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Comment by NamTaf | Hacker News Reader

If Google had any sense, they would be throwing a tonne more at this. It may be Ingress with less features and a Pokemon skin but that latter part is exactly the mainstream appeal they need to make AR big. This is their big chance to create a new market. If they sort out the bugginess and roll out decent features in the next couple of months to keep retention, they're onto something big.

At near-on midnight on Saturday, there were 150-200 people sitting in a 70m stretch of the main public park area here in Brisbane CBD (Southbank). During Sunday when I walked through, that was closer to 250-300. This is purely because there's 3 or 4 points of interest in close proximity so people congregate there to interact with it. It's truly a sight to behold.

This game has captured the imagination of non-gamers better than anything I can think of in recent history. It's nearing WoW / CoD levels of ubiquity.

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The one thing which is missing (and which made Ingress the amazing game it is) is ingame notification and ingame player activity.

Based on the gym activity there are at least 15-20 players in my town but there is just no way of contacting them. If I am lucky I can manage to meet one by random chance but currently Pokemon Go is a rather single player game.

The other thing which is missing is a system which shows ingame player activity. At any given point I can open my scanner in Ingress and see exactly what's going on around me. I can see if there is a new player in town, I can see if my favorite enemy is active again, ... but in Pokemon Go I feel like I am blind.

I know that there are other Pokemon Go players out there in my town but I just can't see them or interact with them.

I watched five of my colleagues walk to Town Hall in Sydney's CBD and play the game the whole way... Remarkable!

This game is targeting young kids, so I'm not sure there will ever be any person-identifying interaction. A lot of online multiplayer games for kids don't have interactions beyond friending/favouriting someone. P-GO would be a prime candidate for 4chan type people and you can imagine how that would work together with location spoofing and global playground. I expect that Nintendo & Niantic know this (Ingress never solved the chat spamming issues - bots advertising resources for real money)

Yes, of course you are right about the safety of the kids.

I just wish there was an opt-in system where you can choose to share your ingame actions. If you don't share it you are invisible and you can't see other players, but if you are into Ingress-like gameplay you can just enable it.

About bots and cheating in Ingress: the biggest problem is that Niantic is a small company and they just don't have the manpower to sufficiently deal with the cheating. If they were Valve or Blizzard the situation would be a bit different.

I'm not sure I'm buying the small company angle. Sure, there are always going to be very creative people who work around complex rules, but that's not everyone. They could apply very basic checks and get rid of 99% of spam I've seen. Specifically, applying "you just moved more than 20km in one go and posted the same message including {bay/sell} => permaban".

For one moving 20km to Paste a message is easy and legal - using the Intel map. If you use the chat there it uses whatever location your focus is on. Also banning the "selling items" accounts does very little, they are cheap to recreate. The thing you have to control are farming bots.

> moving 20km to Paste a message is easy and legal

Anything you can do in Ingress apart from actually hacking the players' phones, or sending threats is legal. It doesn't mean it shouldn't be filtered. At some point more than half the lines in the chat were bots trying to sell stuff. Killing either part works - production (farming) or selling.

I'm not saying it's nice and that I support those sellers, but I'd try to kill the root ... and the chat experience always was limited with Ingress. In my local groups it was good enough however to get into contact with people to get then to hangouts or slack or whatever. With Pokemon this is really missing.

Perhaps it's just easier to leave it like the way it is? This way they can easily track spam-bots and the network behind it. If they start to implement more sophisticated by systems the spammers would also become more sophisticated.

At the point where you can't really talk to people anymore because your window is just flooded with spam, no. It may be easier for Nianic, but not for the players.

Besides, are you serious with that suggestion? Would you prefer email spam filtering didn't exist, otherwise it would get sophisticated? (easier to leave it that way viagra for sale now)

If the game is targeting young kids, it's missing out on its primary audience. For one thing, young kids often do not have cellphones of their own. But for another, I was recently at a mall in a fairly major city, and I did not see one person under 18 playing, but near every Pokestop, and every lower spawn rate Pokemon, I found dozens of people. Pokemon games have had somewhat adult humor and themes for years, though the TV show is undoubtedly meant for a younger audience. Given that most of the people who really wanted this game are people who grew up on Pokemon and are now adults, not at least providing the option to have social interaction feels a bit wrong. It could be abused, sure, but I think throwing the necessary resources at keeping it from being abused, and punishing abusers would be worth keeping the game relevant to its current primary consumer.

I believe the point is that if the target audience includes kids, you get stuck with the restrictions that implies, whether or not they are the majority. Some of this is directly legally mandated, some of it is indirectly legally mandated by fear of lawsuit, and some of it is mandated by avoiding bad PR about any bad thing maybe possibly happening to some kid somewhere because of your app. By that, I don't mean to minimize concerns about the real possibility of things that could be bad, but to highlight the fact that the PR disaster doesn't even need a real bad thing to happen, just a semi-credible accusation made to the right media for any reason.

None of those three concerns can be fixed by any amount of "resource investment" that will satisfy anyone. It would just get them accused of censorship anyhow.

Nintendo has always been very reluctant to include social features within games beyond a very difficult to use friend list, hell, they removed SwapNote from the 3DS because it young players were getting inappropriate notes sent to them. Frankly, I'm surprised they haven't binned Miiverse some days, but they do an excellent job at moderating it.

I wouldn't expect Ingress-style open comms, but it would be nice to at least be able to message other players on a friend list.

It's what Nintendo does. They very much view their products as kids toys.

AR done right inherently involves person-identifying interactions. All week almost everyone I know has made brand new real life friends while on their poké-travels. That's the draw here.

Apparently these already have the potential to be "honeypots" without seeing nearby players

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/07/10/four-suspects-...

Um. I played Ingress up to level 7, at which point I gave up. The geolocation features were excellent and I enjoyed exploring my city and finding interesting landmarks that I hadn't seen before --- but I found the actual game was extremely lackluster.

The problem as I saw it was that the game (as of a few years ago) rewarded taking territory, but not keeping it. So capturing a portal scores you points. But once you've captured it, there's no point keeping it any more. In fact, you want it to be recaptured as quickly as possible so that you can retake it and score more points. I found that I'd hardly ever use the higher-end defensive items because there wasn't any point --- defending portals wasn't worth anything.

This encouraged the behaviour where you'd capture a portal, and outfit it with the cheapest possible resonators. This made it trivial for the other time to capture it, and they'd do the same thing. And then you would recapture it. Repeat ad nauseam. This wasn't fun.

I don't know what the gameplay's like for Go; hopefully they didn't make the same mistake this time.

Edit: I've just discovered that Ingress also has the field formation mechanic, which is an end-game thing and grants team points. So you want to hold portals there to maintain big fields. So there is something --- I just never got involved in it (probably because it involved talking to other Ingress players)...

> I don't know what the gameplay's like for Go; hopefully they didn't make the same mistake this time.

The "capture" gameplay is only in gyms, every day you can collect a bonus/rent of 10 coins and 500 dust for each gym where you have a pokemon. Increasing the level of a gym increases its defensive power (so less chance for an other team to capture it) and the number of pokemon which can be stored in it (spreading the wealth amongst the team)

> The problem as I saw it was that the game (as of a few years ago) rewarded taking territory, but not keeping it

I suspect that was intentional design. Niantic was born out of the Google Maps division, and IIRC, the whole point of Ingress (at least initially) was to crowd-source generation and verification of geo data for GMaps. You could think of it as Waze for pedestrians/bikes. So gameplay that encourages constant conflict == constant data stream.

Walking around my neighborhood last night on two occasions at different times of the day, I encountered a dozen or more players both times: people of all ages out in the park or walking their dog. I live in an urban area half a block from a park with four Pokéstops in close proximity, but meeting/interacting with other players is not going to be a problem.

My small town has about 150 pokestops and only 10-20 players so we are spread pretty thin. The chances to meet someone are pretty slim.

I'm kind of on the fence here. I played Ingress quite a bit (and early), but what I disliked was that it seemed multiplayer only. There was very little (for me) return for being a solo player and most Ingress communication at that time happened in G+ (aka I wasn't part of that).

Pokemon Go is in some ways a limited Ingress, but the collecting/evolving/upgrading part of the game is what got to me.

I'd be glad about social features in the game. But I already think that this is a better game than Ingress for me personally.

If I am on my own then Pomemon Go is currently much more exciting than Ingress. But I miss i) you can not annoy opponents by blowing up their farms/homeportals, ii) make long bike tours in order to build large fields and iii) meeting with 8+ players and building a nice L8 farm, iv) being involved in continent-wide fielding operations with 100s of other players.

tldr: Pokemon Go is the better single player game, but if you are into large-scale and coordinated multi player games then Ingress is better.

The ingame player activity feature in Ingress turned out to have some really nasty privacy implications. I doubt they'd want to repeat it.

I think that's a very short-sighted judgement to say that the game is nearing anywhere close to the level of games like Wow and CoD, and sadly -- it will never get there.

There isn't very much flexibility that the game offers, and even it if will offer it in the future, the initial moon phase will be over by then.

It's a nice example of launching a product and getting people to use it, but within a few weeks Pokemon Go will be history, unless of course, people find more dead bodies or other surreal stuff while playing the game, though I wonder if that's the reputation that the developers are going for.

> the initial moon phase will be over by then

FYI: The statement should be the honeymoon phase, derived from the nothing-but-bliss albeit short-lived marital phase, rather than the lunar one.

Yeah, I feel like they set themselves up for a tough situation in a few weeks. Ingress was in beta and invite-only state for ages, which allowed the map to be built up and people to slowly join over time. People who joined later were still excited about low-level peers starting with them.

P-GO is likely to reach its peak in a few days... If some exciting content updates don't follow they may have a problem keeping people around. They'll definitely retain many fans (people still play the original handheld versions), but it will be interesting to see what happens in the future. Also, from own experience - it was easy to play Ingress and go on long walks initially. But after a while, you really want to spend time doing other things; past some point a 1h trip to do something specific for virtual points loses the appeal.

Pokemon Go reminds me of nothing so much as the Macarena in 1995. It's a fad that will run its course. But a game getting that level of cultural penetration will be a real watershed.

I speculate that Tetris (possibly even just the 1989 GameBoy version) was bigger than the Macarena.

Tetris wasn't that big before the Gameboy version. It was "big" in the tiny new computer/tech world, but it was gameboy which brought it into the mainstream.

The difference is that smartphones have a lot higher penetration than Gameboys did.

Yes, but that difference is mitigated by the fact that tetris was the first mobile videogame that was popular or even socially acceptable for the post-college crowd to play.

Now, the adult mobile gaming market is saturated.

It's going to easily pass WoW and CoD...if they get it working better fast enough. Actually, scratch that. At this point all they need to do is show an intense commitment to daily improvements. They don't need to solve everything immediately, they just need to convince people that they're making it better as fast as they can.

Pokemon Go has all the right elements at exactly the right time. It's going to be tremendous if they can keep up.

I think that highly depends on what they do. In its current form, you're probably right. If they add the right features, I think it could be big. What are those features? I'd speculate that the big one is letting people battle each other with the pokemon they've collected. Also, let them trade pokemon with one another and get them building teams. Give people a reason to interact with one another using the app, and they'll start talking to each other in these strange places they keep congregating.

> I'd speculate that the big one is letting people battle each other with the pokemon they've collected.

I haven't played Pokemon Go, but if you can't do this, what exactly are people doing in the game? Just collecting Pokemon and doing nothing with them? Honest question -- I had implicitly assumed being able to battle with collected Pokemon was the whole point.

Right now everyone's collecting and fighting in "gyms" with the assumption that fighting each other comes later.

I think Pokemon has more to do with success of it than the AR stuff. I see most people playing without AR on. Pokemon appeals to the nostalgia factor. A lot of us grew with these games when we were kids. Now most of us older, but we still grew with them. It also hits the kids demo as well. Pokemon is/was a good game. Its like why marvel and transformers and all these 80s/90s cartoons are doing so well.

> I think Pokemon has more to do with success of it than the AR stuff. I see most people playing without AR on. Pokemon appeals to the nostalgia factor.

I think it's both. The game isn't great on it's own, and I bet the AR will feel tiring after a while like it did with Ingress. But this is amazingly close to the real-world idea of Pokemon so many of us have wanted since childhood.

Last night I went for a walk in the middle of the night to a nearby park. I encountered a few other "pokemon trainers" on the way (it's really obvious when someone is playing), and at the park were at least 30-40 other people, spread out in small groups, some hanging out in spots, some wandering around the grass tracking a Pokemon...

Seeing Pokemon in the real world is neat and all, but meeting lots of other "Pokemon Trainers"?! Wow, that really made me feel like a little kid again. I hope the population stays active until they add battling. It seems like it would be incredibly dull playing this game by yourself without running into others.

It just feels like such an enormous misstep to me, I can't even fathom it.

Why not wait until the game was much more polished and had many more traditional Pokemon features before release?

Nobody will be playing this in a month unless Niantic are really really fast with the content updates. Like, one per week fast, until it's much more deep than it currently is.

> Why not wait until the game was much more polished and had many more traditional Pokemon features before release?

The game has all the G1 pokemon. I've had friends ask if it had "that modern garbage" before considering installing it, so having just G1 sounds like an excellent pick, it doesn't hinder younger people and recaptures the RGBY generation which didn't keep up with the series.

There's plenty of things to add and improve (including but not limited to the servers) and the rest of the international rollout to complete before there's any reason to expand to Gold and Silver.

The problem isn't a lack of Pokemon, it's a severe lack of polish. For example:

- Obviously the servers are slow, but the app freezes and crashes all the time too.

- The help text is unhelpful and leaves the user with a ton of questions as to what the buttons actually do.

- Little to no support for people in rural areas, as the Pokemon follow the XM patterns from Ingress.

- Buggy Pokemon catching (e.g. you have to throw super far to catch Zubat)

- No way to add friends, and very little community interaction (with the exception of gyms and lure modules).

- Can't rename character, change clothing, etc.

- The map on the Pokemon screen loads slower than everything else, so when you go to tap "Transfer" and the map loads it changes the layout and makes you click the app.

It feels more like a buggy beta of Farmville with geocaching than it does a Pokemon game. Pokemon Go is to the classic Pokemon games as Elder Scrolls Online is to the classic Elder Scrolls games -- tons of potential, but severely lacking in execution.

> - No way to add friends, and very little community interaction (with the exception of gyms and lure modules).

For what it's worth, here in New York City, the community interaction takes place IRL. There are literally hordes of people roaming the parks. Some people set out lures, and then sit on benches, striking up conversations with other players who walk over to try and catch some Pokemon.

I can't imagine how this game would work in rural areas, though.

Right. I feel like the game would have been so much better if it released with trainer battles (without a gym) and trading.

Google doesn't own Niantic anymore.

Ouch.

Google invested alongside Nintendo. It's highly likely they still own a significant portion of Niantic even if it's not an internal startup anymore.

Does it ask you to login all the time too? My session gets expired very quickly.

From what I understand, it'll ask a new login if the servers crash between usage sessions of the app. I've not had to log in today, for example, but yesterday I had to two or so times. The login bug is relatively low-priority to me - all it does is force me to switch to the 2FA app and then untick the music in settings. Compared to other bugs, that's trivial.

I'm still occasionally seeing bugs with gyms - for example, instantly kicking me back to the gym screen as soon as I try to battle - but that's fixable by going and battling another gym. I've yet to see a way to solve the other big gym bug wherein enemies stay at 1hp but never die or do anything until the timer runs out.

Otherwise, the standard client/server sync bugs (pokeballs sitting on screen doing nothing if you lose server connectivity during capturing it) and client-side bugs (battery saver mode cuasing the game to become completely unresponsive to touch sometimes when you bring it back by turning your phone upright again) are the main gripes.

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