Pokémon Go Is Shadow Banning Cheaters
wired.com
wired.com
From an interesting interview with a Niantec Exec on the linked sub, stating they're adding PvP aswell: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/6e3qt2/legend...
I've heard that the developers are continuously adding things, but it looks like the game has become a lot more harder to play without spending money on it.[1]
Of course there was a spike at first release, like every other game. Less press after a year is hardly indicative of the game being only hype. If you can name a game that didn't get less press a year after release I'd love to hear it.
> but it looks like the game has become a lot more harder to play without spending money on it
I'd love to hear why you think this is true other than someone mentioning it with no explanation in the top comment of that link. The only thing I can think of is a slight hit to pokeball drop rates which - while annoying - only affects those in rural areas who don't have access to many pokestops. This game (like Ingress) has always been geared toward urban areas and ignored rural players. This was an issue day 1 and it hasn't changed unfortunately, but this is not a recent development.
Honestly, the game is pretty hollow and is hardly something I'd recommend everyone pick up, but to say that it was only hype and things aren't looking good now is uninformed.
Major nitpick, i know, but you said game not app so i guess Minecraft[1] got pretty much a stable news coverage throughout the years
I didn't say the game flopped. It didn't, but the excitement the parent comment to mine talked about was just because of hype, and it is not holding up. That's was my observation.
If you look at the current numbers, I bet they aren't having problems with anticipating server capacity now.
Pokemon was a big parts of multiple generations, so the initial outburst of players; because of nostalgia. The retention rate is very low I would imagine.
The people who played and quit with the hype weren't the people paying money in the first place. The people who were throwing money at the game are still playing and still paying money. And they now have corporate sponsorships rolling now as well. For example, I just saw an event this past weekend that clearly paid to have lures up at all stops in the area.
I don't think that things "aren't looking so well" yet. It doesn't have the peak playerbase anymore, but its certainly still making good money.
Yes, it is no where near what it was at launch, but that is because the launch stats were astronomical.
I agree it is a huge success, but it could have been much more.
But if they are still gaining new users, perhaps that doesn't matter. Be interesting to know what that gain/loss math looks like.
The adult contingent has dropped off a lot but I bet once they add PvP it'll pick up.
It's still a cute game, but there is little depth atm.
At this point I honestly lost hope that they'll ever add it.
After all, for such games, if you're not going to spend money, then you're not a customer - the only reason for allowing you to play is to use you to advertise the game to potential customers; making it harder to play freely might be the only way to turn you from an user to a customer.
I still don't get why people talk about Pokémon Go and AR. As if one had anything to do with the other.
Pokémon Go has zero actual AR; it's just overlaying a 3D animation on top of a camera feed, with no relation to reality other than readings from a shitty smartphone gyroscope. When playing, I would actually disable that feature anyway, because it made catching Pokémon harder (performance issues + no "AR" means no gyroscope input, which makes the game no longer care about you maintaining constant orientation).
The AR we've been promised for decades now was about overlaying computer data that's related to what you're looking at in the real world. At this point, even those "point camera at the printed tag, see a 3D model on your phone" have more AR in them than Pokémon Go.
Also, last time I checked, Pokémon spawning wasn't synchronized. There's close to zero shared world state between the player (only the static - spawn zones, Pokéstop locations, Gym location and status - and lure).
Anyway, to be clear: I'm not complaining about the game itself - just about abusing the term "AR" to describe it.
"Recently I went with my nephew to hunt Pokémon. We were walking down the street and a bunch of kids approached us. They were also hunting Pokemon. My nephew and these children got into a bit of a fight because they were trying to capture the same invisible creatures. It seemed strange to me. But these Pokémon were very real to the children.
And then it hit me: This is just like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict! You have two sides fighting over something that I cannot see. I look at the stones of buildings in Jerusalem and I just see stones. But Christians, Jews, and Muslims who look at the same stones see a holy city. It’s their imagination, but they are willing to kill for it. That’s virtual reality, too."
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/the-pos...
Isn't it also positioning the Pokémon based on the camera feed ? I was under the impression that it was detecting objects in the picture and was trying to position the Pokémon in a way that made sense, but I was never sure.
Also, again from what I remember when playing ~6 months ago, the Pokémon placement in AR mode locks orientation and distance. So walking forward is literally the same as standing still - only the background camera feed changes, but Pokémon and its animation isn't affected in any way. This again supports the theory that placement is random and totally unrelated to "real world".
Unfortunately, they went with the P2Win model that 99% of mobile games use nowadays, chock full of microtransactions and devoid of any meaningful content.
They stripped the game of all the elements that actually made Pokemon fun and all that was left was Ingress with a Pokemon skin.
Maybe some day we'll get an actually good Pokemon game for mobile. Until then, I'll cherish the memories of playing on my gameboy.
For example, battles obviously should be a direct rip off of the main games. Coding Pokemon battle seems super easy to do. And in order for it to be fun, they just have to copy the exact system.
Similarly with leveling, encounters, missions, everything was just designed around what was easy for the team to do rather than what people liked about Pokemon. It's embarrassing.
Their problem with cheaters would be mitigated much better if they focus on PvE.
I'd like to see them either revise the gym mechanics entirely or introduce "junior" gyms that would make some of the weaker Pokémon viable to use. Heck, a gym with a dynamic CP cap could work - max_CP = 1000 - (15 * gym_level) with too-big Pokémon being forced out. You could boot the strongest protectors in a gym with a flock of (weak) Pidgeys at that point as long as they raised the XP of the gym, then evolve/transfer/both all of those for individual XP.
Right now most varieties even fully evolved and with perfect IVs and movesets are simply not worth putting into gyms.
Edit: As far as the pay-to-win aspect, I'm not really seeing that. The purchasable items can all be gotten by getting into a few gyms a day to get "coins," which would go along with a social aspect of getting together with a few friends on the same team to go take down gyms. The only item that's hard to come by and I think inconveniently priced is the Egg Incubator, which without real-$ purchases is weighted towards a LOT of walking per stop.
Lure modules and incense have never seemed to make much difference to me (and lures can be done by just one person in a popular location with everyone benefiting), and while Lucky Eggs are nice they're not really that important.
Buying Pokeballs just seems silly if there's any kind of outdoor art installation area anywhere nearby, because you can wander that for a relatively short time and stock up - or just veg on a blanket in the park between 2-4 art pieces and swipe 2-4 stops every 5 minutes.
There's so much you can do if you think of it as generating a roguelike on top of the landmark, road and park data they have.
The delay point is much better. I don't think GameBoy style fight-to-capture would have been good, the technique used (basically Safari Zone, actually) was solid for that. But I think full PvP against other players would have been a huge hit - certainly it's why I never joined.
Only because the whole point of the game became grinding on simple pokemon to turn into candy to level up / evolve other Pokemon. It's a circle of crappy game mechanics requiring other crappy mechanics to work.
Sure, it would suck to need to actually fight 800 other magikarp to get a Gyarados, but that's not how any other pokemon game works. I can have my magikarp fight any other pokemon and gain xp.
I was able to do a red/blue style combat game for a homework assignment in Java. Not saying it's really easy, but it's not incredibly hard, and like you say, it's not harder than anti-cheat or many other things in the game. Also, if using a normal pokemon battle mechanic, you don't have all the issues with cheating at gym battles, and latency that the current game has.
The time it takes obviously varies based on what exactly you're battling and how strong your team is, but it's clearly something that millions of people consider fun when done thousands or hundreds of thousands of times per game.
It'd also only need to be the case for gym battles, so hey, most people wouldn't be spending tons of time on these battles anyway.
As for the coding required... I see what you mean (the amount of work they put into the mechanics in the main series is absolutely insane given all the strange possibilities for moves and strategies), but it's apparently easy enough for fan game developers to be able to copy it. If amateurs can code similar systems for fan games like Pokemon Uranium, Niantic can code it for Pokemon GO.
Pokemon battling is actually a fantastic game mechanic, and one I have fond memories of. I'd love a game where I do it against other people, but the competitive scene is way too intense to appeal - I want a simple, Clash Royale style game where I could battle against players of similar intensity. Capture mechanics, like the ones Pokemon Go actually used, could keep teams feeling novel and interesting.
But instead, we got Go. No story, no battles, just captures and microtransactions. I'm honestly baffled that it ever saw such energy - it seems like Pokemon sans Pokemon.
While it is based on a show that is inappropriate for children, the game has intentionally avoided including any content that would push it past an E rating.
It has in-app purchases, but all content is available to gratis players, given enough grinding.
The reward to effort ratio is lower.
Besides that, when you put free-to-play players in direct competition with paid players, and give the latter an enormous advantage over the former, that's when people start griping about pay-to-win.
But the Switch was a smash hit and Nintendo gets to keep their Pokemon IP platform exclusive for another decade or so at least :(
I believe HN does something similar but I ran a small forum back in the early 2000s and we could flag one or more people into groups where their posts were only visible to each other, but not to anyone else.
Since the site was invite-only, there was no anonymous access so they had no practical way of finding this out on their own.
Eventually they got bored of "being ignored" and left on their own..
For the Something Awful forums, this is called hell-banning.
Shadowbanning can be refined to deal with the situation you have identified. For instance, the abusive account's postings can be shown to an account in good standing, if their IP addresses are the same, or in the same class C, or in recent login history, those accounts did appear to some from the same machine or small network.
The system can also detect a pattern of behavior whereby some account in good standing is expressing unsual interest in accounts in poor standing, like specifically searching for their postings or looking at profiles or whatever. Or maybe some more subtle clues.
Many player have noticed this and have been updating openstreetmaps.org data in hopes that Niantic does a biome refresh and that OSM is actually where they are sourcing their data from.
Which it isn't - they use Google Maps data. Tho GM uses OSM as one of their sources (apparently) so... YMMV
I still think the game is ridiculous in how much it punishes people for simply not living in the city. Even if you had a low density of stops out in the country they could at least have decent numbers of random spawns. This is one reason I stopped playing, seeing only Pidgies and Ratatas gets old. Also, having the game get angry at you for riding a bike is dumb, bike riding is a huge part of the lore of the game!
So the people who live in places most like actual Pokemon regions and who travel around like trainers get worse Pokemon than those who stick to the same large city and never go anywhere interesting.
Seems kind of backwards if you ask me.
Programmer: "What?"
Manager: "No scroll bar..."
Programmer: "Hmm..."
Manager: "... For a website that you need to scroll."
Programmer: "Genius!"
Start at 27:45 but you should watch the entire thing.
Achieving internet points was not very high on the goals list
Honestly this is the kind of thing where I could see hyper-local chat (team or public) of the sort Yik-Yak was trying to do. "Hey Instinct within 1 mile, meet in 15 to take down the gym at the fountain?"
If you want to prove to yourself that you can level up your Ratatat to level 1,000,000 - fine, do it. But don't send that pseudorodent to your local gym to lock it down forever.
Flooding live production servers with requests to figure out the location of Pokémons isn't "white hat" either.