POKEYMANS thread

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sun Jul 10, 2016 6:35 am

Yeah, I have two friends that got into it and all I can really say is why. You run around waiting for pokemon to randomly generate, and then swiping your finger at them. That's it. There's no game at all. It's quite possibly the most cynical and barebones chassis for microtransactions I have ever seen in my life. They could have made an actual augmented reality pokemon game, but instead they made a really shitty clicker game with pokemon graphics.

I don't even particularly follow pokemon and the disappointment makes me want to punch them in the dick.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sun Jul 10, 2016 6:38 am

Basically if you don't live in a city (and you better be feeling lucky about which part of which city) the thing is literally unplayable.

Rural areas, hell, insufficiently large/lucky city areas get dick all. And apparently that includes some sort of naturally occurring wild pokemon.

Not that wild pokemon would make the game playable, since those aren't battles and you need a specific location in order to get battles.

I tried logging in while I was on delivery in the outer Sydney suburbs the other morning to see if, well, I could even see what a location looked like. But it just plain failed to load at that point.

If you don't live near an active Ingress gaming population (so what? a university campus or a major CBD?) since they apparently are (maybe entirely?) mapping their locations based on that game instead of oh, say, anything that would make it work for vast swathes of geography, this thing is pretty much worthless for now.

And yes, that's before other fairly obvious issues that would likely still make it a pretty shitty game.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sun Jul 10, 2016 7:50 am

I live nowhere near a city. Heck, if the outer suburbs of Sydney (sure, outer suburbs, but on the other hand, still basically part of/attached to Sydney, which is possibly the biggest city our country has?) don't have anything, then "over an hour away from fucking Adelaide" won't even have a Zubat. Imagine, scouring the land in search of a Zubat.

I'd be happier with it being a thing you connect to your Pokemon Safe account, and transfer them to your phone just to have your Pokemon show up in augmented reality and you can pat them and talk to them and... basically it'd be a cross between the following mechanics in Pokemon: Best Version and the Poke-Amie in Pokemon: French Version. Or a cross between them and real life, I suppose.

That'd be great, I probably would borrow a DS and buy a Pokeyman game and pay for a month's usage of the PokeSafe just so I could always have some adorable Pokeymans with me in the world.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Jul 10, 2016 8:11 am

I wouldn't say it's an incredibly cynical and barebones chassis for microtransactions, because microtransactions are completely unnecessary. You can buy shit, sure, but I just got lure modules, arguably one of the more reasonable things to buy, just for hitting level eight. And having a Pokemon in a gym earns you pokecoins.

Really, what it is, is a fitness app with pokemon-shaped carrots and no stick unless you count having to catch more shit in order to level up the shit you caught before. It's also a funny-pic generator if your phone has a gyroscope and can actually run the AR part, which mine can't. No gastly's working at Burger King for me.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sun Jul 10, 2016 8:30 am

I'll agree with it being a funny pic generator. With Psyduck sitting next to someone in the chemo ward of a hospital, Doduo standing aggressively on a stack of VB (shitty Australian beer) crates, Magikarp being found in a bin (and on a frying pan in one case) and so on. That bit is pretty funny.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Mon Jul 11, 2016 7:33 am

https://twitter.com/DavidOliverW/status ... 5373961216

"Folks are at the Black Lives Matter march and catching Pokemon! Black Lives Matter but we gotta catch em' all bro!"

Pseudo Stupidity · Post by **Pseudo Stupidity** » Mon Jul 11, 2016 6:57 pm

Pokemon Go contains all the worst parts of games: Grinding, Microtransactions, an incredibly buggy platform, and generally shit gameplay. The game is total shit.

But seriously, the best way to win is to find a place with a ton of Pokestops close together and fucking PARK THERE and then do tiny laps. It's easy to find a spot where there are multiple stops you can activate at once, then you can use a Lucky Egg and two of those lure things and fucking POWER LEVEL. The game is all grinding and the luck of where you live, and that should say something about how shit the game is (hint: it's very shit).

Fuck Pokemon Go, but I might play it for the capture stuff to socialize since everyone seems to love this shit game.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Jul 11, 2016 7:06 pm

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Wed Jul 13, 2016 5:10 am

Well some scouting of the local area, and suddenly, when the servers are working, Pokemon Go DOES function... relatively nearby.

But good god are it's location selections arbitrary. Apparently the sites mapped from the Ingress game are in turn sites mapped from Google Maps markers that meet certain requirements.

I live at a fucking google maps marker. It has a picture, it's been there forever, but presumably either being a private business based tourists site disqualifies it, OR it was never somehow tagged by an Ingress player/administrator something using the, somewhat mysterious process, that makes a Google Maps site into an Ingress site and then in turn maybe into a Pokemon Go site.

However the locations drop off for the local village isn't bad compared to the plethora of locations in of all places the local slummy mining town up the road (it has a bunch of murals on google maps... so it seems there may be an abnormal cluster of sites out there that even the larger booming suburban sprawl town 20 minutes drive further out lacks).

But the appearance rate of wild pokemon for some reason fucking PLUMMETS once you leave the towns and head out to rural/village. Still if you are near roads you get seem to maybe SOMETHING even if its like, seriously a tiny fraction of the appearance rate in town.

Now Google Maps, it counts the road I drive into my house on as a road.

Pokemon Go puts my entire 10 acre garden open to the public as being a solid couple of hundred meters from a road.

This apparently puts the entire thing far enough away from whatever the fuck spawns wild Pokemon appearances that... there are no wild pokemon appearances happening within range even from my house which is one of the closer points to the nearest Pokemon Go approved Totes Real Road (tm).

However if I want to try out battling in this game I just need drive about 1.5km, trespass in some guys paddock and challenge the local fucking water tower (that doesn't even want to supply my house with water).

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Wed Jul 13, 2016 10:15 am

Pokemon Go most popular mobile game in USA history, even more than Candy Crush Saga.

Also more popular than Twitter.

On the way to surpassing even Google Maps and Snapchat.

No wonder Nintendo shares are skyrocketing.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Jul 13, 2016 1:52 pm

PL, go challenge the water tower gym, win, and tell the county(?) that now they have to supply you with water.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Wed Jul 13, 2016 9:46 pm

"Challenge the local water tower."

Like a modern day Don Quixote...

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Jul 14, 2016 2:00 am

If the local water tower isn't already dominated by kids that significantly out level me I would be surprised. Still I will be checking it out sooner or later.

Meanwhile while my tourist site right near the village isn't a site you can go out into the middle of fucking nowhere up the road and find a rusty old steam tractor wreck that is a pokestop.

Sigil · Post by **Sigil** » Thu Jul 14, 2016 4:05 am

My understanding of the mechanics that govern what areas pokemon spawn in is this: pokemon spawn based on the same data that governed how much 'XM' an area had/has in Ingress. XM density for an area was, apparently, determined by some sort of usage stat of google services tied to a location. So areas where large amounts of people (unsure if ALL people that allowed google to collect anonymized data or just ingress players) frequently used google services during the time Ingress was collecting data are areas where pokemon frequently spawn.

This means that locations that were busy a couple years ago will be prime places to catch. For instance, my neighborhood in a medium sized town has light pokemon spawns, I can encounter about 10 if I walk around the whole neighborhood (About 1.5 miles) and see more on the radar. If, however, I take a 10 minute trip inside Walmart I encounter a pokemon every 60-90 seconds. The neighborhood near mine that didn't exist during Ingress' heyday literally has fuckall, nothing spawns as far as I can tell.

Hope that helps, because I was going fucking batty until I researched enough to know what the hell governed spawns so I knew where to go.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Jul 14, 2016 6:49 am

Whatever governs wild spawns (not locations) I think they mostly only happen on or within range of public roads. (and maybe a few other places google maps knows are accessible to the public)

But in an hours walking from my place I caught less pokemon than I caught sitting still waiting to pick someone up in a car park for 30 minutes.

And good fucking god battling and leveling up pokemon is god awful shite. I mean for fucks sake, the two things they could have and damn well should have just copy pasted from the base franchise and they decided to do something different and totally fucking screwed the pooch.

And in the end it's basically just pure walk grind to get better quality pokemon drops or more pokemon that you mince in a blender for more pokemon salami candies to force cannibal feed their brothers and sisters with at a grossly inefficient rate. Well. Or sit in a mall carpark for many hours within range of a pokestop.

I'm going to have to walk 20 or 30 km before I can take on the water tower (the weaker gym in the village, and both the village gyms being pissants compared to the ones over in lower class suburban explosion town) in what appears to be a two cowboy town. Assuming the two kids playing down there don't keep walking.

You know. Having just said that. It suddenly occurs to me that this game could develop a fairly obvious dark side. Team rocket isn't there to steal your pokemon, they're there to break your fucking kneecaps.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Sun Jul 17, 2016 2:07 pm

Nintendo continues to make me want to punch them in dick.

First, Darkrai was revealed as a new playable character for Pokken Tournment... exclusively in the arcade version... and only in Japan. Because fuck Western console owners.

Second, pre-order bonuses for Sun and Moon have been revealed for various countries around the globe, including the UK, Spain, Japan... even fucking Austrailia. But the US? Nope, fuck 'em.

Why does Nintendo hate me? Is it because I hate them? Petty motherfuckers.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sun Jul 17, 2016 2:34 pm

You shouldn't be pre-ordering anyway. Stand firm against those motherfuckers.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sun Jul 17, 2016 4:47 pm

So my little sister asked if I wanted to do a ride-along and manage her phone for Pokemon Go while she took care of some errands.

I discovered a few things about Pokemon Go:

1) Addictive as shit, for all its minimalism.

2) Holy shit, one of the parks in my city spawned six dratinis while we were there

3) I can now see why this one cemetery was having problem with people coming in there. It's got a lot of special-made statuary and the like and so, from Pokemon Go's map, it looks like a bunch of looping roads peppered with upwards of a dozen poke-stops. This has been enough of a problem for them that they've put up a sign requesting no one play games on the premises.

4) We saw several families at the park while we were walking. Mom, dad, and kid(s), all holding hands and talking about Pokemon. So it's getting people out of the house and doing some sort of togetherness thing, so it's got that much going for it.

Eikre · Post by **Eikre** » Mon Jul 18, 2016 6:24 pm

The idea governing Pokemon Go is so good that it literally cannot have a failed implementation.

Which is great, because there is literally no way in which this implementation isn't fucked. It's cataclysmic. These assholes had Google and Pokemon money, plus an extensive alpha test in the form of an entire completely different game. I genuinely cannot understand how they produced such an unrelentingly terrible product.

It's optimized like shit. The decision to hack the Ingress XM mechanic into pokemon spawn locations instead of using geological metadata was incompetent lunacy. And everything is a fucking vaporeon because, even though the math governing combat is rudimentary to the point of braindeath, they still couldn't take twelve fucking seconds to look at its emergent results.

But the upshot is good, if you're just honest about it. I'm going to GPS-spoof myself into lure modules while I'm at work all day, and then go have dinnertime picnics to knock down gyms and meet other 20-somethings. The game is only going to spend three weeks on my phone, but the space it takes up now is going to then be filled with the contact data for a bunch of social nerds who look like they'll sell me drugs and/or have sex with me if I offer them drugs. So, GOTY 2016, frankly.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Tue Aug 02, 2016 7:09 am

A lot of people here seem to hate fun.

Ok, to be fair, I live near several areas with high Poke-density, so I'm getting the ideal experience; I imagine it would be lot less fun if you were stuck in "occasional Pidgey, if that" territory.

I already liked walking around (IRL) and finding things, so for me this is one of the best games ever. Buggy? Yes. The battle mechanics? Dunno, haven't bothered with that yet, busy collecting. Grindy? Not really, it's not like you're obligated to catch every Pidgey you see. Maybe if you were trying to power-level? Not that there's much point to doing so.

The micro-transaction thing, I have to say, is totally minor. It has them, but as a regular player you'd never need to buy any of them. I'm pretty sure most of the sales they've got is businesses buying Lure Modules to attract people.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Tue Aug 02, 2016 10:57 am

I don't think you know what fun is. That's not even meant to be a snippy insult as much as a genuine response.

Pokemon Go is an augmented reality game without any pesky gameplay to get in the way of its addictive design. When I called it a cynical and barebones freemium chassis, that was not hyperbolic. Pokemon Go is literally nothing but the minimal necessary for a game to be "addictive" to people without providing any real entertainment experience. There are numbers. If you pay attention to the game, opportunies will present themself to swipe at the screen and make those numbers go up. There are basically no decisions to make and basically no skills to develop. The numbers don't really even mean anything to most of the playerbase. You just put your eyes on your phone, walk around, and wait for duplicate pokemon to show up so you can swipe at them and make your numbers bigger. Occasionally you may find a pokemon you didn't have before. You won't really be able to do anything interesting with that pokemon, because there is nothing interesting to do to begin with, but that's a thing you didn't have before so hurrah. I mean, you admit haven't even tried the "battles" - the supposed payoff that gives your constantly increasing numbers meaning. Battling is shit, so I don't blame you, but what purpose does that even leave for playing the game beyond "these particular repetitive actions feed my addiction for bigger numbers."

That constant incremental design is like crack for people. The faulty meat-computer you call your brain loves that shit. It's why clicker games and idle games are so popular (though I will point out that, even as I criticize them, the typical clicker/idle game requires substantially more decisions and thought than Pokemon Go). People picked up Pokemon Go - even people who roll their eyes at their mother's Farmville addiction or whatever - because it was superhype. A Pokemon augmented reality game? Holy shit! But the only reason they haven't put it down is because it follows the digital era playbook for addicting people to pointless bullshit. Or to give themself an excuse to go outside, get some exercise, and meet people. And like any addiction, scratching that itch feels good - but that doesn't really mean you should call that sort of gratification fun. Crack addicts genuinely enjoy crack, but you shouldn't take that as an endorsement.

Pokemon Go is depressing for two reasons. The first is that it could have been a genuinely good augmented reality experience, and the second is that despite not being that it's still been wildly successful. This is why we can't have nice things.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Tue Aug 02, 2016 8:38 pm

Oh, I see. You're judging it purely on its gameplay merits. I'd agree that it's not much of a game, but it's a great toy. Somewhat like Minecraft (which does have gameplay, but the "survival" part is super-easy and really secondary to the self-imposed building projects).

But so what? It's not like toys aren't fun, or that tactical games are inherently are more noble endeavor than other entertainment. And yeah, another AR game with better gameplay could come out in future and be superior. But until then, it's the only thing doing what it does, and what it does is fun.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Tue Aug 02, 2016 10:18 pm

Pokemon go is not a toy. If it were you'd be able to get your pokemon out and just sort of play with them in AR or something as basic as that. This game has NO toy like functions. NONE. You walk. You collect. You Increment. THE END.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Aug 03, 2016 3:41 am

PhoneLobster wrote:Pokemon go is not a toy. If it were you'd be able to get your pokemon out and just sort of play with them in AR or something as basic as that. This game has NO toy like functions. NONE. You walk. You collect. You Increment. THE END.

You meet other people and talk to them because when you suffer from things like social anxiety, the fact that you have a shared interest (collecting pokemon) works as an icebreaker and you can limit the conversation to this obvious safe topic instead of constantly wondering if they're about to talk about "the problem with darkies" or whatever.

Its value has almost nothing to do with the software itself, and basically everything to do with the logo on it. But that's still something it brings to the table that has been sorely lacking.

Disclaimer: I don't play it - the population density is skewed sharply in favour of the very elderly, followed by the somewhat elderly and middle aged, followed by children. You have to go a fair distance to really find anything in this area so I wouldn't end up meeting people who are like myself. But my half-sister plays/collects and says a lot of other students do, including those too shy to normally talk with other people. Were I literally half my age now, this would be the perfect thing for bringing me out of my shell and maybe I'd end up slightly less of a bitter [EDITED] than I am currently.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Wed Aug 03, 2016 11:27 am

Barebones gameplay is a feature, not a bug. The point of the game is indeed for people to get out there and have a reason to talk to each other, not sink hours of soulless number-crunching trying to get the most lewt strats.