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.