I realized Pokemon Go was just a "background activity" for hanging out with friends... and I'd rather focus on the people.
I'll jump back in as soon as they added trading and player vs player.
It is completely devoid of skill and rewards only having a higher level. The game isn't even pay-to-win or skill-to-win.
It's win-to-win-to-win.
If a person knows anything about the mechanics of the game they know casual players (and most adults) are simply not able to compete with lvl 25 school kids who can devote 6+ hrs a day to this game.
I'd rather play games where I can beat opponents with skill, not grinding.
The problem now is that holding gyms is impossible. I can never have more than 1 because the time it takes to drive to the nearest gym and capture it is less than the time it takes for somebody else to retake a gym.
I don't think the creators of the game envisioned that kind of dedication, though. And you're right, that is a fundamental difference between Pokemon GO (which despite the claims of its older players, is definitely targeted at teens and children) and Ingress.
That basically describes every roguelike and JRPG ever. At best they provide a tediously complicated skill tree or bizarre counter structure that gives you some trivia to explore and memorize to provide an illusion of skill, but fundamentally a massive chunk of modern gaming is "kill stuff, increment power"
If anything, WoW's big problem is that an average new player starting out is faced with 12 years worth of content they have to rush through to get to max level endgame, where the vast majority of in-game social life occurs. The innate incentives of experiencing the storyline and zones doesn't compete favorably with the huge social incentive of wanting to join your friends at endgame as quickly as possible.
In WoW, just any zone-leveled game, old content quickly becomes obsolete once it's superseded with newer content, and only delivers a fraction of its original value.
Pokemon GO doesn't have this problem (for the simple reason of tying their in-game geography to real-world geography), but also has a very shallow gameplay where the novelty will wear off quickly. If they can expand gameplay mechanics quickly before players abandon it, they may have a sustained hit.
urm, tanks can solo the 5 man dungeons, so it doesnt really matter what the rest of the group does anymore...
Maybe you meant MMORPGs and JRPGs? Because MMORPGs tend to fit to that template.
If nothing else, Niantic learned from Ingress. High level players have high level stuff, sure. But 6 v 1 ensures even the most casual player can make progress. You don't have that level bonus wall to climb that you have in other games.
I live in a city centre, and there are families walking past all day, with kids looking at phones. And plenty of kids walking alone or in groups.
If any city counts pedestrians, or would be interesting to see what difference Pokémon has caused.
Don't underestimate anybody. There are 40-olds working full-time who can devote 6+ hrs a day to games.
The only limiting factor for taking down gyms for me is the number of potions I have. I usually only fight with half dead monsters so I can use revives instead, then I use potions for the one that I put in as a defender to conserve potions.
I am also at level 23 and can take out pretty much any gym. But right when I walk out of range, someone half my level using either a full six roster or type advantage or both will boot me out. When the game came out I could maybe stay in control of a gym for a day but now it has not exceeded half an hour so I no longer try.
I think this is a nice change from ingress, where there was very little a low level player could do about a high level portal.
I wouldn't underestimate the value of a game mechanic for getting people to hang out. Many board games are basically just background activities, but there an excuse to get together.
That said, if it is a background activity, it should be a background-able app -- i.e. notify me when certain Pokemon are close but otherwise leave me alone. I find it much less exhausting to have an app that requires my attention for only 15 minutes a day.
The scary thing is, iBeacon handler don't have to do the cute "hey you're in this store, click to open the app!" sort of thing. They can run completely in the background, just reporting "hey boss, they're in the shoe section of Store #3313 now! Now they're in the produce section! Now they're gone." And, as far as I know, there's no way to turn off the tracking behaviour while keeping the helpful "activation suggestion" behaviour.
https://github.com/transistorsoft/cordova-background-geoloca...
https://github.com/transistorsoft/react-native-background-ge...
Here I am driving around Iceland with my sample app, completely in background. Tracking engages automatically when device is detected to be moving.
I have no idea what APIs they use, so I'm not sure how hard it is to get this information, but it is at least possible.
It is fairly clear that there are no such heuristics in PoGo.
The reality is, Niantic is a small company, and does not have the resources to throw at detecting/banning/dealing with the appeals.
There's something to that. I pass many players daily on my way to work, and I see them more often in groups (usually friends, sometimes couples) than alone. I've read somewhere recently that it's also turning into a way to ask someone out / handle a date, and personally I know one girl I could easily ask out by suggesting we go Pokemon hunting...
Of course gym battles are a lot more simple and fixing the many issues both combat-wise and in general take priority compared to adding such mechanics in.
It's not an issue, LTE is fast enough. For multiplayer we take into account every bullet and sync dozens of players in real time.
Level 20 is sort of the "soft max". beyond that it's very expensive to progress further. It's 210,000 total XP for level 20. 435,000 total for level 23.
Realistically, say 4 hours of catching at those lured sites buys you enough for the 60 evolutions, 60,000 xp. Let's go with 5 hours total.
Perfect conditions, i think that comes out to 35 hours. I'd say double or perhaps triple that realistically. You have to go gather loot and stuff, which still grants XP, just at a slower rate. If the OP felt like it, running the whole time with lucky eggs would cut that down quite a bit, maybe half, and cost perhaps $20. I'm guessing around 80 hours without buying anything.
A single person who's interested in it can pretty easily come up with 3 hours a day, and quite a few hours on the weekend. 30 hours seems pretty accessible. it's been out for 2 weeks or so now, so the OP is only a little on the high side. Perhaps not at all if they'd spent money on eggs.
Of course, different people have different commitments. In a rural area, this would be impossible. Family, hobbies, a long commute would drastically reduce the time available. But if your hobby is video games, it's pretty easy to swap one for another with little effort.
also i bet most of what everyone read about this game at first was paid for; people downloaded based on those initial false articles, see the bugs, uninstall, or even play like you did and gave up when you notice the pay to win scheme. but regardless, the app already made it to the download top lists and now they're even getting real news coverage everywhere.
this has nothing to do with people wanting Nintendo games on mobile. it's just a forced marketing fad like any other we always had since the 80s.