Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

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> In Pokemon Go i haven't found them worth it yet, but that may come later.

It's not a requirement but I highly recommend to people to buy some "Lucky Eggs (2X XP for 30 minutes) and extra "Incense" (attract more Pokemon for 30 minutes) and use them together in the early game.

The reason why is that you get 2X the experience for discovering a new Pokemon which you will do a lot of early on. By doubling that further you save a ton of time in getting to a reasonably high level and collecting a lot of Pokemon quickly.

I'd also buy some "Egg Incubators". You get 1 for free and it has infinite uses. The ones you can buy get 3 uses before they "break". My advice is to use the infinite one on all eggs that will hatch after 2km of walking and use the breakable ones on 5km and 10km eggs. You get more use out of them this way. And eggs can hatch new Pokemon which benefit from the bonus described above.

For a few dollars you'll save many, many hours which to me at least makes the game more enjoyable.

also, save up a bunch of Pokemon ready to evolve (such as the ever plentiful Pidgey) and do them all at once with a Lucky Egg. 500 xp per evolution turns to 1000, making leveling pretty fast. The last few days I've been saving all of my stuff until the end of the day to evolve and easily pick up 12k+ xp

it's tempting to evolve everything as soon as you can, but waiting to do batch evolutions with double xp is much more effective

Good idea. I haven't evolved many of my Pokemon's yet. Just saving the dust and candy for when I want to evolve higher level captures I'll get later. Of course, at some point you need to figure out when it makes sense to just start evolving!

But, I'll certainly use this idea when that time comes!

Why bother playing the game at all if you're paying to skip it?

You're not. You're paying to play it more efficiently. I could spend 30 minutes collecting 8 Pokemon (lets say that gives you 3000XP) or I could use that same 30 minutes to collect 16 of them and double my XP on top of that (giving you 12,000XP). This lets me play the game faster. You aren't buying anything other than the ability to do more with less time.

The delays in these games are designed to make you pay to skip them. If it wasn't a free-to-play game, the delays wouldn't have been there in the first place. They're just there to make the game worse.

Exactly. So play games that don't use these abusive tactics, instead of rewarding them...

You don't have to buy anything and the experience is just fine. There is nor requirement to buy anything - the game leaves plenty to do. It's just the option is there if you want to go faster.

Also, it's a free game. If they charged $60, then I'd get your point. But the game is based on a "Freemium" model like tons of other software.

> You don't have to buy anything and the experience is just fine.

As implied by the earlier commenters, that's obviously not the case.

> It's just the option is there if you want to go faster.

It's only an "option" because they crippled the game in the first place.

> Also, it's a free game. If they charged $60, then I'd get your point. But the game is based on a "Freemium" model like tons of other software.

And thus, freemium is inherently abusive. But even then, there are more acceptable ways to do it.

For example, look at how Smite does this: free to download, you can pick between grinding/microtransactions to unlock each character individually, or pay $30 to unlock everything in one go and effectively go back to what the game should have been from the start. Cosmetics are still paywalled, but at least there are no more microtransactions that have any effect on gameplay.

I'm not against paying for games. I'm against constantly being hounded to pay for the same thing over and over again.

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