Um. I played Ingress up to level 7, at which point I gave up. The geolocation features were excellent and I enjoyed exploring my city and finding interesting landmarks that I hadn't seen before --- but I found the actual game was extremely lackluster.

The problem as I saw it was that the game (as of a few years ago) rewarded taking territory, but not keeping it. So capturing a portal scores you points. But once you've captured it, there's no point keeping it any more. In fact, you want it to be recaptured as quickly as possible so that you can retake it and score more points. I found that I'd hardly ever use the higher-end defensive items because there wasn't any point --- defending portals wasn't worth anything.

This encouraged the behaviour where you'd capture a portal, and outfit it with the cheapest possible resonators. This made it trivial for the other time to capture it, and they'd do the same thing. And then you would recapture it. Repeat ad nauseam. This wasn't fun.

I don't know what the gameplay's like for Go; hopefully they didn't make the same mistake this time.

Edit: I've just discovered that Ingress also has the field formation mechanic, which is an end-game thing and grants team points. So you want to hold portals there to maintain big fields. So there is something --- I just never got involved in it (probably because it involved talking to other Ingress players)...

> The problem as I saw it was that the game (as of a few years ago) rewarded taking territory, but not keeping it

I suspect that was intentional design. Niantic was born out of the Google Maps division, and IIRC, the whole point of Ingress (at least initially) was to crowd-source generation and verification of geo data for GMaps. You could think of it as Waze for pedestrians/bikes. So gameplay that encourages constant conflict == constant data stream.

> I don't know what the gameplay's like for Go; hopefully they didn't make the same mistake this time.

The "capture" gameplay is only in gyms, every day you can collect a bonus/rent of 10 coins and 500 dust for each gym where you have a pokemon. Increasing the level of a gym increases its defensive power (so less chance for an other team to capture it) and the number of pokemon which can be stored in it (spreading the wealth amongst the team)

This game is targeting young kids, so I'm not sure there will ever be any person-identifying interaction. A lot of online multiplayer games for kids don't have interactions beyond friending/favouriting someone. P-GO would be a prime candidate for 4chan type people and you can imagine how that would work together with location spoofing and global playground. I expect that Nintendo & Niantic know this (Ingress never solved the chat spamming issues - bots advertising resources for real money)

If the game is targeting young kids, it's missing out on its primary audience. For one thing, young kids often do not have cellphones of their own. But for another, I was recently at a mall in a fairly major city, and I did not see one person under 18 playing, but near every Pokestop, and every lower spawn rate Pokemon, I found dozens of people. Pokemon games have had somewhat adult humor and themes for years, though the TV show is undoubtedly meant for a younger audience. Given that most of the people who really wanted this game are people who grew up on Pokemon and are now adults, not at least providing the option to have social interaction feels a bit wrong. It could be abused, sure, but I think throwing the necessary resources at keeping it from being abused, and punishing abusers would be worth keeping the game relevant to its current primary consumer.

I believe the point is that if the target audience includes kids, you get stuck with the restrictions that implies, whether or not they are the majority. Some of this is directly legally mandated, some of it is indirectly legally mandated by fear of lawsuit, and some of it is mandated by avoiding bad PR about any bad thing maybe possibly happening to some kid somewhere because of your app. By that, I don't mean to minimize concerns about the real possibility of things that could be bad, but to highlight the fact that the PR disaster doesn't even need a real bad thing to happen, just a semi-credible accusation made to the right media for any reason.

None of those three concerns can be fixed by any amount of "resource investment" that will satisfy anyone. It would just get them accused of censorship anyhow.

Nintendo has always been very reluctant to include social features within games beyond a very difficult to use friend list, hell, they removed SwapNote from the 3DS because it young players were getting inappropriate notes sent to them. Frankly, I'm surprised they haven't binned Miiverse some days, but they do an excellent job at moderating it.

I wouldn't expect Ingress-style open comms, but it would be nice to at least be able to message other players on a friend list.

It's what Nintendo does. They very much view their products as kids toys.

Yes, of course you are right about the safety of the kids.

I just wish there was an opt-in system where you can choose to share your ingame actions. If you don't share it you are invisible and you can't see other players, but if you are into Ingress-like gameplay you can just enable it.

About bots and cheating in Ingress: the biggest problem is that Niantic is a small company and they just don't have the manpower to sufficiently deal with the cheating. If they were Valve or Blizzard the situation would be a bit different.

I'm not sure I'm buying the small company angle. Sure, there are always going to be very creative people who work around complex rules, but that's not everyone. They could apply very basic checks and get rid of 99% of spam I've seen. Specifically, applying "you just moved more than 20km in one go and posted the same message including {bay/sell} => permaban".

For one moving 20km to Paste a message is easy and legal - using the Intel map. If you use the chat there it uses whatever location your focus is on. Also banning the "selling items" accounts does very little, they are cheap to recreate. The thing you have to control are farming bots.

> moving 20km to Paste a message is easy and legal

Anything you can do in Ingress apart from actually hacking the players' phones, or sending threats is legal. It doesn't mean it shouldn't be filtered. At some point more than half the lines in the chat were bots trying to sell stuff. Killing either part works - production (farming) or selling.

I'm not saying it's nice and that I support those sellers, but I'd try to kill the root ... and the chat experience always was limited with Ingress. In my local groups it was good enough however to get into contact with people to get then to hangouts or slack or whatever. With Pokemon this is really missing.

Perhaps it's just easier to leave it like the way it is? This way they can easily track spam-bots and the network behind it. If they start to implement more sophisticated by systems the spammers would also become more sophisticated.

At the point where you can't really talk to people anymore because your window is just flooded with spam, no. It may be easier for Nianic, but not for the players.

Besides, are you serious with that suggestion? Would you prefer email spam filtering didn't exist, otherwise it would get sophisticated? (easier to leave it that way viagra for sale now)

AR done right inherently involves person-identifying interactions. All week almost everyone I know has made brand new real life friends while on their poké-travels. That's the draw here.

Walking around my neighborhood last night on two occasions at different times of the day, I encountered a dozen or more players both times: people of all ages out in the park or walking their dog. I live in an urban area half a block from a park with four Pokéstops in close proximity, but meeting/interacting with other players is not going to be a problem.

My small town has about 150 pokestops and only 10-20 players so we are spread pretty thin. The chances to meet someone are pretty slim.

I'm kind of on the fence here. I played Ingress quite a bit (and early), but what I disliked was that it seemed multiplayer only. There was very little (for me) return for being a solo player and most Ingress communication at that time happened in G+ (aka I wasn't part of that).

Pokemon Go is in some ways a limited Ingress, but the collecting/evolving/upgrading part of the game is what got to me.

I'd be glad about social features in the game. But I already think that this is a better game than Ingress for me personally.

If I am on my own then Pomemon Go is currently much more exciting than Ingress. But I miss i) you can not annoy opponents by blowing up their farms/homeportals, ii) make long bike tours in order to build large fields and iii) meeting with 8+ players and building a nice L8 farm, iv) being involved in continent-wide fielding operations with 100s of other players.

tldr: Pokemon Go is the better single player game, but if you are into large-scale and coordinated multi player games then Ingress is better.

Apparently these already have the potential to be "honeypots" without seeing nearby players

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/07/10/four-suspects-...

I watched five of my colleagues walk to Town Hall in Sydney's CBD and play the game the whole way... Remarkable!

The ingame player activity feature in Ingress turned out to have some really nasty privacy implications. I doubt they'd want to repeat it.