Everyone's outside, and it's because of POKÉMON GO

I was in the occasionally-get-yelled-at-by-cyclists club long before this came out
Usually on the work phone, too, which is even more hip, imo

Workemail GO is a lot easier on the battery, too

xxp If you're reading this thread, yes.

Now instead of yelling the cyclists will be like "ayyyy powerballs amirite" and you can go "sure thing! You betcha!" and they will go "awesome sauce!" and carry on and you will go back to your longread

servers down in the uk
got an egg at 9.97km haha

servers down in the us seems like

Walked over to the park last night, attacked the gym there, took a few goes to figure out that oh, you're just meant to tap on the other monster etc. But eventually I took down the gym leaders! Turns out when you defeat a gym leader, the game doesn't say "ok you're the new gym leader", it says "ok, this gym is now neutral". And in the 10 seconds it took me to figure that out, some other dude had claimed it. So I did all the work and someone else (from a rival team!) gained. It wasn't a fun gaming experience.

Worse though, the guy then strolled over and wanted to chat. "Hey, you're catching pokemon? I just took over the gym back there! I don't really understand it, all my pokemon seemed to die really fast but then I tapped on the gym anyway and it said I'd claimed it!". I explained what had actually happened and did my best to be jokey about it but in truth I totally failed to hide how salty it'd made me and I think he came away with the impression that I was a bit of a dick. It wasn't a fun social experience.

https://vimeo.com/174821377

the dude who pulls over with his car still running and just jets into the park.
i am curious how this is gonna play tonight.

Town full of people starting and stopping and swearing all day as servers dropped out at various crucial junctures of egg incubation/lure use. It's riddled with errors but I have never loved anything so much. I have the original theme music playing in my head constantly. I wish it was as hysterical in London as the above video.

Sure a ton of trenchant think pieces are being written on this as I type, but this kind of mass phenomenon really attests to the overwhelming destruction of societal belief systems we've suffered this year. Suddenly people (even non-gaming folk) feeling the need to form ultra-escapist countercultures. Everyone desperately seeking an easy new unity that can't be found in politics, but which might just be found in the universal adoration of Psyduck... Not saying it wouldn't still be enormous under more 'normal' circumstances, but the end times atmosphere is certainly escalating the need for camaraderie.

otm

Those tall ships really lifted the nations spirits after watergate

once you get around level 20 the game starts to get ridiculous. pokeballs randomly curve when you throw them, pokemon butt the balls away a lot more, they break out of the balls a lot more (standard balls, superballs, megaballs, whatever). it's not even related to cp because they all do it, even the cp10 ones. rather than the usual nintendo method of making early achievements easier and introducing more difficult monsters/levels/map areas, it's like niantic thought "hey we should make the entire game harder by doing dumb shit". combined with the worsening server problems it's less playable every day.

xp lol

I think server errors are the contemporary equivalent to your Gameboy running out of battery in the car on long trips and are therefore deeply necessary to the whole psychology. I'm not at level 20 yet.

makes sense tbh

My phone is too old for this. Surely no-one has ever suffered as much as me.

"My phone's getting too old for this shit"

http://cdn.watchloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/b964ab54-73ef-4532-b95c-9207de585afd_original_image_500_500.jpg

literally hundreds of people at 10pm Saturday out by 59th and 5th playing in big crowds. never seen anything like it.

out in canada! now canucks too can enjoy the world famous failed log-in simulator

wonder what changes they'll implement (and when) to keep casual interest up once the craziness dies down. a lot of people don't really give a shit about the gym system and there isn't much to work for if you're one of them. would expect them to ramp up the social media aspect, not just pokemon/item trading but posting/chat, friends list type stuff, gifts, maybe actual one-on-one dueling. but this is all built on the infrastructure of a completely different game with a different and much less massive following

having 3 teams (really 2 and a scrappy underdog) might've been a mistake with so many people. wonder how things would look if they based the teams off the original 8 gyms rather than the original 3 game colors

and there should absolutely be pokemon that are only available to catch/hatch if you're on certain teams. it's not like that right now is it? once they do make trading a thing, is it gonna matter? "does anyone want any of the 14 rattatas we all just caught"

I definitely think a more social element needs to be introduced. Like it's crazy how introspective looking at a terrible approximation of myself walking round a map for hours makes me. I mean, I would be that way anyway, but this is much more formless and given to attacks of dark energy, not unlike Zubat. Someone needs to write a Bionian deconstruction of the Pokemon oeuvre.

Trading is essential. Not out of exclusivity necessarily, though I'd be interested to see what kind of economic system arose out of that within the game. Also think a social 'clan' system could be fruitful for irl meetups and discussions about sightings etc though no idea how that could be executed so that it deflected creepiness. One-on-one duelling would also be a great addition, yes. I like the thought of approaching other players like Pokestops.

i'm guessing their whole roadmap is going out the window at this point.

qualx otm re no unique pokemon per team. right now the choice of team is almost completely arbitrary (apart from yellow's reputation) and the whole gym setup is a bit silly. this more than anything reflects how pokemon go was never meant to be a core offering imo.

otoh if they eventually make it so you can interact with people simply over the internet and not based on GPS, and they implement trading, it'll bring with it the kind of unholy black market that nintendo probably doesn't want associated with it. see the recent crap with the counterstrike skins market or the years of WoW character market on ebay.

Went out on the weekend with the bf and kids to play this. And I still dont feel it. I was willing to be turned round on the matter but this is just like Animal Crossing with too much walking. Did nothing for me.

if "walking game has too much walking" is a criticism i'm not sure you were reeeeally willing to be turned around on the matter

True dat.

Battling at the gyms is pretty shit, isn't it? Would love the turn based thing they used to do. Collecting stuff is fun though. Been finding excuses to walk.

gyms are shit and apparently extremely unbalanced? big problem seems to be that vaporeons are one of the best at fighting and super easy to evolve? every gym is just being run by vaporeons. which are way stronger than flareons for some reason (even though i'm seeing a lot of flareons around too) which are in turn way stronger than jolteons. which makes no sense because jolteons are objectively the cutest? this sucks. i just want jolteons :(

the entire game mechanic is shit really if you think about it for more than 2 seconds

there's no incentive to actually stick with a single pokemon because the leveling and fighting mechanic is so far from the original series

imagine the end of landmark pokemon original series episode "bye bye butterfree," ash is just like "oh, that butterfree? whatever. i just read a few pages of a book about pokemon so i'll probably find a much higher-leveled base caterpie to evolve soon"

"yes, i know that one squirtle with sunglasses is the one i totally fell in love with but it's CP14 and i just learned how to tie a knot so i'm probably going to find like a CP546 one soon so it's off to Professor Hot Oak with it"

there's no incentive to actually stick with a single pokemon because the leveling and fighting mechanic is so far from the original series

otm, it's like niantic never really understood the original games. there's no point in the stardust because all it does is power up a pokemon that will be out-powered in a couple of days anyway. today i caught a pinsir with cp1237, so good job i didn't waste time/resources getting a cp879 pinsir up to cp900.

i assume there'll be tweaks in subsequent releases (niantic seemed to do a lot of that with ingress) but they want to get moving on some of the fundamentals before they lose long-term players. once we hit 151 (?) pokemon there's not really anything else to do.

also fuck a cp10 caterpie that bursts out of great balls and ultra balls

also magikarp run away. magikarp. fish that are useless half-dead flapping idiots, that do nothing but lie on their side and flail, can run away in a cloud of dust.

Turned based battles would be the best.

the entire game mechanic is shit really if you think about it for more than 2 seconds

― qualx, Monday, July 18, 2016 3:46 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

otm

Magikarp is awesome. They don't exist to satisfy your whims. Though obviously the best (old?) Pokemon are psyduck and snorlax.

i still don't think a social element should be introduced bc we're only a couple of steps from yr grade school kid is hanging out with weird middle aged guy who wants to show you his anime figurine collection in his basement

Literally the most fun thing to do in actual Pokemon is gamely level up a Magikarp into Gyarados by putting it in the #1 slot and grinding.

i'm almost halfway to a gyarados, and i live near a beach with an apparently endless supply of magikarps

http://i.imgur.com/LnK70Ct.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sj2iQyBTQs

"having 3 teams (really 2 and a scrappy underdog)" qualx what do you mean by this? haven't played nearly enough (like, at all) to know what the teams do

lol i thought i'd give this a more determined shot by saying to hell with battery and going on a 5k run with the app open. when i got done i was horrified to see the incubation ticker had not advanced at all. i had missed the li'l mechanic where you actually put the egg in the incubator. whoops.

which team is the scrappy underdog?

I assume yellow?

yeah yellow's definitely the smallest, though there's a massive stronghold of them at my local fire department

"having 3 teams (really 2 and a scrappy underdog)" qualx what do you mean by this? haven't played nearly enough (like, at all) to know what the teams do

you pick a team (blue/red/yellow) at level 5 and try to take over gyms for that team

it's based on ingress where everyone has a choice of two teams and they try to take over landmarks in a way that coincidentally seems to resemble the game Go

from ancient china, not pokemon

my measly S3 is getting accustomed to playing this in my apartment and the combined effect of phone with horrible gps that isn't supposed to play game + 8th floor room means the game constantly thinks i'm at a legion post 3 blocks away

but people keep dropping lures there and i got a bulbasaur so nbd

I'm surrounded by Red and dumbly picked blue. I've picked up the occasional gym, but basically its a sea of red in my neighborhood :-/

Mainly the point of holding gyms seems to be for getting coin rewards, but the trickle I can pick up makes me despair of ever affording a backpack upgrade.

playing this amidst a crowd of hundreds of people who are also playing it and no one is talking to each other is a really weird thing

Couldn't you try talking to people?