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Pokémon Go loses its luster, sheds more than 10M users

arstechnica.com

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Re: Pokémon Go loses its luster, sheds more than 10M users

#121

Post by PeterisP »

jtmcmc wrote: post #73
jampa wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why they don't make their own pokemon map, they hear a lot of feedback and still they choose to act against it. I made a map that scanned my whole city just for fun and leaning, released and showed to a couple of friends. The next day I was flooded with Facebook invites with people telling me how they got a rare pokemon or requesting for a expansion on their cities. People kept sending messages when it we…

I wouldn't be surprised if they were but it takes some time to actually release a game feature.

If a feature can be developed within a day or two by a hobbyist developer who has to reverse-engineer your system (and they aren't that exceptional because there were multiple such projects built), then there aren't any technical reasons why your team can't release such a feature within a month.

Re: Pokémon Go loses its luster, sheds more than 10M users

#122

Post by ben_jones »

echelon wrote: post #84
jagger27 wrote: post #66

If there's one thing The Pokemon Company and Gamefreak can do well it's to iterate. There will always be an opportunity for Nintendo to make an in-house sequel. Niantic can and should be cut out of the picture in the future.

Why should Niantic be cut out? Nintendo owns a (large?) share of them. They could become a second party, like Retro Studios.

If Niantic management is responsible (I mean they are but did they make wrong decisions, or did they make ok decisions in bad circumstances?) you can argue that keeping that same management involved in a sequel could be detrimental to the evolution of the game. It also makes it harder to shed the failures of the first iteration.

Personally I think Niantic's entire team was plain overwhelmed and failed to adapt. Some decisions were made for money, and you can argue that they were unnecessary, but their is also no doubt a lot of people worked really hard and tried their best to make it work. There is of course value in that experience that can be applied to future iterations.

The future looks great for AR at least.

Re: Pokémon Go loses its luster, sheds more than 10M users

#123

Post by Akkuma »

wcarss wrote: post #16

The loss and subsequent banning of maps and map users made nearly everyone I know stop playing, especially in the total absence of an official replacement or a compelling reason to continue. Hearing my map ding was enough cause to make me leap out of my chair and run to the nearby park at midnight to catch something I wanted, and there'd usually be the usual lure-users and a few map-users out there at the same time.…

This sounds pretty similar to Ingress. Niantic seems to be poor game designers, since they seemed to have learnt very little from Ingress. I always thought Ingress and now Pokemon Go are great concepts with some of the worst design to keep people interested for more than a few months. Additionally, for a company that built Ingress and are well funded ex-googlers, I thought their handling of technical issues seemed outright terrible.

Re: Pokémon Go loses its luster, sheds more than 10M users

#124

Post by jghn »

duaneb wrote: post #97
khedoros wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a problem with that. Different strokes for different folks. What I'm enjoying is available to you, but you've chosen to limit yourself to a constricted set of abilities, because you (apparently) enjoy the limitations. Let's ignore the maps; pretend they never existed. I can drive wherever I want, but my time is limited. A child's time is less limited, but their location is more limited. A college student…

It's a competitive game, though. By "unlimiting" yourself you're changing the rules for competitive play for everyone . It's a very selfish way to play the game. It's a relief you've stopped.

You realize that you're not actually fighting over a single Pokemon, right? If you catch one I can also catch it

Re: Pokémon Go loses its luster, sheds more than 10M users

#125

Post by derefr »

khedoros wrote: post #108
derefr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand the impulse to "fix" the game, though. As much as it's a commercial product, it's also a piece of art. Would you "fix" a movie? Or would you just avoid seeing it? Or—if you happen to be in film yourself—would you get some people together and make your own? I'm serious on that last one: the people who made the pokemon mapping apps could all get together and have enough pooled mobile-fronted an…

> Would you "fix" a movie? Yes, if I had the time and artistic ability. I've enjoyed various unofficial re-cuttings of Star Wars, different edits of Blade Runner, and so on. I'd put other things in the same category: upscalers for emulated games, texture packs for N64 games and Minecraft, mods for Minecraft and every other game under the sun, re-implementations of game engines or whole games that introduce features n…

> I've enjoyed various unofficial re-cuttings of Star Wars, different edits of Blade Runner, and so on. I'd put other things in the same category: upscalers for emulated games, texture packs for N64 games and Minecraft, mods for Minecraft and every other game under the sun, re-implementations of game engines or whole games that introduce features not found in the originals, etc.

I would note that all of these fall either into the category of "creator encourages community involvement" or "creator has abandoned work and ignores community involvement." Yes, people participate when participation is a net-positive. What I was asking is why people would bother contributing their time and effort to effectively do software development for a company that actively tries to discourage them from doing so.

It'd be like people making Minecraft mods and then Microsoft suing them for doing so. Surely people would re-implement the engine and start modding that, to get away from the abuse?

> If they'd only called it Rucksack Goblins and made up their own characters...

Yes, that's more what I meant. Why not create a Fanny-pack Gremlins March app?

Re: Pokémon Go loses its luster, sheds more than 10M users

#126

Post by wonder_er »

calsy wrote: post #117
khedoros wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a problem with that. Different strokes for different folks. What I'm enjoying is available to you, but you've chosen to limit yourself to a constricted set of abilities, because you (apparently) enjoy the limitations. Let's ignore the maps; pretend they never existed. I can drive wherever I want, but my time is limited. A child's time is less limited, but their location is more limited. A college student…

Cheatings cheating doesn't matter who, what, where or how you play it. All games are bound by rules set for ALL players. No one gets to bend the rules of a game because of their circumstance for e.g. 'I work all day, so I should have access to tools that give me an advantage over others'. Games are not an equal opportunity endeavour where everyone gets to be a winner. Those who play by the rules and practice (or grin…

This is fascinating to me. Your assessment is entirely defendable, yet in this situation I end up with the opposite assessment:

"this is a make believe world with arbitrary rules - bend them as much as you can, because why not"

>No one gets to bend the rules of a game because of their circumstance

Again, I come to the opposite conclusion, that _because the rules are there_ they are fun to push, modify, bend, break.

If you and I were having a conversation in just about any other context, most likely we would find so many areas in which we agree, and might even really enjoy the time spent.

So, it's so funny to me that we might disagree so completely on something so foundational as rule-following behavior.

Cheers!

Re: Pokémon Go loses its luster, sheds more than 10M users

#127

Post by stormbrew »

jmcdiesel wrote: post #106
hkmurakami wrote: post #53

No matter what happens to Pokemon Go, Nintendo has proved to the world that its IP is immensely powerful and valuable in the mobile age. That's a nice weapon to have to shut up "analysts" who always want them to take the path to short term gains. I remain bearish on Pokemon go and bullish on Nintendo.

Its not their IP though, is it? Its the Pokemon Company, and nintendo only gets a small percentage of the licensing...

Nintendo owns 33% of TPC. But they also own some amount of Creatures Inc, which owns 33% of TPC (Gamefreak is the other third share). So it's not clear how much control they have over pokemon, but it may in fact be a controlling interest. Never mind that not all shares are voting shares.

I'd be pretty surprised if Nintendo weren't at least de facto in control of Pokemon, personally.

Re: Pokémon Go loses its luster, sheds more than 10M users

#128

Post by ge0rg »

JeremyBanks wrote: post #107
ihuman wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather have a stable game rolling out into more countries that's harder than an unstable one that I can enhance with 3rd-party tools. The server problems made the game unplayable for me.

The client's inability to handle the most minor of server disruptions without a hard crash made it unplayable for me.

Also its hard dependency on fetching everything from the servers (it looks like that even includes the pokemon 3D models - sometimes you clicked on a Pokemon, and had the catch screen with only the shadow of the Pokemon shown for some seconds until the 3D model loaded), and almost zero caching, even of static content like pokestop pictures.

Re: Pokémon Go loses its luster, sheds more than 10M users

#129

Post by fl0wenol »

betadreamer wrote: post #59

I still play regular but it is getting pretty mundane. But that is not because pokevision and other 3rd party was banned. In fact they were supposed to be banned a lot earlier. The map users (myself included) will never pay for pokemongo but might pay for the map. This is not a good business model for them and in fact it defeats the purpose. Instead of hunting or seeking you are basically shopping. The reason why it…

Agreed. The process by which you fortify gyms is broken. Leveling up your gym is very time-consuming and can too easily be undone, especially by other players nearby. There needs to be a better way to handle gyms and battles that scales with local user activity... perhaps a shunt to a PvP mode that grants the winner or the winner's color a certain amount of exclusive access time to fortify.

The game is not similar enough to Ingress for the existing tit-for-tat ideas to work. Fire XMPs Gym Battle; Add Resonators to Portal Put Champion on Gym. Where's the equivalent of shields or key-based recharging at a distance? Why can't I buff my pokemon stationed on a gym (or the gym itself) with items after an alert that the gym is being battled?

Re: Pokémon Go loses its luster, sheds more than 10M users

#130

Post by bskap »

calsy wrote: post #102
nathankleyn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's particularly aggravating playing it in a large city (for us London) where, without the maps as a guide, you're stuck wasting balls on common Pokémon incessantly because that's the only thing around. Add to that the fact that they made it, with a recent update, insanely likely for anything half-decent to simply run or be impossible to catch, and you have a recipe for declining interest in playing and paying to be…

But you are supposed to catch common pokemon, that's the quickest way to level up.

Assuming your goal is to level up. A lot of people were playing for the collection aspect.
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