trading, gaggle of asian girls laughing as they were flicking their screens throwing pokeballs at images on their screens, group of three black guys in their mid 20s wondering why the rustling leaves haven't yielded anything event though they been walking around this spot for 10 minutes... Made me smile a bit. Wonder how long it will last and how much attention Niantic will give it.

edit: further detail

(http://i.imgur.com/F7xORYl.jpg)

It's too fucking hot to play this here. Plus the line between "hey, this neighborhood is cool" and "I will get mugged for meth money" varies from block to block. 

Eh, and I don't care enough either.  :awesome_for_real:

I'd rather just have an official pokemon game on my phone (with multiplayer goodies) and ditch the AR shit.

So, far as I can tell this isn't a game.

Maybe I don't get it.

Pokemon forces people to accept they live in shitty cities. Nice!

Teen discovers dead body whilst playing Pokemon GO (http://county10.com/201021174044426240/teen-playing-new-pokemon-game-on-phone-discovers-body-in-wind-river).

My kids have been running all over the house with this.  Driving me nuts.

I may download and check it out :)

My biggest complaint is the (lack of) combat. Catching wild Pokemon just requires you to swipe-throw balls at them, and the gym battles consist of tap for basic attack, tap-and-hold for special attack, and swipe sideways to dodge. I wish they had just kept the standard Pokemon combat with no swiping and shit and added the ARG bits.

Was thinking the same thing but on the other hand, I doubt they'd get such a wide spread of users if they made it so you had to take the extra time to battle it out in order to catch them. In the rush rush world, this is the simplest fix. Same with the gym battles... turn based action would slow it down so much that most casual users would not even bother and eventually would be lost.

If Nintendo allowed that then they'd only be proving there's no reason to buy the Gameboys anymore and a very large chunk of revenue goes bye-bye.

So, no, you want Pokemon you're going to have to buy the GB and the game. This is as close as you're getting for a good while.

Good point too. Since that was really the only thing that they pushed at E3 other than Zelda...

And this is why it's not a game.

The game is in getting your GPS to ping back accurately. Jesus I spent 20 minutes walking around 2 stops only to have my avatar wander around it but never in range of either.

Turn on Wi-Fi. Phones use shit GPS and rely more on global wi-fi maps than actual GPS signal.

Sadly I was around a park outside the Zoo here. No wifi in the area. And if I am getting weak wifi signal it will lag out my game.

The game certainly doesn't handle poor signal well. The closest Gym to my house is at a local lighthouse where I only get 3G service (no 4G LTE out there), so when I battled the Gym I got the defender down to 1 HP where he stayed while killing the rest of my team. :oh_i_see:

There's a gym right next to my house, I can't quite hit it while in my house but if I walk 20' or so from my driveway I can hit it and a pokestop (w/e it's called).  There's like a couple 1000+ lv pokemon in it though and I think my max is 93.  Not sure the mechanics of getting them leveled up but I'm guessing it just means play a bunch.  There's another couple gyms down the street so we went to one of those and it also did the 1hp thing where the guy wouldn't die and we eventually just quit the app.

I'd agree on the non game thing but twice in the last two days one of my kids has asked me to go on a walk so he could catch pokemon and hatch eggs, so I'm not going to complain too much if it gets him outside  :grin:

Also this game takes a shit on my battery.  I can actually watch the numbers tick down in real time.

IIRC, that is a bug, not due to connectivity. Then again, it could be a bug based on connectivity.

Combat Power is based on training, evolution and a hidden base value. When you catch Pokemon they come with random strength, you have to look at where along that like, XP arch thing they are to get a sense of where they'll end up when fully trained. You train them with Stardust and that Pokemon's specific candy; you get 3 candy for catching a Pokemon and 1 for releasing it.

You also get a lot of candy for hatching eggs for that specific pokemon. I have been in the 7-8 range each hatch.

Jesus, how old are you people? :oh_i_see:

I'm holding out until they make this for my flip phone.   :why_so_serious:

In my town there are veritable hordes of teenagers wandering around playing this game until the wee hours.  It's insane.
It's like the 1950's all over again.  People at the Sonic and shit.  People strolling.  It really is an alternate reality.

Is it fairly simple to get this thing up and running?  I don't give two shits about Pokemon, but I have a kid or two that might find it interesting.

So easy, a caveman can do it   :awesome_for_real:

Yea it's really simple.

Mine locked up when I was close to a Snorlax in my neighborhood.

Anyway, yeah, this is pretty much a re-skin of Ingress, and has all the problems as well as a few of the good ideas of Ingress and Shadow Cities. Not setting it up so trainers can battle each other, or so there's really any battle mechanism except having gyms dominated by people who play too much/pay too much in microtransactions (as was the case with Ingress), nearly guarantees that by September this will be gathering dust. The only thing to do past a certain point will be to obsess maybe about the one you haven't caught--most players will not be able to meaningfully engage the gym battles. It's not just that Nintendo doesn't want the game to cut into the handheld exclusivity, it's also that Niantic is 100% unprepared to code for direct device-to-device interaction like a Pokemon battle except through something like a gym.

However, it will almost certainly drive significant sales for Sun/Moon later in the year.

One of the more popular vape shops in Austin ended up being a gym. I'm not sure what the bounding box looks like, but people under 18 can't go in.

Apparently the library is a pokestop, not a gym. They made the art&community center a gym...but it's not open to the public. Bah.

I think they got it backwards, as art galleries are supposed to be stops and libraries are supposed to by gyms.

I find all this moronic and am laughing that this is what I'm dealing with this morning at work.

Should move this to MMO games.

I saw no less than 3 dozen groups out playing yesterday. I had to be designated driver and drive my wife / kids around as they caught them all.

Looking back this game is going to be a big deal.

Well, catch 'em all and stuff.  Despite what Khaldun says - and he may well end up being right anyway - that has always what has made Pokemon popular.  Collecting the stupid things.  It is so fundamental to the Pokemon experience that they literally made and sold the same fucking game over and over and over and over again, just by adding new Pokemon to collect.  This sounds kinda genius to me, but we'll see.

It's a bit unpredictable, but you generally don't have to go inside structures to interact with a gym or a pokestop.

Work would be a gold mine if the cell phone reception was anywhere near decent.  The labs combined with the old fab construction of these buildings is awful.

The gaggle of millennials from upstairs and the call center folk are roving in packs cursing the reception as they go along.

So the building I work in on campus has 3 stops all around it and a gym in the front lobby. Luckily, there is a bathroom directly under the statue the gym is posted on - bonus I get wifi in there as well. I see myself having a lot of big early lunches in the coming weeks.  :why_so_serious:

The closest gym is about two blocks, but I can hit three stops without leaving my office chair  :grin:  Which is countered by the fact I live in the country and there are absolutely zero pokemon there.

I found a group of high school kids cruising around in a golf cart; apparently it moves slow enough to hatch eggs while being fast enough to easily get to masses of pokemon.

This game is not for me... I live out in the boonies somewhat and walking around staring at my phone doesn't seem that fun.

Be careful if you play this as the app can access a lot of stuff on your phone without you knwoing.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/1434/view/news/read/40525/Pokemon-Go-Full-Access-Granted-to-Personal-Google-Accounts.html

So, I am trying this out (er, mostly to see if it is something my kids might like?), but I don't get it.  I can get to a Pokestop from my office, but hell if I know what to do with it.  I have also so far encountered zero roaming Pokemon. 

NIANTIC TEASES TRADING, LEADERBOARDS COMING TO POKEMON GO

http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/07/11/niantic-teases-trading-leaderboards-coming-to-pokemon-go

Tried playing this and it seems like a large chunk of the game play is having to restart the app and hoping whatever you just spotted/caught isn't gone.  :x

Yeah that was huge on the hit list of yesterday's server issues. Seemed that the server was not returning the result of the encounter to the user.

It really really is. The other part is playing while someone else is driving and cackling about what you're catching to them. Or so it seems from my wife and kids.

I play on the bus and I am actually playing a new meta: timing of your GPS pings according to the bus starting and stopping. My avatar will be in one spot just out of range and the bus will start pulling away towards it, but by the time my GPS pings, my avatar shoots right past the stop I was aiming for. Frustrating at first, now pretty much the norm.

Front door is a stop, just like in Ingress.  There is a gym across the street.  I wonder how long before we hear about the data breach?

Considering the app gives full access to a google account, probably already happened. What a massive treasure trove of information.

Still not a game. Everyone is sheep.

Can you troll someone by making their house\job a stop? Could be fun

Niantic is a spinoff of Google. Datamining their users is what they know.

Buggy, battery draining, pay to win, mechanics that aren't exactly game-y, and a requirement to be in a medium to high population area.

That's my overall impression.

Uninstalled.

It once again suggests to me that the first person who makes a genuinely fun augmented reality game is going to make money hats bigger than Bolivia, but so far nobody seems interested in stepping up to the plate.

By all rights, this should have been that game.

It just isn't fun.

Maybe they'll add the fun down the road.

I do know that my children went from hyper-excited about this to can't be bothered.  At least the younger two.  The eldest had to buy a new phone to play (apparently it won't work with phones running on Intel Atom or somesuch.)  Maybe she'll have fun with it.

I just took over a gym with my 10 year old. That's pretty fun.

My 14 year-old apparently spent most of the day yesterday walking around our relatively small little town collecting Pokemon visiting the various stops.  He was literally sore when he got home around dinner time from all the walking he did.  I don't know if this thing will have any longevity, but that alone blew my mind a little.  Meanwhile, I sit here on the 15th floor of our office building and simply wait for the Pokestop right outside to cooldown...I don't even have to move to get to it =)

Even as barebones as this thing is, it's going gangbusters.  It doesn't take much imagination to see how the addition of some simple social functions (and maybe a bit more "game") would make this thing into the biggest thing ever, or something.

Kid nearly ran out in to the road in the dark near my work yesterday, staring at his phone.

I think it will wear off quick unless they do some significant changes.

They're talking about adding trading between users but I am sure that makes them very nervous, so it won't happen any time soon. I think by September, the app will be gathering dust for most players, because the local gyms will be owned nearly constantly by the same catasses that controlled points in Shadow Cities and Ingress. The one down the street from us already has a 1525 CP Flareon sitting on top of it.

Catasses and whales who've spent crazy dollars control everything with no hope of challenging them here, too.

So far the fun is in walking around with the son and catching new things. Once we get to only ultra-rares and see only Ratacate/ Pidgey/ Wheedle every place interest will be gone.

I dunno... it is not difficult to battle at the poopsock pokestops. Just choose pokemon that are a stronger element and see how far you get up the gym. Even if you only manage to take out the first one, you still dent the gym's prestige. Repeat and you can clear it. Just have to revive and heal up after each loss. It also serves to exhaust your items so you can collect more at stops.

(https://files.slack.com/files-pri/T04HC90Q7-F1RACBXPS/13700219_1137378806285196_2116901738558544204_n.jpg)

How long before people see the treadmill and the fad wears off?

I'm betting about a month for casual players to get bored, at least a year for the poopsockers.

People in general haven't gotten tired of Pokemon mainline.  The truth is out there.

Watching the FB feed of people around my age who just don't "Get" games and continue to see them as "only for kids" has been an amazing reminder of just how old and out-of-touch you are by age 40. So many angry, confused, and judgmental people whining "I don't get it" or "why the hell are all these people walking around my neighborhood."

More depressing is you think it's more normal for people NOT to be walking around your suburban neighborhood.

Yup. It is one of those clarifying moments where you realize what insane control freaks people are--especially middle-class professionals. "People are doing a thing I don't do that I don't think I like, not that I know anything about it really, and I want them to stop!"

I'm just going to go with it. Gets me and my GF out walking parts of town instead of sitting around the house. If it lasts a month or two, then I'll get a month or two out of it. Free entertainment and motivation to walk around places I would only drive by.

I'm stealing your line and adding to my sentiment, Khaldun. I feel like Facebook trolling.

My business has actually gotten a little afternoon boom from this. You can reach two pokestops from our dining room (and we've even advertised that on our marquee), and people are all the time dropping lures over in our little corner. The only downside is that when said lures drop my entire staff might take a moment to try to "catch them all," so to speak...

And I don't really care how long it lasts or even if it's really a game. It's definitely a fun activity, and, just in case there were some nerdy folks in your community that you didn't already know, well, here's the chance to meet them.

A friend of my neighbor got rear-ended in traffic by someone that was playing this while driving (he heard it running on the other driver's phone when he went to check if she was okay).  Hopefully they'll do something like disabling it if you're moving more than 20mph soon, or the headlines could get ugly.

Walking around my town the last few days have been pretty entertaining. The interesting thing is watching how diverse the groups playing this are. Everything from little kids to straight up 40 year old's wearing star wars shirts. Lots of people that haven't seen much sun (curious how many sunburns have come from this). I have watched several people driving around playing this as well which worries me some. Somebody is going to get hurt unfortunately unless they disable this while driving.

The business in my town are jumping on board as well and some of them are pretty hilarious. We are talking about grocery stores that cater to old people having tons of kids stopping by. Leaving the poor old people confused on what the hell the kids are doing running around. Pokemon is not my thing but I applaud them getting people outside doing stuff even if its on accident.

Local comic-book shop and local bar are both right next to pokestops. I notice that both of them have continuously had lures on.

If I were a priest, I'd be dropping lures on the pokestop at my church 30 min before services.  :awesome_for_real:

Likewise, I'd offer a 10% discount to a person who drops a lure on the stop near my place of business.

Overall I am just "whatever" about the whole thing. Having to dodge a half dozen people on the sidewalk who are staring at their phones is normal around my office (middle of apartment/restaurant district next to campus) so I don't even really notice.

We just went to the once-a-week "dining outdoors" thing our town's restaurants do and it was hilarious and kind of touching--I would say half the people there were doing Pokemon GO during dinner, and every single restaurant had dumped some lures onto the pokestops on the street.

Seriously, they are THIS CLOSE to being on to the biggest thing ever.  It is very rough and shallow right now (not much of a game, really), but just look at the impact it is already having.  My fourteen year-old again wandering around town a bit yesterday farming some stops and searching for Pokemon.  He comes back with pictures of flocks-of-nerds doing the same thing.  My 11 year-old has been scoffing and ridiculing the whole thing, but last night at 9 pm he says he is going for a walk, and when pressed we find out it is because he wants to find some Pokemon.  I live in fucking Denmark, where the game has not even officially been released yet. 

There is a marked increase in teenagers and even young adults walking around the suburban streets here. I also am struck at how many people are finding out that objects they see every day actually have names. I myself honestly didn't know the name of a sculpture I see every day until I saw it as a pokestop.

There's a kind of exciting shared-experience feeling about it for these few days. It won't last--but I'm fascinated at the people who just instantly hate any shared experience that they don't know how to share in or wouldn't want to share in, regardless of what it is.

I guess they're enjoying the shared experience of hating something together.

My wife and I had dinner on the square of a neighboring town last night. We had a lot of fun watching the packs of nerds orbiting the square, and then we had a lot of fun joining them. My wife doesn't care to play, but she was fascinated by how the game draws attention to points of interest that we had never been aware of before, so she was happy to follow me around for a bit. That and the other nerds were all friendly and laughing and happy to share their captures.

The most fun MMO I've played recently, to be honest.

Installed it on my phone last night. The GPS simply doesn't work here. Don't know if it's my phone, the software or the UFO communication signals interfering with it. (I live in a place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stacksteads) with an unusually high number of UFO sightings. It's also the cannabis growing centre of Lancashire, totally unrelated).

(https://secure.surveymonkey.com/business/intelligence/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/pokemon1_line.png)


 :ye_gods:



(http://cdn.inquisitr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Pokemon-GO-Porn-iPhone-Android.jpg)

 :uhrr:

It's fun, but people suggesting things like that with only a week's data are clickbait-pushing twits.

" Winter is coming" is now a phrase that applies in real life but we won't know what that fully means for Pokemon Go for awhile. That said it's still impressive how much it is spiking now. Whatever fall off it has I'm sure game developers wished they had 5% of what Nintendo is left with for sustained revenue.

Agreed, but it's the prediction of hitting those numbers long-term within the first week that are just dumb. Ok, not dumb exactly but exceedingly optimistic. There will be an impact, it will be significant, nobody can guess where it's going to wind-up.

Candy Crush is down there at 2m daily users. At this same point in it's history a few years ago the same wonks were predicting it would overtake all things and games like it were the "next big thing." They were right that it had a big impact, but in all the wrong ways on methodology and usership.

Turns out that while I can't catch any at my house (they start appearing about a mile up the county road from my house), I can hatch eggs while driving around on my tractor.  My daughter finally got interested in working when she found that out  :oh_i_see:

I'm just happy for the devs over at Niantic.  Granted, they were a Google project, but really they weren't even effectively monetized for years.  They dumped a great many millions into that system and poured in a shitton of effort.  Whether you liked the game (Ingress) or not, it was refreshing to see a studio give a great many fucks about its project and players and put forth the requisite effort over time.

Now they reap the rewards (minus the Pokemon license of course).  Kudos to them.

That said, there's no way this level of play continues, regardless of season.  It's frantic.  It will die down, especially once the bigger alliances start owning everything in town.  The flaw in the game is entry is rough unless you're just into collecting and breeding or just serve as a gofer for the higher-ups.  Ingress on the other hand, has shittons to do combatively regardless of your level.

Between the two games, I still feel Ingress is better... but mechanically, Pokemon beats it in the "hunting" aspect.  Ingress portals are static; Pokemon have to be found or compelled.  It makes the game way more geocache, which is where the "newness" is imo.  We're learning that people actually dig geocaching type games, it's just they never had the appropriate conduit.  There's no turning back now.

Realize also, that wearable computing is about to completely change the game.  Coupled with games like P-Go?  I think it's a goldmine at that pricepoint.  Then once the gear becomes socially acceptable in public, even moreso.

Snapchat sees more usage than Maps? Christ, I'm old.

It's pretty cool, I work at a children's hospital and they always have lures down for the kids. I am enjoying watching people play this, and it sure works out as a desktop support guy walking my ass all over the place. There is a gym at the police station in my little town, and you can't get to it by car - people just kinda hanging out by the cop shop.

Pro tip...save up all the candy from the commons, and evolve a ton at a time after using a lucky egg. Mad XP!

Its kind of amazing me the various landmarks I'd never actually noticed in areas I've been walking through for months.

I'd never even touched a Pokemon game in my life before three days ago. Also, I strained my right calf from walking too much.

I went out earlier and caught a load of common pokemon; I tried some gyms but just got roflstomped. What's the trick to levelling your dudes? Does everyone just pick one Pokemon and sink all their Stardust into them?

It's "winter" here in Australia and there's been people out and about at night... admittedly we don't get snow and temps drop to 2 C at the worst where I live. Daughter got me on to this - we go for walks and drives together with it so it's good. What worries me is back to teaching on Tuesday... I want to see how many staff are playing it on the Monday development day and how it's going to affect the classroom.

K9 from what I can tell, pick one that has a higher evolve cost like 50 or 100 and focus on thathe.

There a gym outside the restaurant  I'm  in. Ithe was my color so I did a fight to work on leveling it. Beat one, but the next was too high. In the time it took me to get seated and restore my pokemon, the gym changed hands three times. It's not even been released here yet.
.

Trick to leveling fast is fairly simple:

1. line up a bunch (10+) of pokemon for evolving.
2. get somewhere where there are a lot of stops and pokemon on your nearby screen
3. use lucky egg
4. evolve all the things
5. start walking and getting points and catch everything you see

Jumped 2 lower levels doing that. Have 1 egg left and going to use that to blow by lvl 19 when I get there (2 more levels).

As for high CP pokemon? Heard the trick is to level up and get a naturally high pokemon and evolve that, then power it up if it is the last tier. Dunno though... I haven't tried it out yet.

Took my dog to the park. Walked about 3k in an hour.

I used to work at that park, when I was a kid. (It's a BIG park). I have never, outside of fourth of July, seen that many people in there.

It was crazy, and a huge slice of ages (although trending younger of course). There were 20-somethings running around telling people if/where they found rarer Pokemon. The park had...seven stops? Eight? and a gym. Lures down at most of them. I just walked in circles for an hour.

So if you want to level....go to parks. I think as you go up in level, the Pokemon you find seem to have more base combat power. I came away with a ton of Pidgetys, those rat things, and Eevees. I empowered and evolved the highest rated Eevee into a...Flare-something? Had like 900 power.

I haven't paid a cent (although I might, just to expand the backpack and number of pokemon you can have), but I ALSO work in a building that's a stop. So every twenty minutes or so I spin the wheel, which I admit helps.

But every park over a certain size I've seen has a number of stops and at least one gym (I pass two others on the way home from work). So if you want to level up, that's the best place to go. Plus no idiots to run you down.

I figure...why not? It gets me and my wife off the couch, the dog is thrilled to go wander around on a leash and sniff the other people and dogs (and pee on, like, all the things). If this doesn't keep people's attention, someone will come along and figure it out. I'm 100% for any sort of game that gets people up and moving and even occasionally interacting. (In my case, that was like 15 people wanting to pet a beagle and 3 people informing everyone where they caught a Snorlax and a Qubone. I got the Qubone).

It'll probably, somehow, be Blizzard that manages it. :)

I just watched an older couple that looked like they had just come in from plowing the fields sitting at a table eating dinner and grabbing the plethora of pokemon we have spawning every evening. They hardly ever smiled, just farmed straight for about an hour.

This is a strange game indeed.

It also occurs to me that it was very fortunate for us all that the game designers didn't decide it would be clever to allow someone to capture another player's spawn -- as in a true shared pokemon world.

The riots would have been apocalyptic.

It's already bad enough people who don't play the game are setting up lures to rob wayward pokemon masters. We don't need the Ashes and Mistys of the world forming into pvp gangs.

I'm pretty sure that'll come with the Team Rocket DLC/IAP.  :awesome_for_real:

Couple of other levelling things:

Focus on an Eevee if you can. They take a big jump in power when they evolve, and you can get three different kinds of evolved Eevees, so you can keep evolving them up.

If you get a 5k or 10k egg, esp. a 10k egg, at a pokestop, slap it in an incubator. The 10k egg is going to pop out as a 600-700 CP rarer Pokemon and it will be cheap to power it up at first. I had a 10k egg pop out a powerful water type at 650CP with 20 candies attached, and the stardust cost for powering it was really cheap, so I could zoom it to 800CP right there and then.

Never pass up commons: they are what supplies all your stardust. Just get the Professor to render them into food afterwards and store up a whole bunch of evolutions like people are saying--do those all at once with a lucky egg fired up.

Servers down or is it me? I seem to have good service but haven't been able to login for the past hour or so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDDTjTuCLNE

Nintendo stock is up 90%+

Is there a way to spend money in Pokemongo that is somehow going to get funneled back to Nintendo or do investors just not understand games? Or in this case, non-games?

This entire phenomenon, and that's exactly what it is, is completely beyond me.

(https://scontent-lax3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13680976_1297678606909757_2570332926776932518_n.jpg?oh=ee2f30b5ca66397659478a646c29c631&oe=582CCD02)

Player in a rural area:

I saw a Caterpie once.

They get some sort of residuals on top of the licence maybe. The app has your usual F2P microtrans built in for the whales and catasses.  Normal joes can play for free without worrying about that though.  So yes investors know nothing by of games.

 This shouldn't surprise you. They're the first type of person to roll eyes and call you a man child for playing rather than drinking and watching a sport like a REAL adult.

The game does have in-app purchases but the portion of that going to Nintendo is likely small. Current estimates are around 10% - 20%. E.g. one likely breakdown of each purchase is:

Apple/Google 30%, Niantic 30%, The Pokémon Company 30%, Nintendo 10%

Nintendo owns 1/3 of The Pokémon Company so presumably some portion of the revenue going to The Pokémon Company eventually gets back to Nintendo. Nintendo also invested in Niantic but it's not known right now if they are getting a direct revenue stream from the game from their investment in Niantic.

Didn't Apple lower their cut to something like 15% recently?

Only for long-term subscription purchases (1 year or greater).

What should surprise you is that Pokemon Go doesn't rely on whales. The game has been earning most of its revenue from small time spenders. Iwata I believe said a few years ago one of the things he didn't like about mobile gaming was the whale catching revenue model. He wanted more mobile games to encourage everyone in believing that a game is worth paying for and Niantic has succeeded in making that game for Nintendo. If it was Iwatat it's a shame he isn't alive to serve out some crow to his detractors.

He's not serving shit yet (well, if he weren't dead he wouldn't be). Let's see where the money comes from a year from now. Ingress was one third of an idea of a game and 100% of the success is in the word Pokemon. Neither Nintendo nor Niantic are relevant here other than one happens to have one third control of a property and the other knew how to reskin something.

Yeah, I have to agree that if this was, say, Digimon, it would not be the phenomenon it is.

Blizzard needs to do their thing with this. They have pets in games already. Crossover with a Blizzard version of this that connects with rewards in other games.

Too late.

The next ARG that will make money will have similar mechanics, but the "catch cute animals in the real world" niche is now 100% full, even if Blizz puts more polish on it.

Blizzard can't penetrate this market. One is too many.

But there are going to be attempted clones of this shit. Pay money for keys for boxes you find around the world. Bullshit keys for boxes have worked in MMOs and I can hear the dollar signs going off in peoples heads world wide. This has proven a new market stream and we will be knee deep in them next year.

The clones in this case will matter little, not at all, not in the least. This is brand name. The people turned on to ARG gameplay here are not going to jump ship just because someone else has a cute animal catch-em-all game. It will take a majorly different theme and a new set of hooks to move over people for whom this is a totally new kind of experience. Which very likely game developers and suits will not know how to do, any more than anyone knew what to do when The Sims got people to play games who didn't play games.

It will be interesting to where this goes -- I'm not sure the whales/FTP from other mobile/PC games applies -- it seems there is a strong revenue stream from people that aren't even playing the game, paying for Lure Modules at Pokestops as local cafes, restaurants, coffee shops, pubs, etc. capitalize on increased foot traffic for a relatively small fee that they can make back tenfold (<$2 per hour for big bump in business seems like a small expense).

Maybe Niantic/Nintendo will roll out some sort of "pay to be a Pokestop" mechanism too, or maybe some arrangement where a business could *purchase* a right to be a "enhanced" Pokestop.

How that would affect gameplay IDK.

I keep hearing this isn't a "game", but all the server outages harkens me back to early MMO days ;)

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85916/pokemongo.jpg)

Levelling is important, but also, when it comes to gyms, CP isn't everything. If you look up the weaknesses of the guys in the gym, you can beat their Pokémon with a much lower CP guy. I smoked a gym yesterday that had two 1k Arcanines and a 900 flareon with a team of sub-500 ground guys and an 800 Vaporeon. Their attacks were "Not very effective" (1/2 damage) and mine were all "Super Effective" (double damage). As with most Pokémon games, Type is pretty important too.

The battle mechanic is also pretty dumb--if you're willing to frantically tap away, you can often make up for a -300 CP or so disadvantage even if you don't have a type advantage of some kind.

Sorta true. But there are pokemon that are just flat out better. Vaporeon and snorlax are just flat out stronger. I repeatedly try to knock around a 835 vaporeon with my 844 jolteon and only won 2 out of 7 matches. And I tried the dodge, attack, dodge attack, etc. Also tried spam tapping. Super effective attacks routinely hit for the same or less than what he was hitting me with on his normal attacks. Even my special hit for less than his special and my pokemon is 'supposed' to be stronger against him. YMMV I guess.

Yes, this.

Capture everything you see, transfer the lower CP extras to get more candy, evolve when you can.  Capturing and evolving both get you XP.  The higher your level, the higher CP pokemon will spawn for you. 

As far as I can see there's very little point in wasting candy on "powering up" your guys because you'll inevitably find a wild one with higher CP after you've gained a few levels.  If you want to be able to compete for gyms (which is kinda pointless IMO because the mechanics are broken) just focus on grinding your levels.

The reason to compete for gyms is because they are the only non-cash way to get Pokecoins. And Pokecoins unlock stuff like more incubators and lures. Just dropping your Pokemon off at a gym of your team is worth 10 pokecoins.

Easiest way to take a gym is to stack vaporeons. Sadly, she is the easiest and strongest to get with great HP and water gun is insanely powered for her. If you can't beat em, join em.  :awesome_for_real:

Yes, don't waste candy and stardust early on especially. I now have a cp 850 pidgeot, and that's not from powering it up. It's from catching a cp 275 pidgeot and having a million pidgey candies from catching a hundred of the fuckers, so insta-evolve to powerful. There's a few low-level pokies that jump a lot in particular--eevees, nidorans. If you get a high-CP one of those at its lower version, it'll jump big when you evolve it.

Basically the strongest things you'll see are usually 10km eggs that hatched. Those come out of the egg pretty strong and they come out with a big supply of candies and they're often relatively "low" in power when they come up, meaning they're cheap to power-up. I got a Lapras from a 10km egg that hatched at 850cp with 20 candies and was only 200 stardust to power up at first, so I jacked it quickly to 1040 cp.

Someone is not a fan. (http://www.krem.com/news/resident-leaves-amazing-message-for-pokemon-go-chasers/276328115)

I wouldn't be a fan of roving idiots trespassing on my property, either.  We even got an official CANFORGEN (Canadian Forces General Order) today to watch for people roaming around in authorized areas of our bases and installations playing this.  It also mentioned to be aware of your surroundings should you decided to play yourself to avoid injuries.  Seriously.  Pokemon Go is now a threat to national security. :facepalm:

A charity in Bosnia had to warn people not to wander into old mine fields the other day.

It's like people lose all common sense when they start playing this.

That's because they are being programmed to fight the Evil Power.

Level 10, not sure this has legs.  It's very buggy and server gets slammed every afternoon.

It has been fun partnering with my 8 and 16 year old, though.  Easy digital excuse to bond.

We are trying to have fun with it--my wife who never games at all likes it--but the server downtime and the times that the server is technically up but not really (like, your GPS position updates but nothing is "really" there on the map and you can't interact with anything) are so predominant that it feels stupid to say, "Hey, let's do a pokewalk". Odds are it'll just be a walk-walk, which is fine, but not the game. I am a little surprised that the company doesn't seem to be able to get on top of this even a little bit.

Given the history of the games industry and the track record of 90% of tech companies who suddenly find themselves on the "hit" end of the hit-miss spectrum, you shouldn't be.

I'm more surprised there haven't been huge long-term outages rather than the frequent glitches and inability to juggle network traffic.

I reinstalled because 1. I am weak and 2. the family was going downtown and I wanted to see if it was more fun downtown.

It was more fun downtown.  I went from just over level 4 to level 8 in about an hour or so.

Back in the suburbs, I'd bet it'll be weeks before I get to 10.  Or I could go back downtown for an hour and probably hit 10.

If the geocache data doesn't load, you can generally restart the app and it will show back up.

I'm still having trouble with non-interactive pokestops, and having the ball not go through rocking motions.  Lost a ? ? ? Drowzee that way.

I dunno, I have a 10km egg incubating, but it's all of 1.8 km right now, because I can't be bothered to leave the app running for half an hour plus to see maybe 4 pokemon and one pokestop.

Yeah, I am enjoying the social aspects of this, but the technical aspects are an embarassing mess.  I can't run the thing in the background at all despite it utterly ravaging my batteries, I'm constantly running in to connection issues, even when it DOES connect I'm often not sure if it's really working because pokémon just show up randomly or they don't and I have no way of knowing if their absence is intentional or something has borked at some point again, I constantly get hangs and crashes, I'm running in to the stupidest glitch where the game only runs when I'm holding my phone upside down and cuts to a black screen when I turn it upright. 

I also have no idea when or if the "nearby pokémon" thing works or what it does (I've read a number of articles with conflicting explanations of the system) or if there's any way to track or hunt specific pokémon down, which is really getting annoying.  I have caught 73 pokémon, and 64 of them are normal type while another eight are Zubats.  In the actual games, different pokémon inhabit different areas and if you want a Pikachu or whatever you go over to where they are, but everywhere I've been in this city is just lousy with birds and rats and almost nothing else.  Which is an even bigger problem here because you need candies to level up and the only way to get candies is by catching more pokémon of the same type, so if I do manage to ever catch something rare, it's going to sit on my bench picking it's nose while my army of powered up rats wrecks faces.

I mean, it's a fun activity and all, hanging out with people in the sun, chatting and giving a shit about Bulbasaurs again, but I do wish it had been programmed by someone who knew how to make some kind of game.  It's not like timesink level-up treadmills with microtransactions are some weird untapped frontier on mobile phones or something.

My one glaring issue with this now is the 3 footprints bug. The main thrust of Pokemon to my knowledge has been "gotta catch em all." Yet, the main tracking ability that was working earlier on in the game, now doesn't work at all. It has become this walk around and maybe random pokemon will pop up. No one is hunting around anymore in my neighborhood because they can't. That nearby tracking screen? Ignore it. Good luck.

Niantic's silence on the issue is astounding. Not even a 'hey, we know about this and are working on it.' They have no community representation and zero communication outside of a few social tweets to people.

It's a shame really.

PROTIP:

When evolving your Eevees, you can pick which one you get. Rename them prior to evolving, to the following:

Rainer : Vaporeon
Sparky: Jolteon
Pyro: Flareon

I'm 2 for 2 (Vaporeons of course) - worked for my son as well.

I work at a hospital and there are a lots of stops, people keep em lured a lot and it's pretty sweet. Nice for the kids too ;)

So me and the kids were hanging at the house last night and saw something on tracking that no one had - and my son identified it as a Venosaur. We started on foot trying to find it, but no luck. So I took the 4 kids on a family drive through the neighbor hood at a slow rate of speed. Never found ole Venosaur but we had an exciting little hunt. These kind of things make the game fun to me. The family walks, trips to the park, excitement of finding a rare one. Good stuff.

Did that the first day they changed the maps and fucked up the tracking nearby. Haven't done it since because it's just a wild goose chase at this point. I'll start hunting again once Niantic gets its head out of its ass and realizes hunting pokemon is what made this a huge launch. Gyms are not overly exciting and pokestops are just supply nodes.

It seems like Naiantic is the company that got the golden goose but rather than making the mistake of killing it was surprised it had to be fed, sheltered and kept away from foxes.

Get the kids in the car (and the wife if she plays) and load this up prior to doing a neighborhood drive.

https://github.com/mchristopher/PokemonGo-DesktopMap

We scored a Snorlax doing this yesterday that there is NO WAY i would have found if we were walking. It seems that the creatures are added to the world and will despawn in like 15 minutes. So for those 3 footstep things you have to hoof it in the perfect direction to get there in time.

I know right? The first day I was shown this right in the middle of town and had a sea of pokeman to gather up, but when I went home and excitedly tried to show this to my wife, well, sitting there for ten minutes going "there'll be one any minute, I know!" does not for an exciting presentation make.

Eventually I figured out to drop some incense, so it wasn't a complete flop.

Don't go hunting Pokemon in minefields (http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pokemon-go-players-urged-to-stop-walking-into-minefields) sounds like advice that shouldn't need to be given.

Universities are a treasure trove. Pretty much each building has a stop and a lot of the major ones are gyms. Pitt has the Carnegie museums and CMU right down the street so this entire area is full of stuff. Hell even my apt near the zoo is pretty active all the time. I feel for the burbs and rural people.

Yeah, that's a pretty big flaw IMO and it's not like it's at all a difficult problem to solve since it'd be easy to translate better progression systems from other games into this one.  I think the help text in game even suggests that you can level up your pokemans by training them at gyms, which would make complete sense, but that's completely false as far as I can tell.  Personally I'd like to see something analogous to the incubator where you can pick one "favorite" pokemon and have it slowly level up as you walk -- the map could show it running along next to you, it'd be cute as fuck.

There's even precedent for it - I believe Gold/Silver had a pokewalker that you could load a pokemon onto, and then walk around and level it that way.  Each step = 1 xp, I think.

It was HeartGold and SoulSilver, the remakes of the Gen II games for DS.

Yeah, those.  I always refer to them as Gold/Silver.

Probably my favorite version of pokemon games.  Although I have a soft spot for Yellow.

Took kids to a national park today, was a freaking BLAST. 

It's amazing that they haven't even addressed the "three track" thing--that's a specific thing that they could either confirm, disconfirm, or say "we're investigating". Nothing.

Another little tip I wish I'd know about: if you don't want a charmander, squirtle or bulbasaur to start, just refuse to catch the one that appears. Walk away. You'll get a pikachu instead.

Also: with pidgies, just get as many as you can and then evolve all of them into the middle-stage pidgeon Pokemon after doing a lucky egg. It's only 12 candies. Don't do the 50-candy evolution.

Yes by the way on universities and colleges, even in rural areas. Because a lot of students played Ingress, so there's usually a metric asston of pokestops.

(https://scontent-ord1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/t31.0-8/13710617_10207118911226483_7311966854723715645_o.jpg)

My kids hate me.

Nice collection of gym mons. I'm getting there... slowly. Hunting the dreaded hp-sink Snorlax currently. Highest Vaporeon is 1700. Rest is just trash.

BTW, found one vape...then hatched a 10k egg ...was an Eevee. I was sad. I said, screw it, I'll make him a vape too! No luck on the Snorlax's. I was DE'ing my Krabbys last night and accidently evolved a 30 CP one. DOH!

I like that I'm not the only person who thinks of processing Pokemon into candy as "DEing" them.

There's a great cartoon running around in a similar theme using Rick and Morty. I'll see if I can find it.

Ed: Oh hey.. bad dubbing on top of the image:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH4bRUYuMrQ

I was walking around Hermon park in Houston last night.

It's like a scene from Black Mirror out there. Dark outside and everyone roaming in packs staring at their phones.  You can almost hear the native digilife through the passing speakers.

Out of all the fads I've missed, this will go down as the one I'm most glad to have missed.

Cheer up, there will be more you will get to miss before you die.

I got a pretty good Snorlax out of my 10k egg. About 1350 CP and some room to power him up.

I do wish that maybe 1 in 20 encounters in my area was something a bit out of the ordinary. Or even 1 in 50. At level 19 I'm still getting about 90% pidgies, zubats, rattatas, spearows, even when I go into downtown. I see clefairies, bellsprouts, nidorans and an eevee now and again, but I don't think I've seen anything genuinely new this entire week except through eggs.

It's kinda neat that going to a different area gives you an entirely different ecology.  Most of SF is full of zubats, but Crissy Field is full of bulbasaurs, Mt Tam has a lot of eevees, and of course anywhere by the water is great for magikarps.

lol@nintendo's stock

lol@the money not understanding gaming

lol@everyone

That happened faster than I thought it was going to,  honestly.  I assumed it would have happened after their next earnings call when it came out that they weren't pulling in billions from a game they didn't make.

I was surprised when it went up even a single % to begin with.

Nintendo released a statement on Friday telling people their forecast in April already took into account their expected revenue from Pokémon GO for their fiscal year (ending March 2017), and that basically their current revenues from GO have not caused them to revise that forecast (i.e. those revenues are in-line with expectations).

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2016/160722e.pdf

Edit: line break

I dont understand how gyms work.  I'm a low level, so why would I bother going to a gym when they are inhabited by a much higher trainers/mons?  I'm going to lose, so... why go?

Is the only way to level just by collecting & evolving?

You get experience for every enemy pokemon you knock out, and given that you can use six pokemon in a row each time you attack a gym there's opportunities for even fairly low-level players to kock off the lower rungs of a gym.

That said, the gym fight mechanics are entirely static and pretty dull after you've done them a couple of times. It's arguably worse than ingress since you can't do much to actively defend gyms, and if you're in a city they flip so quickly that it's hard to see any value from holding them. Perhaps if you're one of the 1% and have godlike pokemon, but then that's just another example of the game rewarding the rich for being richer.

So, I line up 6 of my lowbie pokemons and hope I win?  5 lose and last may win?  Most likely I'm going to lose on all, which is fine, but it doesn't make me want to try again.  Game is not that compelling.  It seems bizarre since I don't get how new players advance.

If you're that far outclassed, there's no point. But if you have a couple 400s and it's defended by someone about 600 you can prolly knock it out. Use types to your advantage too.

The point to holding Gyms is you can get coins without paying real money.

All that said, I'm kind of over the game.

Pretty much. Niantic doesn't seem to have any idea of how to manage it, either. The gyms around us are either perpetual level 2/3 with lower-level pokemon that people knock over four or five times a day or they're level 8 monstrosities packed with 2000 CP Gyardos, Snorlax and Dragonites that pretty much don't change hands at all now.

Same as Ingress.

Gyms are pointless and they removed tracking pokemon from the app and fucked over 3rd party sites that mapped pokemon in your area, all for the sake of server stability.

In other words, can't hunt pokemon and can't battle with any sort of salient result, along with no 1v1 challenges and no trading. I assume this was all just a big test to see how fast a game can lose players. Sadly, people in high activity areas will keep moving the participation needle.

Looks like the Eevee naming trick doesn't work anymore, or perhaps I am just bad at spelling.  Also looks like they adjusted the bonus on Eevee evolutions (downward).

The miss chance for level 15+ captures is real and massively frustrating.  Add that to living in a 'rural' area (closest pokestop or gym is 2 miles away) and even the collect part of collect them all becomes annoying.  Wife can't even play for the poor connectivity in the area (game doesn't handle intermittent network connectivity well at all, surprise).  If I lose another 10 balls on a 50cp zulbat...  I'm routinely out of balls and waiting around until I can find an excuse to head into a more densely populated area's parks to reload.  That runs right into the rural vs. urban problem, the early vs. late adopter challenge also exists; but one consequence of being in a rural area is that I can sometimes take over the local gym or drop a pokemon there for the meager allotment of free coins.  Late adopters will always have the opportunity to travel to an unappealing location to participate in the game, yay?

Meh.  This developer doesn't understand that the customer defines your market, you can see it in their response to the mapping apps.  Rather than take a hard look at the tedious aspect of the game your players are automating their way out of just pronounce that they are playing it wrong and go to war with them.  That doesn't seem like a winning strategy.

Pokemon Go still excites for the 'next generation' AR game, but this first month of release is supporting the adage that it is better to be lucky than good. 

Dunno if this was posted before, but this is Police Heli footage of police tracking a car driving suspiciosly that turned out to be a guy hunting pokis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlAsCBP0GkU

If you want fast forward to the last minute as it ends with one of the best, most deadpan sarcastic comments I've ever heard.

Eevee naming trick only works the first time you do each evolution. After that, it's RNG. New tracker looks promising, but doesn't address the underlying issues of populating other areas... in addition to a greater variety of mons.

That new speed verification thing is just fuck stupid. I see their intent, but it needs to really be tuned better. My friend that bikes is constantly getting this and she is not some insane bicycle fanatic...just a casual beach cruiser type. Same with a buddy that runs. This thing is also fucking with my GPS now where it was smooth as silk prior. Now I get a dead avatar that doesn't move, then the GPS lost message, then my avatar goes full bore to catch up to where I actually am, then I get this retarded popup that I have to clear. Not so much gamebreaking, but annoyances tend to build into that if they are frequent enough.

So basically they're like most other MMO developers.   :awesome_for_real:

I'd fucking love for someone who knew how to make a game to make something with some of these core concepts.  Just a basic foozle-whacker that's driven by GPS so you have to walk around to find the ten rats and collect their tails.  This game manages to be fairly compelling even with its fuckstupid loot/advancement system; put a basic Diku clone on there instead and it'd be massively addictive.

Thought the Meridian 59 guy was running the cutter over at Niantic... so exactly!

I have a GPS watch and between dodgy GPS in Pokemon Go and spotty cell coverage I get 'credit' for about a quarter of the distance I travel - makes eggs an exercise in frustration.  Just allowing users to link a higher quality data source for position would go a long way to help out.  The "You are going too fast" pop up comes out all the time in the woods (GPS signals bouncing off trees) and in poor connection areas.  Sometimes you do get to interact with pokestops that are miles away before it figures it out though.  They've got some bad assumptions about client spatial discontinuities and the availability of network... the kind of things you fall into if you never leave your major american tech city before releasing a product to the world.


I'm really tempted to hack together a Laughing Man overlay for my camera now, just for shits and grins.  Today's AR 'polish' kinda fits with an early 90s vision of a post-war future.

The problem is that this game has a titanic amount of data from Ingress and Google in general that most developers won't be able to duplicate very easily.  And even then, probably the only reason this is successful while Ingress is not (as much, anyway) is Pokémon.  It's a lot more work to make a global AR game than another "collect and level up some crappy jpegs of heroes" game.

It looks like they've deleted all the Pokéstops and the gym from the park near me, so I suspect I'm done.  I do a lot of walking anyways but I'm the only person I know who does, so most of my group is probably gone and this game has zero stickiness without that.  Not really sure why Niantic is doing this deletion stuff, this whole neighborhood is empty now except for one gym I'd have to cross construction to get to and a Pokéstop at a synagogue that I suspect the owners don't want people to be sitting around in at all hours talking about Pidgeys.

I'm pretty sure the most valuable part of that data (the map stuff) is openly available; I've seen other apps use Google's map API (in particular I'm thinking of Quadstreaker (http://www.geekwire.com/2013/seattlebased-quadstreaker-app-turns-world-game-board/), which I was a huge fan of while it lasted).

The real world POI stuff is neat but I don't know that you really need it to build a game.  If anything it kinda fucks up Pokemon GO because whereas Ingress is about area control (i.e. distance between the points you visit), Pokemon GO is all about grinding resources (i.e. number of points you visit regardless of distance, or just camping one point with a bunch of other players), so having the POIs clustered together in certain areas doesn't matter for Ingress but it makes balancing Pokemon impossible.  You wouldn't lose anything gameplay-wise by just generating spawns dynamically (like many games do), and it'd make for a much more consistent experience.

New update appears to have added back some sort of tracking feature, but it doesn't seem to show up consistently.  Anyone know how this thing works?

(edit) Googling around tells me that the new "nearby" tracker is in a testing phase and they're trying it out with different subsets of users.  From the one glimpse of it I got this morning it seemed pretty cool.

SF got the nearby... everyone else has sightings. Nearby looks promising.

Yeah, confirmed it's (only?) available in SF -- it went away when I went to work in the East Bay, then came back when I went home.  It's pretty cool.  I spent about an hour last night trying it out, checking the "nearby" for stuff I wanted and then hiking off to find it.

I did like the more "gamey" feeling of the old footprint system where it felt like a challenge to solve, compared to the new system where it just tells you where to go.  The plus side of the new system is that it actually works consistently, and from the perspective of giving you a way to play the game actively that involves walking around instead of sitting by a lure, it succeeds very well.  As far as finding pokemon that weren't trash, I think I got better results for time invested by hiking around than I would have by sitting in a lured bar with a pint (my previous favorite method of grinding pokemon), and the hiking around is definitely better for my waistline, so i call that a success on their part.

South of the Border, SC,  has a shit ton of poke stops and gyms.  Was neat to see.  My daughter called it Poke Vegas lol

First rest area in SC heading south on I95 has 2 poke stops and a gym.  Great place for a lunch or snack :)

This is the best dating app evar.

My gf and I like it enough and would probably enjoy it more if it wasn't so god damn hot and muggy out all the time. We are also getting close to finishing the pokedex for our region so running out of cool new mons to show off.

I have taken to putting crap mons on gyms I take over. Hilarious to see my cp55 weedle sitting on a gym when I leave.

Speed tracking thing is just broken. It triggered three times today as I walked between offices at my normal poky speed. I almost think as with everything about this game that they've used some semi-randomized trigger for it, and did it mostly for liability reasons.

I am in a very favorable play situation at work, with 15 pokestops in easy reach, but I can barely be bothered with the damn thing now. It's a grind that doesn't even get me access to content or anything else, really. There's almost no chance of a random pop of a pokemon I don't have and it more or less reads every region within one hundred miles of me as "grass", so it's not like there's anywhere else to go to find unusual spawns.

This is maybe the biggest waste of the most attention I've ever seen, and it really did not have to be that way. Niantic is just horrifically unimaginative. I'm sure Nintendo's famous control-freakery didn't help but still.

I think I have a theory about the "You are driving" thing and why it triggers so often if you're just walking around. I think it's got nothing to do with the speed you're travelling. I think it's if you have the game open and you pass by too many active opportunities for interaction, whether that's a Pokemon spawning or if it's a Pokestop. So it goes off quickly if you're driving--you passed 2+ spawns so fast that you couldn't have caught them if you tried, so the game assumed you were driving. But if you're just walking around and you complete ignore (or don't notice) 2 spawns, it assumes the same and gives you the "Don't play if you're driving".

Which would make sense given Niantic's general cutting of corners/favoring of cheap-shit algorithms in other respects.

Pretty sure it's not that or it'd be going off a lot more often for me when I'm walking around the city.  As far as I can tell it's done by sampling your location and failing to smooth out lag or GPS errors.  I'll have it give me the "you're driving" error when I'm standing completely still if the GPS gets a funny bounce and decides to teleport my avatar half a block in an instant.  I also see it a lot when switching applications if I've moved since I last had it open, since it rubber-bands my avatar and doesn't notice that it's been five minutes since its last position sample.

Arise for the expansion!

Well, kinda. Gen 2 pokemon are out in case any of you still have this and want to poke around with it.