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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I gotta give props to the players for their clever hacks.

But also this brings up a good point -- the game is inherently unfair to people who don't have the means to travel. Someone in the middle of the country can't legitimately travel to a beach area. And there are some Pokemon that are restricted to a particular continent.

Which means you either have to be rich or have a rich friend who can go to those places and then be willing to trade/give you pokemon. Or be extroverted enough to make online friends in those other places who will trade with you.

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Should the game be inherently fair? Part of the fun is rewarding exploration over time as a life-long pokemon trainer trying to catch them all. You gotta go to all the regions to accomplish that. Maybe it'll take a long time!

> Should the game be inherently fair?

No, but the fairness should be based on skills and engagement, not the size of your wallet.

Why should it be that way?

Because success in life is mostly based on the size of your wallet, and games are supposed to be an escape from life. It sucks when that albatross follows you into your fantasy life.

There are plenty of other games, I don't see why there couldn't be one about traveling in the real world.

Would you frown upon Geocaching as well?

I suppose it is subjective, but it seems to be a pretty much near-universal sentiment among gamers I know that "pay to win" sucks.

A better question is why should it be pay to win?

arguing that "you should be able to get the whole experience regardless of your location" is basically arguing against the entire category of location-based entertainment products. The experience is related to your location. That is literally the product.

Obvious straw man. No one is arguing that location based games shouldn't factor in location. The claim was that success in the game shouldn't be dependent on the size of your wallet. You can have location based games that don't require you to travel internationally or even across regions in one's own country, for example.

I've never played Pokemon Go, but I played a lot of the JRPG titles from nearly 30 years ago.

What determines success in Go? Is it battles, or is it literally just collecting Pokemon?

It doesn't really have a fixed objective. It's mostly played for fun.

The idea of Pokemon was started by Satoshi Tajiri who used to like discovering and catching insects and other small creatures locally. From that developed finding Pokemon and having them fight was added to make more of a game out of it. It's now the world's highest grossing media franchise with $88bn revenue according to Wikipedia, way ahead of that Marvel and Harry Potter nonsense. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media...)

It's a bit up to players if they want to casually collect, or fight or compete or whatever. In Pokemon Go at any rate.

> skills and engagement

Which, for a lot of cases (not universally, of course), is a function of your wallet's size anyway. Depending on your income and/or net worth, you can afford to spend a lot of your time on those, or not so much.

I thought the whole point of geolocation games was that they are traveling games. Games for people who travel a lot. That doesn’t mean you should like them but that IS the mechanic, going around to see places. Wallet use is a part of traveling and that will continue to be true with or without pokemon go.

> I thought the whole point of geolocation games was that they are traveling games. Games for people who travel a lot.

Niantic talk about physical activity and community. Their business model is in app purchases and local advertising. Mechanics encourage controlling local territory.

Pokemon was never like this though. It was always unfair, because you always had to buy two different games (red+blue, gold+silver, etc) to win either of them.

It depends on how the game is setup. If it's "almost possible" to get them all, then it kind of feels like you have to get them all, even if that involves some serious work. This can be compounded if certain "best of breed" types can only be obtained in certain areas, or at certain times.

However, if it's setup so that it's basically impossible to get them all, but you can get many or any, then it doesn't feel as bad, especially if trading is an actual option that works. If the special and/or limited ones are more cosmetic, it becomes less of a chore and more of a "look what I have".

It feels like you have to get them all? why?

It's hard to explain, but if a game has some set of things, and you get 90% of the way there, it can feel quite like you should/need to get them all.

But if you know for a fact that there's some you can never get (had to be on the moon in 2005 to get it), then the pressure is off.

One of the key draws for many Pokémon players is right in the old slogan - "Gotta catch 'em all!"

Part of the desire is the collectability. To be able to get a rare, prized Pokémon. In the original games, part of this was centered around there being two editions of a game, with some of them only in the other, with the desire to make trading a social activity. That said, it certainly didn't stop people from buying two Gameboys, two copies of Pokemon, and collecting them all on their own.

Some folks just have a compulsion to have everything.

It’s a personal decision. There are so many Pokémon that hacking is a long and tedious process. You might as well download saves but them you’re not playing the game. I think it’s fun catching real Pokémon fairly but don’t mind if people hack.

> Should the game be inherently fair? ... Maybe it'll take a long time!

I don't think "maybe it'll take a long time!" is an apt response to "the game is unfair". The parent isn't objecting that it's unfair because it might take a long time, they're objecting that it's unfair because many people can't afford to travel the world. Maybe a better response would be:

> Should the game be inherently fair? ... Maybe it should take tens of thousands of dollars!

While I don't find that compelling, it at least seems more logical IMHO.

I know a guy who plays Ingress, the Pokemon Go precursor where different teams claim locatios. There's one valuable location on an island fort (Pampus) that's closed in winter, so every autumn there was always a flurry of players trying to be the last to claim it before the winter.

But this guy has a pilot license, so he just flies a sports plane over the island to claim it just after it closed.

There's travel privilege, and then there's renting an actual plane for a game.

Knowing pilots, it may just be an excuse to fly.

Can confirm. I'm a pilot, and used to play Ingress pretty heavily, and while it's not the most reliable thing on the planet, a few of us had worked out "Planegress" pretty well. You have to be careful to not trip the "travel rate" limiters, so basically "pop online over the target area, and don't interact except over the target portal." Pilot plays around with slow flight (depending on winds aloft, in the range of 30-40mph ground speed), passengers do what needs to be done. I never messed with it, but some people used HAM radio equipment for remote connectivity for Ingress as well, or satellite based stuff.

But it's absolutely "an excuse to go do some precision ground reference slow flight in areas you wouldn't normally be."

Hasn't that always been the way with Pokemon though? With the original Pokemon Red and Blue in North American release on Gameboy, you couldn't get all the Pokemon independently. You needed someone the opposite color cartridge to trade with. Same problem except then you needed to be face to face friends with someone and at least one of you needed to own the link cable.

Is it "unfair" or is this just the nature of a geofenced game? I think it's part of the fun.

Is it unfair that if you live in Arizona you're not getting to enjoy polar bears in the wild or even in the zoo?

And before globalism part of the romance of travel was things being exotic/rare and therefore harder to obtain.

If the game had other means to trade or obtain Pokémon outside of wild catches then it still offers players a chance.

I don't think it's unfair in any way, as the regional Pokémon are mostly irrelevant for anything but the Pokédex (your collection tracker). They're just as easy to ignore as any unreleased Pokémon.

And if you really want to "catch them all", regional Pokémon have been repeatedly featured in various global events since the game launch back in 2016.

Players use fake GPS apps to pretend they are in a location to catch rare pokemon.

I saw my brother's phone "travel" from London to Seoul in South Korea in front of my eyes and catch some rare pokemon there.

Pokemon Go bans them when detected, but not all get caught.

They don't even bother simulating a proper travel. They just teleport which I find hilarious.

The point of a game, which maps the real world to a fictional world, is exactly that. A game like that can't be fair and it shouldn't be, part of the fun is that it isn't.

After all it is just a game, it's not an injustice for a game to not be fair.

This is one of the underappreciated downsides to living in the middle of the country, imo, but ironically if you're doing that, a person is maybe more likely to be shooting for a bungalow at some point than someone in any reasonably populated area, whereas people in those areas have seen a home go so far out of reach that travel is relatively inexpensive if you just give up on other traditional outlays for cash

A 2 week solo trip to EU can be like ~$2k, and if that's among the most expensive aspirations you have, that could be feasible and you'll get a hell of a lot more out of it than Pokemon.

That doesn't seem unfair on the face of it?

Not every game is for every person and that's ok.

If you are so introverted that you're not willing to join a discord to get the Pokemon you really want then maybe that's something you need to work on. There are discords that are pretty transactional for this that don't involve a whole lot of socialization.

I know people who meet up on discord groups and mail their phones to each other to catch rares and the like.

That's wild. Also, I don't think this solves the "I can win cause I'm rich" problem. I don't think many people can reasonably be expected to want to willingly mail their phone to another person.

Especially, considering that likely means you need to have two phone plans plus two phones. It's pretty hard to say to your friends, family, or boss, "sorry, I can't take calls right now, my phone is in Vermont so my buddy can catch me a Gengar."

I think a lot of people have an old phone lying around somewhere. And it's a game/ leizure activity it's still pretty accessible, it you want to do absolutely everything yeah you gonna had to spend some time or money. I don't think there's a problem with that, it's still enjoyable without going that hard.

You can't just give your username/password to someone else? The pokemen are tied to your actual device?

> Someone in the middle of the country can't legitimately travel to a beach area.

Lakes and sometimes rivers have beaches.

In the original games you had to go out to catch Pokémon.

The world is big…

There’s a whole life outside.

Cant this be easily circumvented with a GPS spoofer app?

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