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.

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.

Pokemon go is incredibly friendly to casual players. everybody gets everything. The only place where players interact via the game is at gym battles which are heavily heavily biased toward the attacker. Level 15, perhaps even level 10 can take down anything, given enough potions and revives.

If nothing else, Niantic learned from Ingress. High level players have high level stuff, sure. But 6 v 1 ensures even the most casual player can make progress. You don't have that level bonus wall to climb that you have in other games.

I gave up because I didn't know that was the case. Nothing in the game indicates it's like that - all I knew was that my Pokemon had far less power than the ones in my local gyms. I suspect most casual players will be similar as the game tells you very little about how to get the most out of it.

It wasn't so friendly for me. I took my kids out Pokemon hunting in the car and we drove around for a while looking for one. My son was traumatized when we drove over a pidgee. I'm never doing that again!

Isn't the idea to walk?

I live in a city centre, and there are families walking past all day, with kids looking at phones. And plenty of kids walking alone or in groups.

If any city counts pedestrians, or would be interesting to see what difference Pokémon has caused.

I don't play by the rules of the game.

I guess don't be surprised when your strategy doesn't work out?

I dunno, I got an amusing anecdote out of it and got a rise out of you.

> win-to-win-to-win.

That basically describes every roguelike and JRPG ever. At best they provide a tediously complicated skill tree or bizarre counter structure that gives you some trivia to explore and memorize to provide an illusion of skill, but fundamentally a massive chunk of modern gaming is "kill stuff, increment power"

If you're not dying at least once or twice every time you play a game it's too easy. Resident Evil demonstrated this to me (the early games). One of the most perfectly balanced games between challenging thoughtful puzzles and survival combat skills. Especially for kids/youth.

This theory could go a long way in explaining the slow death of World of Warcraft. Blizzard can make as much end-game content as they want but the fact remains that the average new player starting out is faced with 12 years worth of content that is so ridiculously easy that there's a very real chance they will go through it all without dying once.

Those not dying at least once have clearly never experienced the wonder that's auto-matchmaking 5-man instance dungeons.

If anything, WoW's big problem is that an average new player starting out is faced with 12 years worth of content they have to rush through to get to max level endgame, where the vast majority of in-game social life occurs. The innate incentives of experiencing the storyline and zones doesn't compete favorably with the huge social incentive of wanting to join your friends at endgame as quickly as possible.

In WoW, just any zone-leveled game, old content quickly becomes obsolete once it's superseded with newer content, and only delivers a fraction of its original value.

Pokemon GO doesn't have this problem (for the simple reason of tying their in-game geography to real-world geography), but also has a very shallow gameplay where the novelty will wear off quickly. If they can expand gameplay mechanics quickly before players abandon it, they may have a sustained hit.

> Those not dying at least once have clearly never experienced the wonder that's auto-matchmaking 5-man instance dungeons.

urm, tanks can solo the 5 man dungeons, so it doesnt really matter what the rest of the group does anymore...

JRPG's yes, roguelikes no (or at least not the "pure" ones like ADOM, Brogue, DCSS, Nethack, etc. which have permadeath and require a good deal of skill).

Maybe you meant MMORPGs and JRPGs? Because MMORPGs tend to fit to that template.

I mean the grind "RPG without a plot" such as Diablo where there's only difficulty when you hit a level cap or you try to rush the game, but for most players it's "grind until you're OP then kill boss".

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.

Geography bias is a real problem. Some areas have several gyms in walking distance, others have miles in-between gyms.

You're "competing" against and playing with those within your geography though.It's an issue for those that want to be posting impressive screenshots on reddit/forums that live in the suburbs sure but outside of that minority most people are interacting with players that have similar opportunities to them.

Except you are not, as the bots have already taken over :-(

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.

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.

For the hardcore players with money to burn on traveling, sure. There was a player in our area who booked a flight to Hawaii literally just to field over the western half of the continent. There's also the risk/reward of holding an out of the way Guardian portal, even though it's easy to achieve that badge with a local portal too.

I don't think the creators of the game envisioned that kind of dedication, though. And you're right, that is a fundamental difference between Pokemon GO (which despite the claims of its older players, is definitely targeted at teens and children) and Ingress.

Players in my area have successfully crowd funded flights, including charter flights, for our most hardcore players.

> 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.

Don't underestimate anybody. There are 40-olds working full-time who can devote 6+ hrs a day to games.

if that was true it would be a good version of real Pokemon. every single Pokemon game was about grinding and luck. if you think any of the franchise game was about skill you're insane.

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.

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

I don't know whether Android has adopted the same protocol, but on iOS, that's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBeacon: basically an API where apps can register an OS event-handler plugin to run in response to the detection of [basically, but not exactly] specific Bluetooth MACs.

The scary thing is, iBeacon handler don't have to do the cute "hey you're in this store, click to open the app!" sort of thing. They can run completely in the background, just reporting "hey boss, they're in the shoe section of Store #3313 now! Now they're in the produce section! Now they're gone." And, as far as I know, there's no way to turn off the tracking behaviour while keeping the helpful "activation suggestion" behaviour.

I would think that to be false based n sports trackers. Or do they work in some different manner that's not suitable here?

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.

The fitness app [Human](http://human.co/) sits in the background and provide a map of where the user has moved throughout the day, and a timeline of when they moved (for example, that there was a walk from 10-10:30 AM, a jog from 2-:2:14, etc). When apps like this are backgrounded, the iOS permission dialog asks if the user wants to allow the app to continue using their location in the background.

I have no idea what APIs they use, so I'm not sure how hard it is to get this information, but it is at least possible.

On iOS an app can ask to access the GPS from the background. You can allow or deny that request, and if you go into the settings you can set its GPS permissions to never, always, only when running

yes, you can. I created a plugin for Cordova/React Native/NativeScript that does this:

https://github.com/transistorsoft/cordova-background-geoloca...

https://github.com/transistorsoft/react-native-background-ge...

Here I am driving around Iceland with my sample app, completely in background. Tracking engages automatically when device is detected to be moving.

http://www.transistorsoft.com/lab/iceland

How do these games prevent location spoofing? Or do they?

Ingress has some heuristics, but is not infallible. Plenty of cheaters have figured out how to avoid detection.

It is fairly clear that there are no such heuristics in PoGo.

The reality is, Niantic is a small company, and does not have the resources to throw at detecting/banning/dealing with the appeals.

> 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...

I have heard that is a thing from a couple people now.

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!

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.

To be fair, it didn't really emulate the gameboy one either. Very different gameplay.

Well, it doesn't really emulate the gameboy game either, so noone wins.

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).

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.

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.

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!"

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.

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.

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.

Level 23? How many hours did you put in that?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.