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

"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?

i did! most did not look up!
one dude kinda heckled me as we were both going for a pikachu
"I got it!" "You ain't got it bro" "Ah fuck" "I'm telling you, you ain't got it bro"
ftr, i eventually got it

just ran thru all my balls trying to grab a jynx. is that r4r3?? it escaped 3 times, boo

i'm at the jersey shore this week and they definitely have different pokemon here than they do at home. i wonder how many biomes there are.

just ran thru all my balls trying to grab a jynx. is that r4r3?? it escaped 3 times, boo

berries are key for this

I always learn when to use items after it's too late too; I didn't figure out berries until I was complaining to coworkers about burning like 15 balls catching a Scyther and I totally forgot about great balls until I watched Abra immediately peace out after I saw it in the wild for the first time

okay, explain berries please

throw a berry at a pokemon, its odds to be captured go up by some unknown amount.

and the odds of the ball curving away for no reason go up by 38678372526352113

I just found a Clefairy, fed it a berry, hit it with a great ball, and it broke out and ran off; what the FUCK

i think curving increases your chances of capture? i've been trying to practice but i'm literally running out of balls. i do know the smaller the target circle is, the better your chances are of keeping the ball shut (according to niantic at least)

half the time i catch one on a "curved" ball i don't get the curveball bonus. it's so janky.

hot tip:

Eevee: 'Pokémon Go' Players Discover How to Control Evolution of Character
Reddit user smithnigel found renaming the character can determine which evolution Eevee will undergo, which is usually random. Sparky yields Jolteon, Rainer gives Vaporeon and Pyro creates Flareon.

im sure they'll have this patched out before i get enough eevee candies to evolve

Have seen people playing this in the park but I got stuck behind my first Pokemon Go dawdler on my walk to work this morning. Keep moving!

Poss just jealous cz my phone is probably not good enough to run this at all and would def run out of battery within approx 20 minutes even if it did run

zubat zubat zubat rattata rattata zubat rattata zubat rattata rattata zubat rattata zubat rattata zubat zubat

some fun everybody on ilx complains about reddit crossover: https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongo/comments/4tsyuv/can_we_stop_mincing_words_niantic_youre_royally/

When this game launched I'd go to the park and make new friends among a crowd of 50-60+ people. The game didn't need to be good, it just needed to work in order to drive people to the park.
Now the crowd is down to maybe 10-15 people. Most of the casual players have quit because they got tired of a game that never works eating their battery. They've stopped scheduling time to go into town for Pokemon hunting.

it's sad how a lot of the excitement for the people who really want to be hardcore about this is built on it remaining a huge Thing That Brings Everyone Together Ideally and not just another nerd thing

i don't care to get all sociological about it but i will continue to gawk @ reddit dorks and feel a bit sympathetic about it all

otm, there's not a lot to keep casual players around once the thrill of "mum mum there's a pidgey in my toilet!!!!" wears off. ingress and geocaching have kept a moderate but loyal core following, and i expect pokemon go will too. as niantic builds new and interesting features into the game, there'll still be theme days/nights, lure parties &c. but they won't attract the hundreds they're pulling now.

imo what's more exciting is the prospect of new geo-based games that get people out for different reasons, that wouldn't get momentum/funding without pokemon go exploding like it has. geocaching can be insane fun if (a) the caches aren't stupid and (b) there are enough nearby. something that sits in between, but without ingress's insanely complicated and bonkers ui, could be where we end up with augmented reality

one thing niantic absolutely does deserve shit for is not expanding on crowdsourced ingress at all, completely ignoring the massive demographic shift between the two games and making it virtually inaccessible for a massive amount of people

this has been both a great and horrible rollout for them but i'm not gonna blame crappy server issues for casual funsters getting bored of a game with very little depth

http://i.imgur.com/hcF0Xur.jpg

i ran out of space in my bag for items so i stopped playing lol

one thing niantic absolutely does deserve shit for is not expanding on crowdsourced ingress at all, completely ignoring the massive demographic shift between the two games and making it virtually inaccessible for a massive amount of people

yeah this is absolutely divisive. from my inner-city flat i can see 54 pokestops and five gyms (so all within 700m). from my sister-in-law's house in the burbs i can see nothing at all. she drove us 15 minutes to her 'local' shopping centre which has one gym and two pokestops. if she were to sign up she'd have to buy supplies, but when i need 100 pokeballs i just walk round the block.

apparently niantic stopped processing portals ~2 years ago, and i'm guessing a lot of late-to-the-game ingress players operated in these empty areas. niantic needs to work on the enormous discrepancy here if they want the game to succeed long term, whether it's processing those portal submissions or importing points of interest from some other database.

of all the issues with pokemon go, this feels like the most vital to resolve because it's cutting swathes of people out of the game and/or forcing them to spend money just to keep up.

https://pokevision.com

^ This is good and pretty essential, lots of people complaining that it's game-breaking but eh, the game's broke already imo, this actually makes it playable again.

Pro tip though - don't check it when you're in bed, nothing more frustrating than seeing a squirtle around the corner when you're already undressed etc.

^ proof that i live on a doduo nest

it's super weird that those mapping api calls have been broken for almost a week. 3 paws was always silly but not having 1 or 2 means that whole function is useless. i'd be happier if they just hid the whole feature until they got it working.

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

oh shit

A wild Kermicycle appeared!

there's a magikarp spawn point down the road but it's in precisely the most active street corner for sex workers