If you thought the Pokémon Go craze was bad...

[Evie]

Better prepare yourself, and possibly build an apocalypse shelter. Because, not happy with making the world grind to a halt for a month once, Niantic (yes, the same folks) are at it again, and this time, they've set their augmented reality sights on a franchise that dwarfs even Pokémon in popularity. .

You know, a little unknown franchise about spells, owls, wands, broomsticks, house eleves, house cups and a certain boy who lived.

No, this isn't the hoax from back in 2016. This is the genuine article, confirmed by Niantic themselves, on their own website. https://nianticlabs.com/blog/wizardsunite/

It's uncertain a)when exactly the game will release in 2018, and b)how long it will take after that for the game to be actually playable, But some degree of collective human insanity is not an unreasonable expectation.

 

[sherbz]

I take great pride in the fact that I have never played Pokemon go. And this new announcement is unlikely to change that position.

 

[Maniacal]

Pokemon Go was kind of fun, when the servers worked... it needed another year of development. It's doing pretty well now though, but I lost interest ages ago.

Hopefully this one will be better, it does seem to be a joint game by Warner Brothers and Niantic so Nia won't be the main team behind it I think. Warner Brother's cash shop and transactions could be terrible though. It will probably be down a lot when it comes out, Harry Potter is still quite popular, but I dunno if it will reach the same insanely unprecedented numbers of players PoGo had when it came out. Even if Niantic had been prepared for a massive number of users, which they weren't, no one could have handled the boom PoGo had.

 

[Ryika]

Pokemon Go really made me worry for humanity. I wonder if this will be another game where people are shot dead for trespassing, fall into their deaths, and get messed up by lions, all because they want to reach something of virtual value in a game that they would only play for a few months anyway.

 

[Evie]

Out of hundreds of millions of players, you are bound to get a handful of idiots with no sense of self preservation and the journalists willing to blow those idiots' story out of proportion to sell a copy.

 

[Ryika]

Sure, but Pokemon Go showed a side of humanity that I had never seen before. I literally have never heard of anybody jumping into a lion's enclosure to, for example, recover something that they've accidentally dropped in there, but add the feeling of urgency by offering a reward that they can only get by doing something really dumb, and some people are suddenly willing to risk their lives for nothing. Sounds like the unintentional start of a social experiment to me, and makes me wonder what we could make people do with only the right triggers.

Hopefully Activision don't get their fingers on it, or they might find some way to use it to make players purchase microtransactions.

 

[Evie]

Darwin Awards candidates are found in all walks of life, including gamers. lol

 

[Maniacal]

It was a tiger enclosure and they didn't actually jump into the enclosure, just a secondary area next to it. Which is still idiotic, happened a week after launch so they were probably trying to use the tracker system it had at the time (when it worked, which it usually didn't). Lots of people caused problems in graveyards, memorials and other places by being loud, rude, littering and generally causing problems which has resulted in the removal of graveyard locations from PoGo and even Ingress (where they existed for years without issue). Luckily most players aren't like that, but sadly masses of PoGO players have caused a lot of problems in a lot of places.

There are some pretty dumb people out there for sure, you see similar stuff in MMOs where people sacrifice their health, social relationships, etc to keep on grinding.

 

[BvBPL]

Why did people think Pokemon Go was bad? It didn't work well? Why would we assume a Harry Potter game would be equally bad?

 

[Leonel]

I was peer pressured into playing Pokemon Go. I really didn't do anything beyond the initial pressuring.

 

[Maniacal]

Pokemon GO was released far too early (Niantic admitted it was only about 10% feature complete), was completely overwhelmed by the amount of players (tens and tens of millions), and often simply did not work for hours on end. A lot of features didn't work very well either, and most if not all have been completely overhauled or scrapped and replaced since.

It was a very rough launch, also a lot of people were clueless and expected it to be like the Pokemon gameboy games but on your phone, which it was never intended to be.