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.

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.

You would think that, but there really isn't. It's easier to see if you load up the game for yourself.

Sure, it's true that Niantic didn't plan or intend for usable maps to exist. But it's also true that the game is effectively unplayable without the maps.

The real winner in this whole situation is Nintendo. Niantic has effectively given their entire userbase over to Nintendo -- and even though Nintendo's doing very little to attract or keep them, they'll probably still get some extra 3DS + game sales as a result.

I don't understand how that follows. How did Niantic give any of its userbase over to Nintendo? Pokemon Go does very little to advance the Nintendo games - there's literally zero upsell involved (or even any cross-advertising).

You could say that the Pokemon Go brand might sell some extra copies of Sun & Moon in November, but I'd argue that the effect runs mostly in the other direction. Pokemon Go was successful because of Nintendo's Pokemon brand. And to at least a degree, that capital is finite (people's appetite for Pokemon-related games is a finite resource, and it's possible that overexposure to Pokemon Go could make them less excited about the upcoming 3DS games).

Niantic's handling of Pokemon Go is driving demand for Pokemon, but not fulfilling it. And some of that unfulfilled demand is going to Nintendo, whose product does deliver a Pokemon experience, and is already sitting in thousands of stores all across America today.

"Sales of Pokémon X and Y, which were first released in October 2013, were up a huge 200 percent compared to their sales in July of last year." -- https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/18/nintendo-3ds-sales-up-80-y...

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> Pokemon Go does very little to advance the Nintendo games - there's literally zero upsell involved (or even any cross-advertising).

It doesn't have to advertise Nintendo's products, it only has to advertise the brand.

Coca-Cola ads drive demand and sales for Coke, even though they rarely upsell the actual product. Coke advertisements can drive sales without explicitly saying "12 packs are $3.99 at your local Wal*Mart".

The root motivation of the bug was the stressing of the servers by "headless" accounts that existed solely to make mapping software possible. It's unfortunate that they chose to try and combat that activity rather than just understand it's what people wanted and make it less taxing on their server (make a mapping endpoint on an alternate server).

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.

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.

And that's entirely the developer's fault, not the players'.

I mean, I see what you're saying in the "the customer is always right" sense—it's Niantic's problem to solve if the majority of people playing their game want something other than their game.

But suppose Niantic don't care about making billions of dollars from an audience of "everyone", but only intended the game to be interesting to, say, 8-to-14 year olds with lots of time to kill wandering around in their small towns not finding much of anything. I don't think it's valid to criticize Niantic that another audience glommed onto the game that isn't that audience, and then is demanding an experience Niantic didn't intend.

A comparison: there are these cartoons in Japan about little girls being cute. They are marketed to little girls, who are intended to identify with the characters. But for some reason, a lot of grown men watch these shows, although nobody ever marketed the show to them. As you might guess, the grown men want different things from the shows than the intended audience does. And the grown men have a lot more money. But that doesn't mean that the show should change, does it?

Also remember, Pokemon Go is a franchise license. It was likely intended, in part, as a loss-leader marketing experiment for Nintendo to revive the Pokemon brand. Franchise licensees, before anything else, have to serve as good ambassadors for their franchise. Even if that means not making money. To do otherwise is to possibly get your license revoked, and for these franchise-licensed works, the licensed IP is usually 99% of the reason people (both in and out of the intended audience) are paying any attention. Making Pokemon's intended audience want to buy more Pokemon games, isn't necessarily more important a concern to Niantic's businesspeople than making a billion dollars from IAPs is; but it is certainly a more life-or-death concern. It's something that can't be traded away even for great benefit, like regulatory-compliance in a bank, or safety concern in an engineering project.

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.

But maybe they didn't want it to go fast. Maybe it was supposed to be unfeasible to get a full set in a reasonable amount of time. This doesn't seem too unlikely if they want to implement trading at some point.

All my 10-50CP Pidgeys don't magically get useful by evolving. Though they do give nice XP.

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.

Sure I can see if I am near a Pokemon, but I can't actually go after most of them due to GPS jitter and the time it takes to walk/cross at lights in cities.

If I absolutely knew which direction to go there is a CHANCE I could get to a Pokemon before it despawns.

As things stand now I pretty much have to win a small lottery to capture one where I happen to be taking a scenic walk.

If you mean they wouldn't hire him just for having ideas, then that's generally true, although I have seen someone hired as a consultant to design the economy of a game since he was a self-described 'free to play economy expert' with several articles posted on gamasutra (yeah, there was all sorts of problems with that project).

I was mostly just affirming that I thought his idea was a good one, not that I actually thought Niantic would hire him based on a forum post.

EDIT: Apparently you think the feature is not fun, well I think the rules for GPS games are not necessarily the same as static games, and the hunt and exploration and tracking could actually be fun when your movement actually matters. And it's a lot better than "you might get these pokemon if you run around in circles for the next ten minutes and get lucky!" that currently exists right now, which is shit and very unfun.

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...

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-cr...

Well it sounds like they were wrong about it.

The feet feature being removed hurt the game, but those maps that posted the exact location of the Pokemon seemed to go counter to the actual game.

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?

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.

No one gets to bend the rules of a game because of their circumstance for e.g. 'I work all day, so I should have access to tools that give me an advantage over others'. Games are not an equal opportunity endeavour where everyone gets to be a winner.

Those who play by the rules and practice (or grind) should be rewarded, those who cheat should be penalised, simple.

"this is a make believe world with arbitrary rules - bend them as much as you can, because why not"

>No one gets to bend the rules of a game because of their circumstance

Again, I come to the opposite conclusion, that _because the rules are there_ they are fun to push, modify, bend, break.

If you and I were having a conversation in just about any other context, most likely we would find so many areas in which we agree, and might even really enjoy the time spent.

So, it's so funny to me that we might disagree so completely on something so foundational as rule-following behavior.

Cheers!

Same with maps, they are third-party tools used to shortcut success. Yes, the tracking sucks in game (im sure it will improve soon), but that doesn't justify having tools that say 'rare pokemon over here' without performing the actual hunting aspect of the game. That is no different to bots. What's the fun in everyone having rare pokemon without earning them.

I'm not dissing maps, Niantic might even make their own official version in the future. But when people cry foul when their preferred method of 'bending the rules' is removed, I don't have much pity for them.

"But when people cry foul when their preferred method of 'following the rules' is removed, I don't have much pity for them."

...via 10M players leaving the game and putting the entire ecosystem at risk.

The thing is, you're looking at this activity like 'success' is measurable within the game's rules rather than how satisfied people feel about playing the game in real life.

This is a big difference between adults and children, by the way. All that prefrontal cortex development tends to push people into taking the value of their time into consideration even when they are playing games. They are not wrong to do so.

The most reasonable explanation for the drop in users is simply a tapering off after one of the most hyped game releases of all time. Correct me if im wrong, but i'm pretty sure there are still some 30M+ users active in the game.

There's also:

-no way to get banned for using the cheat.

-a very very low barrier to entry.

-the cheat is directly replacing a bugged out, missing game mechanic.

-the PvP advantage is minimal, only affecting a small portion of the game.

Basically none of the classic problems with cheating are present here.

Sure they do, and for any other reason that they want to.

> Games are not an equal opportunity endeavour where everyone gets to be a winner.

My point exactly. I still don't get to be a winner, because I don't have the time to put into it. But at least I get to enjoy the time that I have.

> Those who play by the rules and practice (or grind) should be rewarded, those who cheat should be penalised, simple.

"Should" perhaps being the operative word. "If wishes were fishes..." and all that. If it makes you feel better, there've been a lot of stories recently about those nasty, nasty GPS spoofers getting their accounts banned.

'No one gets to bend the rules of a game' is the basic principle of fair play and sportsmanship. You dont have time so you want to circumvent progress quicker because you enjoy it more is not within the bounds of fair play.

The GPS spoofing is certainly bending the rules, but the game allowed you to do that without penalty. Ask most players though and they will say it's unfair as it's a shortcut to success. Now that Niantic has come down on those GPS hacks, do I feel sorry for those people caught out, of course not.

The maps issue is no different. It's like an athlete complaining that his favourite performance enhancing drug has recently be banned, well forgive me if I don't leap to his defence.

Its not like the game is unforgiving to new players, it's very easy to level up in early stages and make good progress.

But what I'm hearing is the people who are bending the rules are playing a completely different game, a noncompetetive game which is enabled by cheating, but good in its own right. And as opposed to multiplayer cheats, it's not good by making it worse for the other players; the cheats straight up enable an alternate playstyle that does not compete with the regular gameplay. It's like Tour de France players calling people with E-Bikes cheaters, even if they don't actually ride in the Tour de France.

So all I can say is "well played, cheaters".

What's this completely different other games within a game you are referring to. Is it the 'catch rare pokemon without hunting for them' game. Well yeah of course that's noncompetitive.

You are aware this is a multiplayer game though, right? There are gyms where you have battles and those with rare pokemons with higher CP will take over gyms that earn them stardust and coins.

Personally, I'm complaining because the game is broken and no fun, and a method of fixing it has been disabled. I don't particularly care about any of the multiplayer aspects, except that it's sometimes fun to meet friends and run around playing it.

How did I get to lvl 22 if the game is broken? How do 30 million people play if it is broken? Its not that the games broken, it just not the way you want to play it. Like it or not the games about grinding, as evident by the RPG lite gameplay mechanics, the 100s of pokeballs given to the player and high XP awarded for evolving common pokemon. You might want it to be a game simply about 'finding rare pokemon easy', but that's not the intend way of playing it.

There is a type of player that grinds and min-maxes and generally does a bunch of stuff I DON'T CONSIDER FUN to win a zero-sum game. That's the only currently existing multi-player aspect, and it isn't why I started using Pokemon GO (I use it as an excuse, to my self, to get out and exercise).

There is absolutely zero other 'multi player' aspect to the game as it is officially built. Anything else is a happy co-incidence.

There isn't anything within the game to turn the crowd of players in the local downtown park from a bunch of strangers in to friends. We all just happen to share one singular interest.

Would you hold the same sentiment for GPS spoofers? Who jump around from gym to gym with their Dragonites and Snorlax that are far higher level than even a heavy map user would have?

Or people that use aim bots in fps? Maphacks?

I think it's a difference in perception. I consider the location-locked nature of the game to be a central feature that contributes to the entertainment value of the game. I don't consider the location of the Pokemon being hidden a central feature at all; it feels more like and unfair hobble that saps the entertainment.

> Or people that use aim bots in fps? Maphacks?

I'm not going to argue that cheating in competitive multiplayer games is a good thing any more than I'd argue that cheating in ways that don't affect other players is a bad thing.

Again, we're playing very different games ;-)

> By "unlimiting" yourself you're changing the rules for competitive play for everyone.

Again, what competitive play? I'm not competing against you or anyone else, by any reasonable metric.

> It's a very selfish way to play the game. It's a relief you've stopped.

No more selfish than being relieved that other people aren't having fun anymore.

You can compete over who can fill up their Pokédex first (okay, just the 145 that are currently available). You can play the game for longer to catch more Pokémon. You can go out of your way to catch rare Pokémon. Even when you and a friend are in the same place catching the same Pokémon, you're not guaranteed to catch it — you can use Razz Berries and choose which Poké Ball to throw.

There's also Gyms. You can compete over who can control the most Gyms. If you're on opposing teams, you can compete over who will take control over a Gym. Or who will be Gym Leader.

There are many different aspects to this game. Whilst one particular aspect (Pokémon not disappearing when caught) may not be competitive, that doesn't mean the game as a whole can't be.

It seems like a philosophical debate: If I'm playing a game where players can optionally compete (but I don't), while using a tool that gives me a theoretical edge (even if I'm using it ineffectively), have I ruined someone else's game just by the perception that I could have?

You probably aren't ruining anyones game if you aren't competing, but you are still cheating.

However, plenty of players that have cheated by using the map tools do place Pokemon in gyms. That is also unethical (even though I would consider it a pretty minor violation as far as ethics goes).

You are competing for valuable pokemon, which IS the point of the game.

Well, until someone catches it. Then it disappears.

I'm not. The coworker next to me and I routinely catch the same Pokemon at the same time. Watching it on the map made it clear: if someone catches it, it doesn't just disappear. It's there for a set amount of time. When the time is up, that's when it can't be caught by someone else.

It matters if you then go on to hold gyms with your super pokemon and you're now out of the league of the non-maps players.

> You augmented the main, core part of the game to make it easier to catch pokemon.

And it improved a flawed game (for me) without harming your experience.

> That sounds like some form of cheating to me.

In that I gained an advantage over what the game provides? Yes. In that I gained an advantage over you or any other player? No. I'm not in competition with anyone. I consider it a fairly solitary game (don't see the point of teams and gyms).

I'm serious on that last one: the people who made the pokemon mapping apps could all get together and have enough pooled mobile-fronted and realtime-GIS backend knowledge to make a full-on clone of the game. (Maybe not with the original's art assets, but those burn battery-life anyway. Use some cute 2D pixel-art like the first-gen games; people's nostalgia will override their aesthetics!)

Yes, if I had the time and artistic ability. I've enjoyed various unofficial re-cuttings of Star Wars, different edits of Blade Runner, and so on. I'd put other things in the same category: upscalers for emulated games, texture packs for N64 games and Minecraft, mods for Minecraft and every other game under the sun, re-implementations of game engines or whole games that introduce features not found in the originals, etc.

> to make a full-on clone of the game.

Nintendo shut down Pokemon Uranium within 9 days, after 9 years of fan development. If they'd only called it Rucksack Goblins and made up their own characters...

I think that ways to extend an existing system in unintended directions are more interesting than most of the existing systems. Reinterpreting art is an art-form of its own.

I would note that all of these fall either into the category of "creator encourages community involvement" or "creator has abandoned work and ignores community involvement." Yes, people participate when participation is a net-positive. What I was asking is why people would bother contributing their time and effort to effectively do software development for a company that actively tries to discourage them from doing so.

It'd be like people making Minecraft mods and then Microsoft suing them for doing so. Surely people would re-implement the engine and start modding that, to get away from the abuse?

> If they'd only called it Rucksack Goblins and made up their own characters...

Yes, that's more what I meant. Why not create a Fanny-pack Gremlins March app?

Well...Pokemon Uranium and the community Metroid 2 Remake. Both actively discouraged, but both worthwhile creations, IMO (and the kind of thing I'd have fun doing). Presumably, they did those not just because they wanted to write an RPG or Metroidvania game, but because they're fans of those specific franchises. I read it as an expression of fandom.

I'm working on an engine re-implementation project for an old game, currently owned by a fairly litigious company, for a few reasons:

- I love the game itself, and writing my own in a similar genre+style misses the point

- I like to feel like I'm the first one to re-discover the file formats in a couple decades

- I like understanding the low-level details of "how the sausage gets made"

- I've seen similar projects with this same game crash and burn, and I'd like to be the different one (there've been half a dozen previous attempts at the same game).

- I want to make it possible to easily mod the game, maybe to get a community to build a remastered version.

> Why not create a Fanny-pack Gremlins March app?

It's a lot of work to attract people to a franchise, and it's easier to ride on the coattails of another one ;-) I also suspect that the driving force was Pokemon fandom, not only the desire to make a game. The legal issues involved clearly weren't a decisive factor during the development phase.

Have you ever heard of The Phantom Edit? Or A Phantom Edit?

Or the Despecialised Edition?

I didn't use maps. I also didn't feel like those who did were cheating, or that I was any worse off for them using maps.

The 'competition' in Pokemon Go was really minimal, and maps had very little effect on them. The only competitive aspect to Pokemon Go is gym battling. If you care only about collecting, you actually benefit from map users, because they're the ones likely to drop lures.

As for gym battling, yes, maps might have had a negative effect on the competitive landscape there. But the competitive mechanics for gym battling were so fundamentally broken from the start that it's not reasonable to blame it on map users for "cheating".

(How were they broken, might you ask? Well, the fact that moves have such a wide variance in DPS, combined with the fact that movesets are entirely random and randomized upon evolution makes obtaining strong Pokemon entirely a matter of luck. Couple that with the fact that leveling up rare Pokemon requires... finding lots of that same rare Pokemon to turn into candy means that obtaining the strongest Pokemon (which are usually rare) is a matter of repeated luck + time spent grinding. Next, battling is kind of pointless until you're around level 15-20, because you'll almost certainly lose, and the amount of XP you gain from beating a single Pokemon is insultingly small. And finally, the battling itself was highly dependent on the latency of your Internet connection. This was fixed in a recent update, but it was a huge annoyance in the first week or two).

That was impossible before, with all the bot-accounts at level 30 holding them.