11 ms·

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

by wcarss 10y ago

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. Once I was out, I'd play for a while, hit a gym or two, maybe finish an egg, and go home. This was still really fun when it was disabled. Without the map, there's no reason for me to leave my house. There's no group of people at work who stand up when a Blastoise is announced into our #pokemon channel, sending us all on a brief Pokemon/coffee walk down the road. That's all on top of the poor quality of the game, which the maps and community had overcome. Niantic being selfish and not understanding their own game or the culture around it seems to have squandered one of the greatest opportunities a company has ever had. (I get that the maps were spamming them, but that's a technical challenge. A bunch of well funded ex-googlers ought to be up to the challenge of scaling/handling unexpected load for a chance like this.)

cheald 10y ago
This is on the money. Niantic made it harder and more frustrating to play their game, and people stopped playing it. They have utterly failed to understand what their playerbase wants, and people are falling off. The maps really drove it into overdrive, especially with the presence of "nests", because it allowed people to figure out where they needed to be, and would then congregate there. By taking out the maps, Niantic has turned their scavenger hunt into a scratch-off lotto ticket - don't bother trying to plan or play with any strategy, just wander around aimlessly until your phone buzzes. Who wants to do that? It's a shame, because at its core there is a compelling scavenger hunt that generated a truly unique social phenomenon, and it's very sad to see Niantic just piss that away. The game just isn't worth putting any effort into - they broke the effort-reward cycle.
- nathankleyn 10y ago
  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 bored.
  - calsy 10y ago
    But you are supposed to catch common pokemon, that's the quickest way to level up.
    - bskap 10y ago
      Assuming your goal is to level up. A lot of people were playing for the collection aspect.
      - ethbro 10y ago
        True, "Gotta level up" is a far less compelling motto.
        calsy 10y ago
        I don't think the motto is the 'foundation' for gameplay. Last I checked pokemon was also about battles.
      - calsy 10y ago
        Um yes, its called 'evolving' your pokemon. Commons evolve into new high CP pokemon which fill up your pokedex AND give you high XP in the process.
        bskap 10y ago
        Yes, but there's only one evolution track per pokemon (except Eevee which has 3 in gen 1). The optimal strategy for grinding experience is to catch a million pidgeys and evolve them all into Pidgeottos for the experience and then transfer them because Pidgeot isn't that powerful of a pokemon. The optimal strategy for building the pokedex is to catch enough pidgeys to get a Pidgeot and then you don't need to catch any more pidgeys.
      - Thriptic 10y ago
        I think the game absolutely needs PVP / better gym mechanics and trading to survive. Right now the emphasis is 95% on collecting, which is why people are losing interest.
- shreve 10y ago
  I was totally fine wandering around aimlessly until my phone buzzed, but they also took out battery saver mode. I never even found out about the existence of maps until they were banned. Removal of such a benign, yet helpful feature as battery saver mode is what made me quit.
  - blahshaw 10y ago
    Battery saver mode was added back in recently, FYI. Though it still seems buggy. The app occasionally fails to wake after raising your phone.
- madeofpalk 10y ago
  But Pokemon Go got popular before all the third party maps and tools came out.
  - hrrsn 10y ago
    Initially, there was half decent tracking available inside the game, which was then killed off. Third party maps filled the void (but was admittedly less fun), which were then killed off again without tracking being replaced. This is entirely on Niantic.
- derefr 10y ago
  > By taking out the maps, Niantic has turned their scavenger hunt into a scratch-off lotto ticket ... they broke the effort-reward cycle You're phrasing this almost as if Niantic wanted there to be third-party mapping apps in the first place, and then changed its mind. The game Niantic released doesn't have mapping, and didn't intend to have an open API. This can be read as an implicit statement that the game design that Niantic thought people would enjoy playing, doesn't involve knowing where pokemon are. Presuming there was at least one actual game designer involved in creating the game, there's likely already some sort of effort-reward cycle built into the game that doesn't involve mapping. It might not be one you like playing, but that probably means that you were not the audience Niantic designed (and playability-tested) the game for.
  - SmirkingRevenge 10y ago
    They do seem to have a thing against unsanctioned map apps/enhancements. It was true in Ingress as well. I always assumed it was because they wanted to distance themselves from anything that could be construed as enabling some kind of stalking behavior - or at least construed as "too much" stalker-enabling (Ingress is already pretty stalker-enabling without map enhancements - but the map enhancements definitely make it many times more effective). If that was at all a reason for their reticence to create capable ingress mapping tools, it must be doubly so for PGO - a game that will attract many more minor age children than Ingress.
  - mahranch 10y ago
    > almost as if Niantic wanted there to be third-party mapping apps in the first place, and then changed its mind. Didn't they though? At the very beginning of the game, you had footprints you could track and use to "hunt" down nearby pokemon. They took it out because it was hurting their servers. Maps allowed similar hunting. I would say that Niantic did in fact, change its mind.
  - AndroidTim 10y ago
    I see what you mean but that's partially true but not entirely correct. Yes maps were not part of the original design but neither was the current system. You see The beta users had a very good indication where Pokemon were. In fact they had a superior system to even the 3 step tracking. They had the distance away from a Pokemon displayed in METRES! That would have been amazing. So the audience Niantic designed and "playability tested" didn't have the piece of crap tracking we have today. Who needs a map if u got descent tracking. Dude WAKE UP from your delusion it had nothing to do with design and targeted audience. It was all about saving BAND WIDTH.
tvanantwerp 10y ago
Before that move, half my office was playing. We'd often play together. Right after the banning of maps, I have only seen one person in the office play a single time. Interest died immediately.
- vintermann 10y ago
  Don't you think interest would have dropped off in any case? It doesn't really offer much in the way of captivating gameplay. Ingress at least had a social/LARP element.
ihuman 10y ago
I thought the maps were banned because of the stress they were putting on the server?
- k__ 10y ago
  Noone cares 'why' they were banned. They did remove their killer feature.
  - ihuman 10y ago
    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.
    - JeremyBanks 10y ago
      The client's inability to handle the most minor of server disruptions without a hard crash made it unplayable for me.
      - ge0rg 10y ago
        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.
mjevans 10y ago
What they need to do is make the 'hunting' system more 4th dimensional. If you 'hear' a Pokemon near by (maybe you don't know what it is, just that you haven't seen it before), you also know a vague direction it's in; maybe not distance but direction. That should stay on your map. You move to a different location so you can triangulate it. You hear it again and another slice lays on your map. You investigate, but it's taken too long to get there. All you find are some footprints. (location saved to client device) Later that day, or another day, the same noise is heard near that area, the client shows the pie slice again, but also loads the local markers within it. You go to investigate the marker and see (maybe even capture) the Pokemon you'd been hunting.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  You need to be hired by Niantic, stat. That's brilliant.
  - philtar 10y ago
    Guarantee you've never made a game in your life.
    - daveguy 10y ago
      Implementation of this feature wouldn't require much in terms of processing power or storage. It would just be a more interesting and engaging way of getting to pokemon beyond the current "click it on an overhead". Game programmers and designers could definitely work with this description to make a feature.
      - philtar 10y ago
        Sure. But it's not fun. Which is way more important than any of the things you mentioned. The first thing a game designer thinks of is fun, not system limitations.
        mjevans 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
duaneb 10y ago
For those of us who didn't use maps--most everyone I know--it was this advantage others had that made it terribly non-fun to play. Why bother playing when everyone is cheating?
- khedoros 10y ago
  For those of us who did use maps--most everyone I know--we didn't consider it cheating. The original form of the game sucked, and the maps worked like a community-made patch to work around some of the shortcomings. Why bother playing when the entertaining part of the game is so diffuse? With maps, I'd gather a few coworkers for a safari when something cool popped up. Now we sit at our desks, catching the occasional thing that spawns in the building, but not going anywhere, and not even really interacting with each other. Why bother playing the way that Niantic wants you to when their way feels like a grind-y waste of time?
  - duaneb 10y ago
    Well if everyone is playing a different game, it's no wonder nobody is having any fun. There is certainly no way for me to interact with you in a fair way if you're cheating past the limitations I'm enjoying.
    - khedoros 10y ago
      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 might be a mix of the two: mobile, with some significant free time. Another variable: location. In a rural location, there might not be a pokestop within several miles. In an urban location, there might be three within range of your home's family room. From my perspective, people are already playing a bunch of different games, based on available time, mobility, location, and density of other nearby players.
rtkwe 10y ago
I can understand why the maps were banned though. The way most of them worked was by sending hundreds of location requests to the servers in a wide grid meaning every map user had the same load as 100+ real users. Add in how popular they were (admittedly partially because of actions on Niantic's end of disabling tracking making them almost necessary) and they probably had a huge impact on the already stressed servers.
jampa 10y ago
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 went down even late at night and saying they don't want to play without a map. It only took 200 pokemon accounts to do it and scan a 3 km radius, so it was a drop in the ocean compared with the traffic they get, and sadly it will go down once the next update hits (they implemented a captcha[1] system). [1] - https://twitter.com/FastPokeMapCom/status/768055037604036608?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/FastPokeMapCom/status/768055037604036608...
- stanmancan 10y ago
  What are you using to generate those charts on your twitter posts?
  - jampa 10y ago
    This is not my twitter account. I just was citing the tweet as source.
- jtmcmc 10y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if they were but it takes some time to actually release a game feature.
  - jampa 10y ago
    I would hope so, but the CEO already said he was against it: F: How do you feel about Poké Radar and things that tap into the code and show where Pokémon are spawning? JH: Yeah, I don’t really like that. Not a fan. We have priorities right now but they might find in the future that those things may not work. People are only hurting themselves because it takes some fun out of the game Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/07/28/pokemon-go-creator-john-hanke-answers-all-your-burning-questions/#746ee55f23ac http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/07/28/pokemon-go-cr...
jamisteven 10y ago
this has nothing to do with 10m people stopping altogether, people are stopping because its a fad, and utterly retarded, this was predicted form its inception. Nintendo stock goes up, and now it will go down.
chrisper 10y ago
What is this maps you are talking about? Did they disable the map inside the pokemon game?
- tim333 10y ago
  This kind of stuff https://pokevision.com/ https://pokevision.com/
Akkuma 10y ago
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.
Shorel 10y ago
After the ban-hammer fell, I enjoy playing a lot more, and I have managed to capture gyms. That was impossible before, with all the bot-accounts at level 30 holding them.

by wcarss 10y ago

cheald 10y ago

This is on the money. Niantic made it harder and more frustrating to play their game, and people stopped playing it. They have utterly failed to understand what their playerbase wants, and people are falling off. The maps really drove it into overdrive, especially with the presence of "nests", because it allowed people to figure out where they needed to be, and would then congregate there. By taking out the maps, Niantic has turned their scavenger hunt into a scratch-off lotto ticket - don't bother trying to plan or play with any strategy, just wander around aimlessly until your phone buzzes. Who wants to do that? It's a shame, because at its core there is a compelling scavenger hunt that generated a truly unique social phenomenon, and it's very sad to see Niantic just piss that away. The game just isn't worth putting any effort into - they broke the effort-reward cycle.

nathankleyn 10y ago
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 bored.
- calsy 10y ago
  But you are supposed to catch common pokemon, that's the quickest way to level up.
  - bskap 10y ago
    Assuming your goal is to level up. A lot of people were playing for the collection aspect.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      True, "Gotta level up" is a far less compelling motto.
      - calsy 10y ago
        I don't think the motto is the 'foundation' for gameplay. Last I checked pokemon was also about battles.
    - calsy 10y ago
      Um yes, its called 'evolving' your pokemon. Commons evolve into new high CP pokemon which fill up your pokedex AND give you high XP in the process.
      - bskap 10y ago
        Yes, but there's only one evolution track per pokemon (except Eevee which has 3 in gen 1). The optimal strategy for grinding experience is to catch a million pidgeys and evolve them all into Pidgeottos for the experience and then transfer them because Pidgeot isn't that powerful of a pokemon. The optimal strategy for building the pokedex is to catch enough pidgeys to get a Pidgeot and then you don't need to catch any more pidgeys.
    - Thriptic 10y ago
      I think the game absolutely needs PVP / better gym mechanics and trading to survive. Right now the emphasis is 95% on collecting, which is why people are losing interest.
shreve 10y ago
I was totally fine wandering around aimlessly until my phone buzzed, but they also took out battery saver mode. I never even found out about the existence of maps until they were banned. Removal of such a benign, yet helpful feature as battery saver mode is what made me quit.
- blahshaw 10y ago
  Battery saver mode was added back in recently, FYI. Though it still seems buggy. The app occasionally fails to wake after raising your phone.
madeofpalk 10y ago
But Pokemon Go got popular before all the third party maps and tools came out.
- hrrsn 10y ago
  Initially, there was half decent tracking available inside the game, which was then killed off. Third party maps filled the void (but was admittedly less fun), which were then killed off again without tracking being replaced. This is entirely on Niantic.
derefr 10y ago
> By taking out the maps, Niantic has turned their scavenger hunt into a scratch-off lotto ticket ... they broke the effort-reward cycle You're phrasing this almost as if Niantic wanted there to be third-party mapping apps in the first place, and then changed its mind. The game Niantic released doesn't have mapping, and didn't intend to have an open API. This can be read as an implicit statement that the game design that Niantic thought people would enjoy playing, doesn't involve knowing where pokemon are. Presuming there was at least one actual game designer involved in creating the game, there's likely already some sort of effort-reward cycle built into the game that doesn't involve mapping. It might not be one you like playing, but that probably means that you were not the audience Niantic designed (and playability-tested) the game for.
- SmirkingRevenge 10y ago
  They do seem to have a thing against unsanctioned map apps/enhancements. It was true in Ingress as well. I always assumed it was because they wanted to distance themselves from anything that could be construed as enabling some kind of stalking behavior - or at least construed as "too much" stalker-enabling (Ingress is already pretty stalker-enabling without map enhancements - but the map enhancements definitely make it many times more effective). If that was at all a reason for their reticence to create capable ingress mapping tools, it must be doubly so for PGO - a game that will attract many more minor age children than Ingress.
- mahranch 10y ago
  > almost as if Niantic wanted there to be third-party mapping apps in the first place, and then changed its mind. Didn't they though? At the very beginning of the game, you had footprints you could track and use to "hunt" down nearby pokemon. They took it out because it was hurting their servers. Maps allowed similar hunting. I would say that Niantic did in fact, change its mind.
- AndroidTim 10y ago
  I see what you mean but that's partially true but not entirely correct. Yes maps were not part of the original design but neither was the current system. You see The beta users had a very good indication where Pokemon were. In fact they had a superior system to even the 3 step tracking. They had the distance away from a Pokemon displayed in METRES! That would have been amazing. So the audience Niantic designed and "playability tested" didn't have the piece of crap tracking we have today. Who needs a map if u got descent tracking. Dude WAKE UP from your delusion it had nothing to do with design and targeted audience. It was all about saving BAND WIDTH.

tvanantwerp 10y ago

Before that move, half my office was playing. We'd often play together. Right after the banning of maps, I have only seen one person in the office play a single time. Interest died immediately.

vintermann 10y ago
Don't you think interest would have dropped off in any case? It doesn't really offer much in the way of captivating gameplay. Ingress at least had a social/LARP element.

ihuman 10y ago

I thought the maps were banned because of the stress they were putting on the server?

k__ 10y ago
Noone cares 'why' they were banned. They did remove their killer feature.
- ihuman 10y ago
  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.
  - JeremyBanks 10y ago
    The client's inability to handle the most minor of server disruptions without a hard crash made it unplayable for me.
    - ge0rg 10y ago
      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.

mjevans 10y ago

What they need to do is make the 'hunting' system more 4th dimensional. If you 'hear' a Pokemon near by (maybe you don't know what it is, just that you haven't seen it before), you also know a vague direction it's in; maybe not distance but direction. That should stay on your map. You move to a different location so you can triangulate it. You hear it again and another slice lays on your map. You investigate, but it's taken too long to get there. All you find are some footprints. (location saved to client device) Later that day, or another day, the same noise is heard near that area, the client shows the pie slice again, but also loads the local markers within it. You go to investigate the marker and see (maybe even capture) the Pokemon you'd been hunting.

cableshaft 10y ago
You need to be hired by Niantic, stat. That's brilliant.
- philtar 10y ago
  Guarantee you've never made a game in your life.
  - daveguy 10y ago
    Implementation of this feature wouldn't require much in terms of processing power or storage. It would just be a more interesting and engaging way of getting to pokemon beyond the current "click it on an overhead". Game programmers and designers could definitely work with this description to make a feature.
    - philtar 10y ago
      Sure. But it's not fun. Which is way more important than any of the things you mentioned. The first thing a game designer thinks of is fun, not system limitations.
      - mjevans 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

duaneb 10y ago

For those of us who didn't use maps--most everyone I know--it was this advantage others had that made it terribly non-fun to play. Why bother playing when everyone is cheating?

khedoros 10y ago
For those of us who did use maps--most everyone I know--we didn't consider it cheating. The original form of the game sucked, and the maps worked like a community-made patch to work around some of the shortcomings. Why bother playing when the entertaining part of the game is so diffuse? With maps, I'd gather a few coworkers for a safari when something cool popped up. Now we sit at our desks, catching the occasional thing that spawns in the building, but not going anywhere, and not even really interacting with each other. Why bother playing the way that Niantic wants you to when their way feels like a grind-y waste of time?
- duaneb 10y ago
  Well if everyone is playing a different game, it's no wonder nobody is having any fun. There is certainly no way for me to interact with you in a fair way if you're cheating past the limitations I'm enjoying.
  - khedoros 10y ago
    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 might be a mix of the two: mobile, with some significant free time. Another variable: location. In a rural location, there might not be a pokestop within several miles. In an urban location, there might be three within range of your home's family room. From my perspective, people are already playing a bunch of different games, based on available time, mobility, location, and density of other nearby players.

rtkwe 10y ago

I can understand why the maps were banned though. The way most of them worked was by sending hundreds of location requests to the servers in a wide grid meaning every map user had the same load as 100+ real users. Add in how popular they were (admittedly partially because of actions on Niantic's end of disabling tracking making them almost necessary) and they probably had a huge impact on the already stressed servers.

jampa 10y ago

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 went down even late at night and saying they don't want to play without a map. It only took 200 pokemon accounts to do it and scan a 3 km radius, so it was a drop in the ocean compared with the traffic they get, and sadly it will go down once the next update hits (they implemented a captcha[1] system). [1] - https://twitter.com/FastPokeMapCom/status/768055037604036608?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/FastPokeMapCom/status/768055037604036608...

stanmancan 10y ago
What are you using to generate those charts on your twitter posts?
- jampa 10y ago
  This is not my twitter account. I just was citing the tweet as source.
jtmcmc 10y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they were but it takes some time to actually release a game feature.
- jampa 10y ago
  I would hope so, but the CEO already said he was against it: F: How do you feel about Poké Radar and things that tap into the code and show where Pokémon are spawning? JH: Yeah, I don’t really like that. Not a fan. We have priorities right now but they might find in the future that those things may not work. People are only hurting themselves because it takes some fun out of the game Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/07/28/pokemon-go-creator-john-hanke-answers-all-your-burning-questions/#746ee55f23ac http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/07/28/pokemon-go-cr...

jamisteven 10y ago

this has nothing to do with 10m people stopping altogether, people are stopping because its a fad, and utterly retarded, this was predicted form its inception. Nintendo stock goes up, and now it will go down.

chrisper 10y ago

What is this maps you are talking about? Did they disable the map inside the pokemon game?

tim333 10y ago
This kind of stuff https://pokevision.com/ https://pokevision.com/

Akkuma 10y ago

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.

Shorel 10y ago

After the ban-hammer fell, I enjoy playing a lot more, and I have managed to capture gyms. That was impossible before, with all the bot-accounts at level 30 holding them.