Pokemon Go

Sarita

So I just looked at that map, and there is exactly one rattata and one pidgey near me. Vast suburban neighborhoods aren't ideal for getting much variety.

Tedrunai

@Demarcus at the bottom of my post I have a link.

@Solaria it actually isn't based on other people's input, it's sending the same request to Google Maps API as Pokemon Go does. Thus you get all the spawn information in real time. It's basically getting the same data as what the app parses into the footprints, except it actually works (and is a fair bit more informative).

@Sarita urban life best life:



So today I was doing my civic duty, cleaning up all the pieces of Valour people inconsiderately left lying around (and even the occasional Instinct someone forgot to take home). Went to my customary gym cluster and started taking them over. Then I noticed every time I moved to the next gym someone from Valour would take the one I just left.

I actually ended up running into the guys who were sniping my gyms and we talked for a bit. I told them I was just taking them for the gym defender bonus so I needed to hold all the gyms in that area at the same time.

"Good luck," they told me smugly.

Welp. I dropped an S-Bomb on them. And no, I did not even so much as glance back at the explosion #TEAMMYSTIC #DABIRDINDANORF.

Solaria

True fact - Vaporeon is great against Snorlax. In case anyone wants to take one out. Or two. Or three.

Kyna

To be quite honest, I can't even look at @Tedrunai right now. I am that disgusted (envious) of his Snorlax army. 

Meanwhile. I'm over here nursing my one super buff Vaporeon to just hold onto the gym out front of my house. 

I call hax. 

As an aside. That Pokémap thing is so good. Very helpful for those wanting to CATCH 'EM ALL. 

Irae

Unicorns these suburbs, I have to head over to NYC and get my (Poké)life together.

Zaila

Was out playing with my Mom yesterday and we came across a little chunk of the city where only about 1:5 pokemon were actually what they showed up as. We ran across a bunch of other players there, too, and we had fun complaining that the Pincher was a Golbat, the Squirtle was a pidgy, the magikarp was a weedle, etc. Was super weird and only in the ONE little hunk of the area. Probably a couple city blocks wide.

Mostly it was just funny, but MAN I wasted, like, 15 balls on an ivysaur that ended up being a zubat.

Fezzix

Zaila said:

Was out playing with my Mom yesterday and we came across a little chunk of the city where only about 1:5 pokemon were actually what they showed up as. We ran across a bunch of other players there, too, and we had fun complaining that the Pincher was a Golbat, the Squirtle was a pidgy, the magikarp was a weedle, etc. Was super weird and only in the ONE little hunk of the area. Probably a couple city blocks wide.

Mostly it was just funny, but MAN I wasted, like, 15 balls on an ivysaur that ended up being a zubat.

They were all Dittos.

Draiman

I've pretty much quit playing. Niantic seems content to never be transparent about anything, and the removal of the in game tracking entirely (instead of fixing it or at least communicating that they're going to fix it) is like........why would I even bother?

Plus the battling is completely retarded. How to become Pokemon master? Tap your phone really really fast.

Atrapoema

Niantic did end up making a social media post about the recent update, but it's mostly a non-answer. You can view it here.

I have to agree, though. They weren't prepared for this launch and are continuing to drag their feet. They act like communicating via social media is time consuming, when they could easily hire a PR manager/social media persona with the money they're raking in from GO. Furthermore, evidence that they did indeed lower capture chance is mounting and they've stayed quiet. I uninstalled the app, it's not worth the headache and the fun was at an all-time low with the tracker gone and their decision to go after sites like Pokevision.

Jensen

I don't think any small company would be prepared for a daily user rate of approx. 9.5 million. The game plays very similar to ingress which was no where near as popular, so to me it's easy to see how the short-comings would crop up. Ultimately I think most people set their expectations too high and got too engrossed in it. Still a fun game I play on occasion but not to the degree the people around me have been.

Aishia

Draiman

Jensen said:

I don't think any small company would be prepared for a daily user rate of approx. 9.5 million. The game plays very similar to ingress which was no where near as popular, so to me it's easy to see how the short-comings would crop up. Ultimately I think most people set their expectations too high and got too engrossed in it. Still a fun game I play on occasion but not to the degree the people around me have been.

A lot of us, I think, aren't upset at their launch failures. I'm a WoW veteran, I've actually come to -expect- failures on launches. But at least Blizzard says 'hey, we're having issues guys, we're working on it'. Other companies do this too. Niantic doesn't do this. Instead their only public moves are to lash out at 3rd party websites/addons for doing a better job than them.

Jensen

Except blizzard is sooooo much larger than they are

Draiman

That's the point I was making? Even Blizzard screws up launches.

Unless you're talking about how much money they have. Which, in that case, I admittedly don't use Twitter very often, but I wasn't aware they charged you per tweet.

The difference is communication.

Jensen

They have the money for a pr department where small companies do not.

Tedrunai

You don't need a PR department to tweet out a simple "we've disabled footprints because of server load" or something like that.

You know what they did instead of talking about any one of the 342754375 bugs their update created? They tweeted some nonsense at Soulja Boy.

I'm not quite as up-in-arms and ragequitting the game like a lot of people but Niantic has to be, bar none, the worst company I have ever seen at basic communication. It really doesn't take much to keep their playerbase happy but they just inexplicably refuse to take 5 minutes to let people know what's going on.

Atrapoema

Jensen said:

They have the money for a pr department where small companies do not.

According to industry analysts, Pokemon GO is making $10 million in revenue a day. Niantic may be a small company, but they were also hired by The Pokemon Company and likely given a tidy pile of money to develop GO, and that's without mentioning Nintendo's investment in the company. Niantic doesn't really have an excuse right now, especially when they could ask TPC for help in PR. It's not so much that they're small as they are incompetent, which Ingress players already knew from their time with that game that constantly had issues despite Niantic being a part of Google at the time, I believe.