The Pokemon Go Craze

I've enjoyed playing the game. It's been a fun way to break the ice and interact with co-workers, neighbors or other people I normally wouldn't talk to very much, and since I already walk a fair amount, it gives me a little something to do on longer commutes.

I'm not really inclined to go on these huge adventures looking for Pokemon (childcare makes that pretty difficult), but it has encouraged me to maybe take the long way when walking on regular errands, and it already helped me find a different bike path not far from my neighborhood. Many of my other friends have used to help explore neighborhoods they dont normally visit.

The game itself isn't that great, tbh, and I hope they fix the servers/add additional functionality soon, but I think the pushback is unwarranted. It's fine. It's making a lot of people happy and step out of their comfort zone a bit. Pokemon is fine. Seems like a positive to me.
 
Yeah, for me the main attraction (again if I had a smartphone) would be the social aspect. I don't think much of the functionality, from what I've heard the game "mechanics" are very simplistic.
 
Well I personally think it's kind of nuts and I doubt I'll ever try it but I'm not big into mobile gaming anyway. I have a few games on my iphone but I never play them. I'll just surf the web or watch netflix during downtime and at home I want to play pc games, not really shallow mobile ones like this. Cus face it, it is shallow, it's a gimmick to get you to go search for things.

A real life scavenger hunt sounds awesome but to do like on a weekend with some friends, not necessarily to do 24/7 on my own on my phone.

For whatever reason though I've not run into anyone playing it. All the people in my sub have young kids so the kids are too young to play (like 5 and under) and the adults too busy. No one at work I know of plays it, probably some of the interns do but I haven't seen them. I saw one guy playing it in line at taco bell but that's it. No roving bands of teens at parks or anything, and I took my daughter to the park for a couple hours yesterday. I must not be in a hip enough area. I'll bet next time we're at the zoo we'll see some pokemon players.

I do feel bummed I missed the boat though: nintendo stock doubled since the game's release. Which I no longer have a brokerage account anymore anyway (I emptied it to purchase a house) but still, this was rumored to be coming, we should've seen it.
 
civvver said:
I do feel bummed I missed the boat though: nintendo stock doubled since the game's release. Which I no longer have a brokerage account anymore anyway (I emptied it to purchase a house) but still, this was rumored to be coming, we should've seen it.
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Apple should feel bummed out, I've been pointing out for years how they should buy Nintendo.

PoGo where all the IAPs are more expensive on Android than on iOS would be fantastic.
 
Lexicus said:
In this sense, it's a benchmark. I would think Pokemon GO will feature prominently in future narratives of the history of AR.

For my part, I'm getting a big kick out of the memes it's generated and watching people make fools of themselves on social media trying to h8 on it.

Like I said, h8ers gon' h8. It's almost impossible to post on the internet about how you hate it without coming across as exactly like one of those old people in the 1950s who said television was a tool of Satan.

Like I said, the few critiques of it I've read that actually were anything other than curmudgeonly dissatisfaction with what the young people are doing today are the "corporate dystopia" ones, which I think are basically correct. There is so much potential in a thing like Pokemon GO, that it seems a shame it's just being used for corporate data mining and microtransactions.

Actually, another thing I've been curious about, for those playing GO to what extent is it pay-to-win?
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It's pay to grind better and pay to lure people to high yield spawn sites.

A couple of items help with powering up XP, or getting more pokemon faster.

Extra incubators for eggs, which hatch as you walk, are the most attractive item to purchase at this stage because they make walking more productive. However there's an ingame way to get a steady trickle of ingame currency as well. Eggs will help with getting more rare pokemon so there's a vanity aspect to incubator purchases.

There's a soft cap at level 20, which is pretty easy it hit without paying anything. After that leveling up gets exponentially slower and the benefits relatively marginal. Grinding through the higher levels is also largely a vanity exercise, one which will be aided reasonably well by judicious use of the purchased temporary XP boost item.

Lures, which increase spawns at a specific Pokestop site, are a powerfully attractive purchase (about a dollar per half hour) for businesses who want to bring people to their doorstep. The game will make a lot of its cash that way.

Sponsored locations, pokemon spawns and items will also bring in revenue.
 
That's nice to know.

But yeah, Lure are going to be a big seller, both from shops trying to attract people and from fans trying to get together and organize fannish events. Which is a really smart approach to freemium, actually.
 
Don't know if this has been posted yet, but I saw a story on the news about the police using Pokemon Go to catch a criminal. So if you have any warrants out for your arrest, you might be better off avoiding the game.

Found an article on it:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/pokemon-go-criminal-arrested-pokestop-police-station-william-wilcox-michigan-a7142846.html

While playing Pokémon Go, one Michigan criminal found the last thing he was looking for: the police.

William Wilcox found himself at the Milford police station while playing the augmented reality game. The station had been listed as a “gym”, where gamers can claim and catch other Pokémon.

Mr Wilcox had a warrant for his arrest, however, and police nabbed him on the spot.

Police told NBC affiliate KCBD that the game simply made the job easier.

“Fortunately, sometimes they make our job easy for us,” said police chief Tom Lindberg.

“The original charge he had was for breaking and entering, but the warrant was for failure to appear for sentencing. He either forgot he had a warrant out for his arrest or was just ignoring it thinking nothing will happen.”

Given the fact that Milford – a town 30 miles north of Ann Arbor – has a population under 6,500, police recognised Mr Wilcox when he arrived at the station.

Mr Wilcox was arraigned and released, apparently unphased by the time in police custody.

“I think he was more upset that he had to stop playing the game,” said Mr Lindberg, adding that this could have been avoided if Mr Wilcox were more mindful of his surroundings.

“Don’t just walk into the police building and start playing the game,” he said. “Most of those characters will appear outside the building."
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I'm going to take "Wouldn't be better on account of not having been made" for 10.
 
downtown said:
Many of my other friends have used to help explore neighborhoods they dont normally visit.
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Yeah that's what I've been using it for. It's made my daily biking a lot more interesting, or at least it's turned it into a game. While normally I'd just try and ride in a giant square that takes time and gets me home, now I find myself hunting out pokestops and the like across town and in areas I don't normally go to.

The "just one more pokestop and then I'll head home" feeling is real. Mostly because I'm chronically short on pokeballs :p
 
I honestly don't see the problem with the micro-transactions model this game is building on. The base game is free to play, and will do for most players. For those who want more, they have to spend some money, which is only fair.

I'm against micro-transactions if the main game costs money to start with, and it's hard too see how much extra stuff you would have to buy to get the game experience you expected. Then it's sort of scammy and I loath it.

But in a game like this, nah, seems about right.
 
That thread forget a fundamental principle of dialogue: that those who ask stupid question receive, and deserve, stupid answers. Nobody should feel obliged to honor pie-in-the-sky or perfectly ridiculous hypotheticals. Which, in the case of an utopian "But the game would be better without micro-transaction, right?" But even then, here's an actual genuine answer:

Perhaps slightly so, if you just took out micro-transaction. Then again, while that would have very little positive effect on most single-player gameplay items, it would drastically limit the multiplayer party item (since we're JUST removing micro-transaction, this chiefly affect the availability of those items). So might actually make the game slightly worse, too. Unless we assume that they add a new system to facilitate getting those...but then again, THAT is outside the terms of your hypothetical, isn't it? You said no micro-transaction, you never said anything about making items more easily available otherwise. And since you just demanded that we respect the terms of your hypotheticals...

For a more realistic analysis, if you took out micro-transactions, you would have to replace them with some other revenue scheme. Ads? Much more cumbersome and obtrusive than micro-transactions. Full price game? The game would probably be less than a fragment of its current popularity, and lose a lot of the social aspect due to not being as widely available. So in that light, micro-transactions made for the best game possible (short of a pie-in-the-sky absolutely free no-revenue game).
 
Let's try that post again:

Makes you wonder how much better the game would be without any microtransactions.

Spoiler for pedants:

Spoiler :
In a hypothetical world where consumers don't accept microtransactions and advertising, and are readily wiling to trade money in either the form of initial purchase price or on-going subscriptions in exchange for goods and services they use, leaving the only design incentive of the game to be how to make the most fun game (supposing that everyone is a rational actor, and is willing to pay an amount directly correlated to the amount of fun they derive from the game), it makes you wonder how the game design would differ.

But you're clever, if you refuse to interpreting the hypothetical in good faith, the way it's intended, I probably don't have the patience to write up sufficient legalese to prevent that.
 
Snerk said:
I honestly don't see the problem with the micro-transactions model this game is building on. The base game is free to play, and will do for most players. For those who want more, they have to spend some money, which is only fair.

I'm against micro-transactions if the main game costs money to start with, and it's hard too see how much extra stuff you would have to buy to get the game experience you expected. Then it's sort of scammy and I loath it.

But in a game like this, nah, seems about right.
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I'm just philosophically opposed to them for reasons. In game design terms, microtransaction start screwing things up as soon as the model becomes pay-to-win, but I can see how a Pokemon game would easily lend itself to microtransactions because part of Pokemon has always been buying items.
But I tend to agree with Zelig that microtransactions prevent game design from breaking the mold, so to speak. It's sort of like sequelitis in Hollywood - except game designers seem even more conservative, which I guess makes sense because making a video game is typically a bigger investment than making a film.

I still play through the old GBA games on my PC (emulators rule) occasionally. I once had a GBA, Yellow, Gold, and FireRed but they've been lost in the mists/sands of time. I also used to get up an hour before school every day to watch the show but that was a loooong time age :D
 
Okay, so from your hypothetical I'm assuming we're talking about a game that people

a)Pay full price for
and
B)that is exactly as popular as it is now.

In that light...at the single-player level, we get fundamentally the same game. Perhaps slightly easier for people in rural areas, where local pokéstops might be made more productive of items, but I doubt that - it seems much more likely the game would remain as-is in that regard, because the game is clearly designed around urban environments. That'S not a matter of micro-transactions that would be affected by the proposed change.

What gets improved is the ease of setting up lure party, I suppose. But then again, I'm not sure lure would even make sense outside of a micro-transaction model. You can't just make them easily available to everyone ; otherwise every pokéstop will be a lure 24/7, and lure lose all their "specialness" and interest. But if you limit the number of lures per user, you make it impossible for individual users (and, generally, for stores) to set up lure locally to attract people - they won't have enough lures as an individual to sustain a party. Restricting it to player accomplishment might SOUND fair, but it put even more emphasis on the elite few at the expanse of everyone else.

Besides which, the elite few are likely racking in the premium currency from controlling gyms anyway, so they can already afford Lures without paying for them.

Really, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that, as far as Lures are concerned...micro-transactions is actually the best model.
 
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