Pokemon Go Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Pokemon Go Frustrations

August 12, 2016 by Belghast

Bad Polling

A few days ago I did yet another one of my super-non-scientific polls about Pokemon Go. I got far fewer results than I had hoped but in the end got 38 total votes… and you can see the results here. Ultimately I was curious to see just how well Pokemon Go is doing among my twitter timeline a little over a month after the initial release. I knew my usage of the app had morphed a bit, and I was curious to see if everyone else had as well. The slight unfair comparison here however is that with the staggered launch, some folks like most of South America just literally got access to the application. As always I tried to create a bunch of categories that summed up what I thought of as the possible endpoints… but ultimately missed a few. The results look something like this.

Actively “Catching Them All” Every Day – 11 Votes (29%)
Only Playing When You Go Someplace New – 5 Votes (13%)
Playing Rarely if you Remember – 10 Votes (26%)
Still Installed but not Active – 6 Votes (16%)
Uninstalled: May Check Later – 2 Votes (5%)
Uninstalled: Got It Out of System – 1 Vote (3%)
Never Tried It: Not For Me – 3 Votes (8%)
Never Tried It: Still Interested – 0 Votes (0%)

Now I have no baseline here, because I should have taken a poll like this shortly after the launch, but it feels like that rarely playing number is probably higher than it would have been early on. For me personally I am in this awkward place of still playing, but not nearly with the same gusto that I once did. The attraction of Pokemon in the first place is the collection of new and interesting “mon”. So when I play the actual game I spend most of my time capturing critters either to keep in my own collection or to wonder trade them off just to see what I might get in return. The first few days of playing Pokemon Go felt like this, with me constantly finding something new and interesting around every corner. However at this point I have caught 85 of the 150 Pokemon available in Pokemon Go and of that list… Ditto, Mew, Mewtoo, Zapdos, Articuno, and Moltres are largely just myths at the moment. That means I have roughly 60% of the 144 that are reasonably available right now. Even then you have to discount the fact that Mr Mime, Khangaskhan and Farfetch’d are not available to me in the United States, which drops the total of available Pokemon down to 141. Then you factor in the fact that I am in a Grass Type dominated area and pretty much every Rock and Fire type Pokemon is rare as shit here… and can pretty much only be summoned with a Lure or Incense my total reasonable list of available Pokemon shrinks further.

I Choose You Venonat #257!

What this means in practice is that I end up going weeks without seeing anything new. Since finding new things is my core reward cycle in Pokemon, it really drags down my desire to keep playing. There also seems to be a huge gulf that you fall off into after level 20. I am just shy of dinging 21, but it has taken roughly a month of casual capturing to get me through the level. I wish the app kept general stats of how many of each Pokemon you have caught because I am absolutely certain that if you added up the number of Pidgey and Zubat caught… they would together be around one thousand… with Zubat making up the lions share of those. That is the core problem I am having is that I would say at least 60% of the Pokemon that I see on a daily basis… I cannot really muster the care to even try and catch. This means I still get vaguely excited when I see my hundredth Venonat or Doduo because they aren’t yet another Rattata. Even then I have caught enough of each to evolve four into Venomoth and three into Dodrio. The other big challenge that I am having is the extreme heat going on right now, which severely limits the amount of time I am willing to go out hunting for critters. The heat index the last few weeks has been hovering in the 110s, and that really is not conducive to going out and catching them all. So instead I am mostly limited to checking my phone quickly when I pull into a parking lot, or on my way walking into work.

There is also still the problem that a lot of the world is a complete and total wasteland with nothing interesting in it. We talked about this a bit on the podcast, but the game only seems to reward you for going to places literally everyone else is going. So that means once a hot spot is found, then that becomes the prime real estate that EVERYONE goes to… which only cause the problem to snowball. There is an open air mall here, and a handful of parks… that are sheer madness over lunch with people hanging out in the cars idling with the AC on near the pokestops that have lures running on them. The game favors high cellular activity so much, that most of the rest of my area is completely devoid of anything of interest apart from random basepop trashmon. The other main issue with this is that the game fails to capture the exploration aspect of the original source material. In Pokemon I knew that going out into new areas, meant that I would be getting a new mix of the available critters. So simply going over a zone, meant that while I might have 40% of the Pokemon be something I recognize, there would be 60% that were new and interesting. That simply does not relate to the real world version with Go, because no matter any amount of reasonable movement around my area provides me a significantly different assortment of “mon”. I can and have traveled an hour in roughly every direction from my home base… and still see exactly the same mix. This tells me that their “regions” are just too large and generic, and there are not that many valuable sub region feature sets identified. Oklahoma is a grassy wasteland to Niantic, so for the most part we get exactly the same assortment regardless if we are hanging out at a lake, or in the rocky canyon maze of Chandler Park.

High Pop Zones

I feel like at some level they decided that the games works well in San Francisco and New York… so it must work great everywhere else. The problem there is the bulk of this country has nothing in common with San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, etc. Most of the country is not a high population center, but instead a tapestry of smaller cities and wide swaths of countryside. In those places the experience is miserable. I have it far better than so many of my friends, but still it is maddening to roam around and see three things on the new “sightings” radar, and none of them are actually interesting. There are so many reports that Pokemon Go usage is declining… and I can absolutely see it. The game is extremely fun for the first few weeks, but once the new wears off… if you are not one of those players motivated to go out and capture gyms… then there really is a constantly shrinking pool of interesting game play. Right now as it stands they need to seriously adjust the reward systems in this game, and tweak it so that if you happen to go someplace that literally no one has ever gone before… you should be rewarded with something awesome at the end of that journey. The game itself is about getting out, exploring and more than anything moving. Right now I feel like it does an extremely poor job of incentivizing me to leave my house, because if in my walk I only encounter two Pokemon it feels like a waste of my time when I could simply be chilling out and playing some other game. They need to find a way to reward players for going to big social hubs, but also find ways to make it rewarding for players to get off the beaten path. As always I am curious to hear your own thoughts. I didn’t include any screenshots because I always hate trying to integrate in cellular format vertical screenshots into a blog that tends to favor landscape mode.

Peak Pokemon

July 28, 2016 by Belghast

Nothing but Zubats

AWildZubat

There are several news outlets reporting that Pokemon Go has reached its peak and is now starting to trend downwards. This is zero surprising to me, simply because it would be hard for any game to reach this level of viral saturation… and then somehow manage to sustain it. There are a lot of factors at play here, not the least of which is our apparent short attention span when it comes to internet fueled phenomena. That said I personally am still playing it quite regularly, but with a lot less of the reckless abandon. On my drive into work every morning there are still a couple of parking lots I pop by and check that have given me good finds in the past. However I am largely not doing the evening walking thing, because we have had a streak of 100 degree days with some silly humidity going on. Whenever I stop anywhere however I still habitually whip out the phone to check if there is anything interesting around. I’ve made several trips to local hot spots in a constant search of something new. The game however has a lot of problems standing in front of it, and I believe that they more than anything are what is standing in the way of player retention. The truth be told, I feel like we are at a point of being rolled out to every market that really makes a difference, and that was probably never the intention… or at least not this soon. However the social pressure of players wanting to play desperately, and being willing to find other ways to do so… meant that if they did not push to other territories that they were ultimately losing their shot at that income stream.

The biggest problem with this game is that the experience is not equitable. I count myself lucky that I work in a town of 500,000 and live in a metro area of roughly 1 million. That said other than a dozen “hot spots”, Tulsa seems to be a wasteland of Pidgey, Rattata, Weedle and oh so many Zubats. When you get out to the suburbs where I live, even those seem to be few and far between that when I go on a walk I am catching them more out of a sense of boredom than any desire to actually waste the pokeballs on them. Similarly I get excited when I see the next tier of “mostly trash” Pokemon in the form of the Doduo, Caterprie, Venonat, and Spearow because it breaks up the monotony of an ocean of Pidgey candy. I said that I count myself lucky, because as miserable as it is to go a week without seeing anything interesting… I am still sitting just shy of level 20 with 76 Pokemon caught and 77 seen. Thusfar “the one that got away” was a Dratini that I lost due to the once super common “pokeball lock up”, where the screen would freeze on catch and you had either caught the Pokemon or not, but had no real second chance because you would have to restart the app to get control again. The folks that are in really dire straights are those who are unlucky enough to live in rural areas. I know when I have traveled to various small towns here in Oklahoma I have seen nothing but the regular assortment of random trash Pokemon, even surrounding Pokestops.

Servers On Fire

Another huge problem up until this point is that the servers have been anything but reliable. Another way that I am extremely lucky is that I have a wife who is super understanding about my desire to go hunting invisible creatures. She has suggested multiple times that we take road trips to check out other areas and see if maybe I can get far enough out of our zone to find something new and interesting. The problem there is that until this week you never really could rely on the servers actually being up at any given moment. It is impossible to tell the difference between what is just the servers on fire from usage, and what is Niantic actually performing maintenance. The reason being that the company behind this game seems to think the best policy is zero communication with their customers about basic up time information. So the one time a few weeks back when we actually decided to take a road trip, the servers looked fine when we left our house. Then by the time we actually reached our destination I could not catch anything without getting a string of constant application lockups due to the servers not responding. I went to a park that I thought would be loaded with Pokemon, and ultimately it was… however after trying to catch four things and getting four pokeball lockups, I gave up and headed home frustrated.

Now when I say that the experience is not equitable, I think it is worth mentioning the experience that the faction of AggroChat is having up in Seattle. They seem to have a cavalcade of hot and cold running Pokemon all of the time. Tam apparently lives across from some park that is an absolute hot bed of activity in the evening, and while we have those here they are nowhere near my house, and would be horribly awkward to drive to at 9/10 pm at night. Here in Tulsa there is a reddit that keeps tabs on what folks have seen and caught… and I know in Seattle they seem to be regularly catching things that we have never seen. So ultimately I feel like they need to tweak the base population to be a little more fair, and a lot less based on cellular activity which was the case with Ingress. I am sure this game is a phenomenal experience in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and Chicago… but significantly less for those of us stuck in smaller population centers. So if we have reached “Peak Pokemon”, I feel like a good chunk of it comes from the frustration of wanting to play… and when you finally can keep connected to the servers, the only thing you see are the same critters you see everywhere. My kingdom for a Vulpix or I would quite literally wet myself if I probably saw a Pikachu or a Charmander.

Still Playing

All of this said… I am still very much interested in this game. The part of Pokemon that I enjoy the most is roaming around and catching new things, and for the most part this app lets me do ONLY that. However at some point I am going to get bored with the assortment of common and slightly less common Pokemon that I can regularly find here. I caught a Machoke on Monday, and that had been the first new wild Pokemon I had seen in over two weeks. Most of the new finds I am getting, are through sheer brute force evolution of less common critters. For example I got an Arbok yesterday, by finally getting enough candy to evolve and Ekans. While in part I am happy to tick off another checkbox in the Pokedex… I would have far rather seen an Arbok in the wild, or a Seaking, or a Gloom… or the countless other evolutions I have finally gotten enough candy to do. I am admittedly jealous of the folks who live in active enough areas to see that sort of stuff in the wild, without actually resorting to making Pokemon Go into a lifestyle. Sure there are folks that have been hanging out at the handful of hot spots every single night here in Tulsa, and I am certain they have seen some pretty awesome stuff. However what I am looking for is a game that I can play in the times between going and doing other things, and for the most part this game fits that bill awesomely. I am just hoping that at some point they give me something more interesting to see than another Rattata. Right now my app is telling me that I have caught 660 Pokemon, and quite literally I figure at least 300 of those have been Zubats. Largely I am just hoping at some point the game changes in a way that makes me still have hope that I will find something interesting in the wild. That is a huge part of what has nerfed my nightly walks is knowing that a trip around the neighborhood is maybe going to get me a couple Pidgeys, a Rattata and if I am super lucky an Eevee. I am curious what your own experiences have been? Are you having much luck “catching them all”?

Real Life “Mons”

July 15, 2016 by Belghast

Garden Guardian

Yesterday was an interesting day for a bunch of reasons… not the least of which was the massive gale force storm that blew through downtown Tulsa. Over lunch yesterday I decided to go for a walk in Woodward Park in a vague attempt to catch some new Pokemon. Unfortunately the entire time I was there it seemed as though the servers were acting up horribly. The park is littered with a dozen or so stops, and most of them were not loading for me when I attempted to spin them. So I roamed around a bit in the 94 degree heat and humidity and finally wound my way around to the Linneaus garden where I met the adorable cat above. I am guessing it belongs to someone in the neighborhood behind the park because it is very much obviously a pet… and obviously one that has been tagged to roam freely. This is also where I encountered what I believe were my first geohackers. Pokemon Go has had a few unofficial releases as folks have modded it like the somewhat humorously named Pokemon Go Anywhere that lets you click to move. This is obviously a one way trip to ban city because it will be relatively trivial for Niantic to determine these folks are running an unofficial release of the game.

However there is a whole other batch of folks that have installed fake gps tools on their rooted android phones, that allow them to essentially teleport to anywhere in the world. This is the sort of behavior I think I was experiencing yesterday at lunch. The Linnaeus Garden is a Poke Gym and is out of range of any of the nearby parking lots and streets. As a result the only real way to go over there and check on it is to get out of your car and walk up to the path leading into it. While I was there it was just me and this cat, and no one else within range of the Pokestop. When I rolled up on it the stop was Blue so I opted to plop down in a bench and do some battling to increase its prestige levels. The adorable cat came up and was friendly and I managed to add a few hundred prestige points before I got bored and wandered off. As I was walking out of the garden area, the gym flipped from Blue level 3 to Red level 3 instantly… still zero people around. So either someone was registering legitimately wrong on the GPS, or someone was actually geohacking to take over the gym. This makes me wonder just how many gyms are being flipped by folks cheating like this?

After this incident I made my way to the car and was just about to leave the park, when I gave the app one last check. While I had really found nothing of interest the entire time in the park, suddenly there was a Bulbasaur within a single footprint away from my vehicle. So I hopped back out of the car, locked it and began the search. There are lots of supposed methods to make tracking down a Pokemon easier, but I largely just wander around aimlessly until I find it. Within a few minutes of going the wrong direction I finally doubled back and found it rather quickly. After that it was a lot of wasted Pokeballs before I managed to catch the orange border critter and make the trip to the park not a complete failure. I grabbed lunch really quickly and headed back to the office where I was greeted with this giant wall of evil looking storm clouds. As I pulled into the parking garage the tornado siren was blowing… and in true Oklahoma fashion there was some guy out there live streaming the storm rolling into the downtown area from his phone. When I got up to my floor everyone had been told to stay in the central area and away from the windows. Shortly after that they called the all clear on the tornado warning, but the storm still raged on for two and a half hours. From what I hear there is quite a lot of damage in various areas of town from the straight line winds, that can be just as destructive as a tornado.

Big Bunny Returns

I’ve talked about my love of our backyard and all of the critters that show up there periodically. There is one however that I love above all of the rest… and that is big bunny. Yeah I realize it is kinda a stupid name for him, but he is literally a massive bunny as seen above in the phone. After the storms blew through apparently he decided to hang out in our backyard for awhile. A few months back he essentially called our backyard home for a few days… and since then I have seen him all over the neighborhood so I am guessing this is a shared phenomena. Firstly I am shocked and amazed that any rabbit would survive this long in our environment to get that damned big. Secondly… we’ve wondered if he is a pet that someone let loose because he seems super chill around human beings. All of this said… I may or may not have walked over to the grocery store with no purpose other than to buy something to feed the Rabbit. When I got back he was nowhere to be seen, but I set out a pile of lettuce leaves on the deck and then thirty minutes later or so I peered out the window and sure enough… he had chomped down on the pile. Afterwards of course I was told that lettuce was a less than ideal and often times dangerous food for Rabbits so I will have to adjust that. Nonetheless I keep thinking that if we feed him, he might hang out in our yard more often.

Past that I took advantage of the cool evening and went out roaming looking for “mons” with little luck. It was quite literally seventy two degrees last night, so given how often I had walked in near hundred degree temperatures… I figured I could not pass up that opportunity. After striking out in my own neighborhood I hopped in the car and drove to a few parking lots that I have had luck in the past. Not sure if they were scared away by the storm, or if the servers were crapping out again… but I found next to nothing. That is until I pulled into the Aldi parking lot on a whim and found the bane of my existence… the Oddish. I had managed to find one earlier and after a single Pokeball throw it ran away on me. So this time around I was hoping that I would be able to catch it and finally fill that hole in my Pokedex. The truth is the most important part of this game for me personally is catching new stuff, and when I can’t do that I get a little flustered. So I threw a ball and it landed really well… and got two twitches, before the damned Oddish broke out again and ran away. So another close call but still zero luck in actually catching it. As far as new finds for the day I did alright racking up a Bulbasaur, Koffing and Abra taking my total to 58 caught and 61 seen.

Zubat Infestation

July 13, 2016 by Belghast

So Many Zubats

I’ve slowed down a bit on the Pokemon Go namely because it is getting harder and harder to find new ones. At this point I have captured 49 different critters out of the 52 I have seen, and I’ve noticed an extreme deficiency in the number of electric, fire and plant types. I’ve spent my lunches roaming around to other areas of town, attempting to sort out where they might be hiding. I would assume that plant types could maybe be found in a park, but as far as Electric and Fire types… I have no clue at all. The single Fire type that I have managed to pick up comes from a Chilli’s parking lot… which I found more than a little hillarious. As far as electric types I have been near the electrical switching station in our neighborhood with little luck, but past that there is really nowhere that streams “electrical types”. I’ve heard rumors that they often times come out during thunderstorms, but considering we have had several and I have not seen any yet I am doubting that one. The reality is there are as many rumors for how to find specific Pokemon as there were for how to summon the Ancient Cyclops in Everquest, and I figure none of them are really true. Given that this is a map based game, in theory everything should be based on some sort of obvious landmark. Following that logic I keep wondering if I can go to a graveyard to find Ghost types, but I have not been willing to cross that line yet.

The huge truism however is that we have an over abundance of Zubats. Right now they are way more common than quite literally any other type of Pokemon. There was a point where I recently had 25 that I had captured and had just been too lazy to hand them in to the trainer. I’ve made six different Golbats, and now am simply just ignoring the flappy critters when I see one. Someone has been pretty much chain summoning lures on one of the Pokestops that I walk past on the way in and out of work… and every single time I get within range it is loaded with nothing but Zubats. As I walk through the parking garage… more Zubats. All of this is hilarious when I hear from Ashgar that he has yet to even catch a single one. Then things that are super common for other people like the Oddish… are next to impossible to find around me. At some point I am thinking I need to make a trip over to Fayetteville because my friend TangerineDada has all sorts of Pokemon that I have not seen anywhere near me. Then I ask myself… is it silly to take a road trip just for capturing Pokemon? Almost certainly but it is nonetheless entertaining.

Necropolis

For a little bit now my friend have been talking about Necropolis, a new dungeon crawler from Harebrained Schemes the makers of the very awesome Shadowrun tun based RPGs. This game keeps getting compared to Dark Souls, but I am not completely sure why the reference. Essentially this is a rogue-like dungeon crawler with procedural generated levels. This is the sort of game where you are not designed to get terribly attached to your character, because more than likely you are going to die quickly and often. Similar to Rogue Legacy it has a mechanic built into the game where your deaths serve a greater purpose in that your actions garner favor with the deity of the labyrinth. You can then purchase abilities at the scriptorium which tweak your experience allowing you to have more health, or hit harder all in an attempt to fine tune your character experience. The concept of the game seems right down my alley, and the art style is reminiscent of Journey or any number of not quite realistic cartoon shaded games of late.

The game however has a bunch of problems, that I am not sure if they are intentional or if they are simply bugs that will be patched out later. Combat feels more than a little bit maddening at times in that there seems to be no limit to the number of things that can be registering attacks on you at the same time. So this means that if you are unlucky you might round the corner and get six or seven mobs swarming you at the wrong moment. Normally speaking in brawler type games this is manageable in that the game gives you invincibility frames in the form of being staggered… so that not every thing attacking you can actually register damage on you at the same time. In Necropolis you can absolutely get surrounded and watch your health go from full to zero in seconds. However for all I know there might be a scriptorium ability that changes how that works. The other slightly frustrating thing is that combat feels a little sluggish. I played with an xbox controller and right bumper is the light attack and right trigger the heavy. Even light attacks are nowhere near as responsive as I would hope them to be, and heavy attacks require near perfect timing because of the extremely lengthy swing animation. All of this said… I enjoyed the little bit that I played and I want to figure out more of the game. There are two kinds of unfair gameplay… the ones that make you just want to throw your controller across the room, and then the ones that make you want to figure out how to avoid the pitfalls of the system. This at least for me appears to be the later, so I fully expect to play a bit more tonight and get a bit further.