15 ms·

Honestly, those compelling new features need to come soon. I've only caught maybe 50% of the catalog, and it's already getting really grindy. It's a LOT harder

by mtrpcic 10y ago

Honestly, those compelling new features need to come soon. I've only caught maybe 50% of the catalog, and it's already getting really grindy. It's a LOT harder to pull users back onto the platform once they've left than it is to keep them enticed while they're already on. I predict something like a 70% dropoff rate for users over the next 30 days unless they release something shiny and new[0] [0] Purely anecdotal, but based on multiple contacts already getting bored enough to uninstall

losteric 10y ago
I've already stopped playing... I was at level 23 and with well over 50% caught, and I still had no chance of winning local gyms. It's not engaging unless I can compete, and I wasn't willing to heavily grind on a casual game just to fight random people. I realized Pokemon Go was just a "background activity" for hanging out with friends... and I'd rather focus on the people. I'll jump back in as soon as they added trading and player vs player.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  In my experience, people who hold down gyms are high schoolers or college students out for the summer. Hard to compete with them when they have free summers!
  - AznHisoka 10y ago
    I loved the card game.. because it didn't matter if you had the most expensive cards, or grinded through levels. It all depended on strategy. The card game was what Pokemen Go should have emulated, not the Gameboy one.
    - crazypyro 10y ago
      To be fair, it didn't really emulate the gameboy one either. Very different gameplay.
    - marcelluspye 10y ago
      Well, it doesn't really emulate the gameboy game either, so noone wins.
- Yhippa 10y ago
  I got discouraged by the inability to load the app and it crashing while I was trying to capture Pokemon I didn't have in my collection so I just uninstalled the game.
  - Thlom 10y ago
    This happened constantly to me as well, but not the last couple of days, but now it seems to crash when I "sleep" it by holding my phone upside down. Sometimes it doesn't wake up again and sometimes touch doesn't work after I wake it up. But it's not a huge inconvenience.
- 1439205948 10y ago
  Did you figure out how to dodge? The battling system is designed to make it fairly easy for a lower level set of pokemon to take over a gym, especially in a group. But you have to understand the dodging mechanic (swiping when an attack is signaled by a yellow flash).
  - ultramancool 10y ago
    Yeah, I've had little problem taking gyms by just doing repeated attacks - you just have to get the prestige down to zero, so 1 or 2 weaker people with enough revives can pretty much clean house. Holding the gyms is the hard part I think.
    - Rayearth 10y ago
      When I first heard that multiple players can fight in the same gym battle instance, I got excited with the hope that there might be the conventional raid versus boss combat mechanics present - a main tank, positioning being important, taunts and so on. Of course gym battles are a lot more simple and fixing the many issues both combat-wise and in general take priority compared to adding such mechanics in.
      - btown 10y ago
        It's also very difficult to design for mobile devices - not due to processor or screen size, but due to unavoidable latency spikes on LTE. You'd essentially need an in-universe explanation to reconcile conflict resolution with user expectation. "But my move registered and I stunned that guy, but he still killed me!"
        fabrika 10y ago
        An author of another real-world game, Cheapshot here. It's not an issue, LTE is fast enough. For multiplayer we take into account every bullet and sync dozens of players in real time.
- lnanek2 10y ago
  That's strange. I'm not that player level and I still easily take down the highest gyms I've seen, which are level 6-7. As long as you can beat the weakest monster in the gym you can attack over and over until the prestige is low enough that there is only one monster in the gym. At that point it is easy to defeat even a 2,500CP Dragonite with 6 crappy Gobats since you have 6 shots to wear him down. The only limiting factor for taking down gyms for me is the number of potions I have. I usually only fight with half dead monsters so I can use revives instead, then I use potions for the one that I put in as a defender to conserve potions.
  - jhchen 10y ago
    I think what the OP means by winning is keeping control of the gym, to your point exactly. I am also at level 23 and can take out pretty much any gym. But right when I walk out of range, someone half my level using either a full six roster or type advantage or both will boot me out. When the game came out I could maybe stay in control of a gym for a day but now it has not exceeded half an hour so I no longer try.
    - jfoutz 10y ago
      There is no keeping gyms. The game is seeing how many you can grab before you cash in your rewards. I think this is a nice change from ingress, where there was very little a low level player could do about a high level portal.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Indeed. Few days ago I took over a gym on my way to work. I thought, hey, there's another gym right next to the office. I'm not going to be greedy, I'll just take that other one and cash in. I don't think I made it to the tram stop 5 minutes down the road before someone took that previous gym back...
- Keyframe 10y ago
  Level 23? How many hours did you put in that?
  - jfoutz 10y ago
    In the city, it's not hard to find a spot with 2 lures going, and i'm sure you can find places with 3. Lucky eggs double the xp for any action. evolving nets 500, with the egg, 1000. You get a few lucky eggs as awards as you level. You can get around 60 evolutions while the lucky egg is active. Level 20 is sort of the "soft max". beyond that it's very expensive to progress further. It's 210,000 total XP for level 20. 435,000 total for level 23. Realistically, say 4 hours of catching at those lured sites buys you enough for the 60 evolutions, 60,000 xp. Let's go with 5 hours total. Perfect conditions, i think that comes out to 35 hours. I'd say double or perhaps triple that realistically. You have to go gather loot and stuff, which still grants XP, just at a slower rate. If the OP felt like it, running the whole time with lucky eggs would cut that down quite a bit, maybe half, and cost perhaps $20. I'm guessing around 80 hours without buying anything. A single person who's interested in it can pretty easily come up with 3 hours a day, and quite a few hours on the weekend. 30 hours seems pretty accessible. it's been out for 2 weeks or so now, so the OP is only a little on the high side. Perhaps not at all if they'd spent money on eggs. Of course, different people have different commitments. In a rural area, this would be impossible. Family, hobbies, a long commute would drastically reduce the time available. But if your hobby is video games, it's pretty easy to swap one for another with little effort.
  - losteric 10y ago
    I took maybe a week to get to level 10 just casually playing walking to and from work... jumped the last 10 by grinding for one day and learning how to use the lucky eggs.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > I realized Pokemon Go was just a "background activity" for hanging out with friends... and I'd rather focus on the people. There's something to that. I pass many players daily on my way to work, and I see them more often in groups (usually friends, sometimes couples) than alone. I've read somewhere recently that it's also turning into a way to ask someone out / handle a date, and personally I know one girl I could easily ask out by suggesting we go Pokemon hunting...
  - gregpilling 10y ago
    I have heard that is a thing from a couple people now.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  It is frankly, a bad game that doesn't have much going for it outside the "It's Pokemon" and giving you a reason to go outside. It is completely devoid of skill and rewards only having a higher level. The game isn't even pay-to-win or skill-to-win. It's win-to-win-to-win. If a person knows anything about the mechanics of the game they know casual players (and most adults) are simply not able to compete with lvl 25 school kids who can devote 6+ hrs a day to this game. I'd rather play games where I can beat opponents with skill, not grinding.
  - danielvinson 10y ago
    The grind honestly ends at about level 20 right now. Once you get a few good attackers, you will always be able to take any gym you want. The problem now is that holding gyms is impossible. I can never have more than 1 because the time it takes to drive to the nearest gym and capture it is less than the time it takes for somebody else to retake a gym.
    - tl 10y ago
      Geography bias is a real problem. Some areas have several gyms in walking distance, others have miles in-between gyms.
      - morganvachon 10y ago
        That's basically how it is with the game's predecessor, Ingress. I'm lucky to live in an area dense with portals within a short drive. Some areas we've played in were so sparse there was no point in trying to capture, link, and field it.
        flatline 10y ago
        Although, length of link and area of field got you more points, so there was some inducement to find open or poorly defended portals that are off the beaten path, in hopes of holding a large field. Portals at mountain summits and the like are often hotly contested. Of course you still have to be in the general area, but there is absolutely no point to venturing to out of the way gyms in POGo.
- andrewfong 10y ago
  > I realized Pokemon Go was just a "background activity" for hanging out with friends... and I'd rather focus on the people. I wouldn't underestimate the value of a game mechanic for getting people to hang out. Many board games are basically just background activities, but there an excuse to get together. That said, if it is a background activity, it should be a background-able app -- i.e. notify me when certain Pokemon are close but otherwise leave me alone. I find it much less exhausting to have an app that requires my attention for only 15 minutes a day.
  - derefr 10y ago
    As far as I know, you can't access the GPS from an unfocused app on either iOS or Android. You can ask the OS to set up a geofence and then get called back when the user enters it, but if what you care about isn't so much where the user is as the fact that they're moving around, the OS doesn't have anything to offer you.
    - eonwe 10y ago
      I would think that to be false based n sports trackers. Or do they work in some different manner that's not suitable here?
      - christocracy 10y ago
        On iOS, when location updates are engaged via CLLocationManager#startUpdatingLocation (assuming all required permissions are in-place, eg NSLocationAlwaysAuthorization, UIBackgroundModes), an iOS app will remain running in background indefinitely until #stopUpdatingLocation is executed, when iOS will immediately put the app to sleep.
    - dmoy 10y ago
      I don't know if this is true, because my android phone helpfully pops up my grocery rewards card in a notification while I'm walking through the store with my phone locked and 0 apps open.
- gcb0 10y ago
  welcome to the pay to win era. also i bet most of what everyone read about this game at first was paid for; people downloaded based on those initial false articles, see the bugs, uninstall, or even play like you did and gave up when you notice the pay to win scheme. but regardless, the app already made it to the download top lists and now they're even getting real news coverage everywhere. this has nothing to do with people wanting Nintendo games on mobile. it's just a forced marketing fad like any other we always had since the 80s.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ben_jones 10y ago
Do non-tech demographics delete unused apps or just let them pile up on their phone? It seems to me the biggest barrier to entry is getting people to go to an app store and make the initial download, in which case getting them to come back wouldn't be all that hard with a well marketed upgrade assuming the app is still there.
kbenson 10y ago
> It's a LOT harder to pull users back onto the platform once they've left than it is to keep them enticed while they're already on. Then again, I imagine it's a lot easier to pull prior users back than it is to find new ones, so in that respect, they're already ahead of everyone.

by mtrpcic 10y ago

losteric 10y ago

I've already stopped playing... I was at level 23 and with well over 50% caught, and I still had no chance of winning local gyms. It's not engaging unless I can compete, and I wasn't willing to heavily grind on a casual game just to fight random people. I realized Pokemon Go was just a "background activity" for hanging out with friends... and I'd rather focus on the people. I'll jump back in as soon as they added trading and player vs player.

sotojuan 10y ago
In my experience, people who hold down gyms are high schoolers or college students out for the summer. Hard to compete with them when they have free summers!
- AznHisoka 10y ago
  I loved the card game.. because it didn't matter if you had the most expensive cards, or grinded through levels. It all depended on strategy. The card game was what Pokemen Go should have emulated, not the Gameboy one.
  - crazypyro 10y ago
    To be fair, it didn't really emulate the gameboy one either. Very different gameplay.
  - marcelluspye 10y ago
    Well, it doesn't really emulate the gameboy game either, so noone wins.
Yhippa 10y ago
I got discouraged by the inability to load the app and it crashing while I was trying to capture Pokemon I didn't have in my collection so I just uninstalled the game.
- Thlom 10y ago
  This happened constantly to me as well, but not the last couple of days, but now it seems to crash when I "sleep" it by holding my phone upside down. Sometimes it doesn't wake up again and sometimes touch doesn't work after I wake it up. But it's not a huge inconvenience.
1439205948 10y ago
Did you figure out how to dodge? The battling system is designed to make it fairly easy for a lower level set of pokemon to take over a gym, especially in a group. But you have to understand the dodging mechanic (swiping when an attack is signaled by a yellow flash).
- ultramancool 10y ago
  Yeah, I've had little problem taking gyms by just doing repeated attacks - you just have to get the prestige down to zero, so 1 or 2 weaker people with enough revives can pretty much clean house. Holding the gyms is the hard part I think.
  - Rayearth 10y ago
    When I first heard that multiple players can fight in the same gym battle instance, I got excited with the hope that there might be the conventional raid versus boss combat mechanics present - a main tank, positioning being important, taunts and so on. Of course gym battles are a lot more simple and fixing the many issues both combat-wise and in general take priority compared to adding such mechanics in.
    - btown 10y ago
      It's also very difficult to design for mobile devices - not due to processor or screen size, but due to unavoidable latency spikes on LTE. You'd essentially need an in-universe explanation to reconcile conflict resolution with user expectation. "But my move registered and I stunned that guy, but he still killed me!"
      - fabrika 10y ago
        An author of another real-world game, Cheapshot here. It's not an issue, LTE is fast enough. For multiplayer we take into account every bullet and sync dozens of players in real time.
lnanek2 10y ago
That's strange. I'm not that player level and I still easily take down the highest gyms I've seen, which are level 6-7. As long as you can beat the weakest monster in the gym you can attack over and over until the prestige is low enough that there is only one monster in the gym. At that point it is easy to defeat even a 2,500CP Dragonite with 6 crappy Gobats since you have 6 shots to wear him down. The only limiting factor for taking down gyms for me is the number of potions I have. I usually only fight with half dead monsters so I can use revives instead, then I use potions for the one that I put in as a defender to conserve potions.
- jhchen 10y ago
  I think what the OP means by winning is keeping control of the gym, to your point exactly. I am also at level 23 and can take out pretty much any gym. But right when I walk out of range, someone half my level using either a full six roster or type advantage or both will boot me out. When the game came out I could maybe stay in control of a gym for a day but now it has not exceeded half an hour so I no longer try.
  - jfoutz 10y ago
    There is no keeping gyms. The game is seeing how many you can grab before you cash in your rewards. I think this is a nice change from ingress, where there was very little a low level player could do about a high level portal.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Indeed. Few days ago I took over a gym on my way to work. I thought, hey, there's another gym right next to the office. I'm not going to be greedy, I'll just take that other one and cash in. I don't think I made it to the tram stop 5 minutes down the road before someone took that previous gym back...
Keyframe 10y ago
Level 23? How many hours did you put in that?
- jfoutz 10y ago
  In the city, it's not hard to find a spot with 2 lures going, and i'm sure you can find places with 3. Lucky eggs double the xp for any action. evolving nets 500, with the egg, 1000. You get a few lucky eggs as awards as you level. You can get around 60 evolutions while the lucky egg is active. Level 20 is sort of the "soft max". beyond that it's very expensive to progress further. It's 210,000 total XP for level 20. 435,000 total for level 23. Realistically, say 4 hours of catching at those lured sites buys you enough for the 60 evolutions, 60,000 xp. Let's go with 5 hours total. Perfect conditions, i think that comes out to 35 hours. I'd say double or perhaps triple that realistically. You have to go gather loot and stuff, which still grants XP, just at a slower rate. If the OP felt like it, running the whole time with lucky eggs would cut that down quite a bit, maybe half, and cost perhaps $20. I'm guessing around 80 hours without buying anything. A single person who's interested in it can pretty easily come up with 3 hours a day, and quite a few hours on the weekend. 30 hours seems pretty accessible. it's been out for 2 weeks or so now, so the OP is only a little on the high side. Perhaps not at all if they'd spent money on eggs. Of course, different people have different commitments. In a rural area, this would be impossible. Family, hobbies, a long commute would drastically reduce the time available. But if your hobby is video games, it's pretty easy to swap one for another with little effort.
- losteric 10y ago
  I took maybe a week to get to level 10 just casually playing walking to and from work... jumped the last 10 by grinding for one day and learning how to use the lucky eggs.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> I realized Pokemon Go was just a "background activity" for hanging out with friends... and I'd rather focus on the people. There's something to that. I pass many players daily on my way to work, and I see them more often in groups (usually friends, sometimes couples) than alone. I've read somewhere recently that it's also turning into a way to ask someone out / handle a date, and personally I know one girl I could easily ask out by suggesting we go Pokemon hunting...
- gregpilling 10y ago
  I have heard that is a thing from a couple people now.
antisthenes 10y ago
It is frankly, a bad game that doesn't have much going for it outside the "It's Pokemon" and giving you a reason to go outside. It is completely devoid of skill and rewards only having a higher level. The game isn't even pay-to-win or skill-to-win. It's win-to-win-to-win. If a person knows anything about the mechanics of the game they know casual players (and most adults) are simply not able to compete with lvl 25 school kids who can devote 6+ hrs a day to this game. I'd rather play games where I can beat opponents with skill, not grinding.
- danielvinson 10y ago
  The grind honestly ends at about level 20 right now. Once you get a few good attackers, you will always be able to take any gym you want. The problem now is that holding gyms is impossible. I can never have more than 1 because the time it takes to drive to the nearest gym and capture it is less than the time it takes for somebody else to retake a gym.
  - tl 10y ago
    Geography bias is a real problem. Some areas have several gyms in walking distance, others have miles in-between gyms.
    - morganvachon 10y ago
      That's basically how it is with the game's predecessor, Ingress. I'm lucky to live in an area dense with portals within a short drive. Some areas we've played in were so sparse there was no point in trying to capture, link, and field it.
      - flatline 10y ago
        Although, length of link and area of field got you more points, so there was some inducement to find open or poorly defended portals that are off the beaten path, in hopes of holding a large field. Portals at mountain summits and the like are often hotly contested. Of course you still have to be in the general area, but there is absolutely no point to venturing to out of the way gyms in POGo.
andrewfong 10y ago
> I realized Pokemon Go was just a "background activity" for hanging out with friends... and I'd rather focus on the people. I wouldn't underestimate the value of a game mechanic for getting people to hang out. Many board games are basically just background activities, but there an excuse to get together. That said, if it is a background activity, it should be a background-able app -- i.e. notify me when certain Pokemon are close but otherwise leave me alone. I find it much less exhausting to have an app that requires my attention for only 15 minutes a day.
- derefr 10y ago
  As far as I know, you can't access the GPS from an unfocused app on either iOS or Android. You can ask the OS to set up a geofence and then get called back when the user enters it, but if what you care about isn't so much where the user is as the fact that they're moving around, the OS doesn't have anything to offer you.
  - eonwe 10y ago
    I would think that to be false based n sports trackers. Or do they work in some different manner that's not suitable here?
    - christocracy 10y ago
      On iOS, when location updates are engaged via CLLocationManager#startUpdatingLocation (assuming all required permissions are in-place, eg NSLocationAlwaysAuthorization, UIBackgroundModes), an iOS app will remain running in background indefinitely until #stopUpdatingLocation is executed, when iOS will immediately put the app to sleep.
  - dmoy 10y ago
    I don't know if this is true, because my android phone helpfully pops up my grocery rewards card in a notification while I'm walking through the store with my phone locked and 0 apps open.
gcb0 10y ago
welcome to the pay to win era. also i bet most of what everyone read about this game at first was paid for; people downloaded based on those initial false articles, see the bugs, uninstall, or even play like you did and gave up when you notice the pay to win scheme. but regardless, the app already made it to the download top lists and now they're even getting real news coverage everywhere. this has nothing to do with people wanting Nintendo games on mobile. it's just a forced marketing fad like any other we always had since the 80s.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ben_jones 10y ago

Do non-tech demographics delete unused apps or just let them pile up on their phone? It seems to me the biggest barrier to entry is getting people to go to an app store and make the initial download, in which case getting them to come back wouldn't be all that hard with a well marketed upgrade assuming the app is still there.

kbenson 10y ago

> It's a LOT harder to pull users back onto the platform once they've left than it is to keep them enticed while they're already on. Then again, I imagine it's a lot easier to pull prior users back than it is to find new ones, so in that respect, they're already ahead of everyone.