Pokemon GO

[Kail]

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.

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.

[Samwise]

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.

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, 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.

[Samwise]

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.

[01101010]

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

[Samwise]

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.

[Cheddar]

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 :)

[Ghambit]

This is the best dating app evar.

[01101010]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Samwise]

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".

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.

[01101010]

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.