Pokemon Go

That's pretty much my reason as well. I have a pretty strong account from the days when I actually enjoyed it, and I can use that to get version exclusive and multiple-choice legendaries for the main series when they pop up. Waiting now for Kubfu, Spectrier/Glastrier and Miraidon.

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.

I tend to use it as a distraction while out walking for exercise as well. There was a time when I was heavy into meeting up with the local raid groups to do raid days and Community Days together and stuff. Still sorta do, but all of our play time has fallen by a lot. Remote Passes really rejuvenated things because at the lower costs, people were more willing to help out with stuff that they wouldn't drive out for. A big problem for my groups in terms of getting participation for raids even before Covid was that the frequent reruns often aren't really done in engaging ways. So people just don't want to do a 16th grind of Kyogre with no story framing or additional flavour quests. If they really wanted more in-person raid engagement, they'd aggressively release new T5s (and/or new T5 shinies) and discount green passes.

FE: New Mystery Fresh Cart Lunatic 7PM PT Sun, Mon, Fri; Expert Unicorn Overlord 7PM PT Wed, Thurs: http://www.twitch.tv/kuroitsubasatenshi

Heh it's the opposite for me. Without Go, I'm not distracted or anxious anymore when traveling or doing jogs.

Death is a companion. We should cherish Death as we cherish Life.

Yeah, the only good thing about GO now is that it will eventually release all the Shiny Mythicals and Legendaries - for some, GO will be the only way to get them.

With me not having sword/shield and the Gen 7 Shiny Tapu event has long passed, my only chance to get Shiny Tapu right now is on the Tapu raids in GO.

Also, for some people the only way to get Shiny Deoxys and Shiny Genesect is via GO.

Speaking of which I managed to get myself a shiny Genesect from Battle League. Took a long damn while, but I got there. Do we know the shiny chances for GBL? Out of the three legendaries I've got from it, two have been shiny (the other was a Regirock).

I think they should make it that you can at least trade with Lucky Friends no matter what the distance. It'd still make you put the effort in becoming so, but give a reward and make it so the Lucky status isn't worthless unless you're an in-person associate

URGH! Yes, I hate that! I'm lucky friends with tons of people in the states, in a state I'll never go back to anytime soon for any immediate reasons. So their lucky friendships are wasting away in my GO.

Much agreed. It feels bizarre because... why wouldn't that be a thing?

I get the feeling Pokemon Go wants players to have teamwork and comraderie, but on a VERY specific scale. Like, trading across contintents seemingly would work in the whole "teamwork" framework. But they want everything to be in-person and local with "your community" Why wouldn't international trading be "teamwork"? Wouldn't that be an amazing expression of it?

Or even Pokegenie, ignoring it's a third-party app, isn't it also the logical conclusion of the "Teamwork" theme? An app created by fans to match players who have the expressed goal of taking down a boss together from all across the entire globe?

Why in the world would what basically amount to "Looking For Group" be a problem in your game? Could you imagine if an MMO or other game like Destiny locked that out? "No LFG. Only teamwork. How dare you not raid purely with your best irl friends and only them!"?

They have a very strict and stringent vision on how they want their players to play the game and create a lot of nonsensical and artificial road blocks for the process.

Another one I was in a convo on the reddit about today was trading Pokemon; why is it a one-done deal? Why can't you trade pokemon multiple times like the other games have. Hypothetically, the argument is something-something game balance, but I don't understand the conclusion there.

One, again, it's a thing in the console games. Players trade mons around all the time in those games.

Two, what balance is it breaking exactly? Anyone who is competitive about it already has super strong high IV (or 0-15-15) mons for their battle league teams.

Three, ok, players trade between each other several mons for better stats. That's still not "getting something for free". I could see the argument for locking that Pokémon to being traded once-per-day so you're not doing it for hours and nothing else, but locking out ever trading again?

Like, one person I talked to brought up "What if a player trades 50 Mudkips between each other to get that perfect one" and... so?

They still would have to put in a ton of work for that situation anyway; they'd need to put in the effort for 50 Mudkip, have the inventory space to just hold 50 rando mons for this kind of event, another friend willing to sit there and trade 50 of their mons for your Mudkips (and then do so again another day), and then the MASSIVE pile of stardust to do this repeatedly. And then do that whole process again if you didn't get one with stats you wanted.

And at the end of the day... woo, all of that for a single hundo mudkip probably? There's hundreds of other Pokemon in the game and plenty than can beat a Mudkip if "game balance" is your mindset.

Point being, just because it'd be possible, doesn't mean it wouldn't be a massively tedious grind, costing a fuck-ton of resources, and being a deeply inefficient means of trying to repeatedly do so compared to just... playing.

However, on the benefit end, it does mean that Pokemon can be traded more freely between people for a ton of reasons ("Hey, I kinda out-classed this Snorlax a friend gave me last year. Anyone want him rather than I delete him?"). And, assuming I'm even ok with such a grind, it does give me a little agency over maybe putting in that kind of grind effort for a single mon that I really genuinely enjoy.

I certainly would never ever want to do that kind of a grind for every pokemon ever. But if I really like Eevee or Chimecho or Klang, why not? Not like, again, that actually would be an effective means of "breaking" the game, especially when there are plenty of players already years into the game that have whatever dream teams they already want to become juggernauts.

Having "a perfect Pokemon" or even a Shundo doesn't actually make you that much better than any other Pokemon player. Type advantages and CP can trounce even the strongest of mons anyway.

And it's not like getting a perfect mon or a shiny really... is like an achievement or acomplishment? Like, yes, it's a badge of "cool thing", but they're not things of "I earned this by being good at the game". No more so than any other player really. Any player hunting any mon has just as much chance for it to be a hundo or a shiny as any other.

Idk. The mindset confuses me a lot.

Edited by InkDagger on May 9th 2023 at 2:01:16 AM

I think the biggest problem here, is that no one nearby who can physically go to Niantic's office, ever actually go there to help voice everyone's complaints, to actually shove them in Niantic's face, showing that yes, there are a large amount of players who thinks what Niantic does is dumb and makes zero sense.

And it's not just concerning Pokemon Go either.


Niantic just recently announced not just one, but two new games. In fact, Niantic has a ton of games already, it's not just Pokemon Go. The need to promote the newer games, naturally, result in newer games having more staffs and effort put into them than the older ones. (This is very likely the reason why big Pokemon Go events lately always comes with issues.)
And that's despite some (not all) of the newer games, having clearly lower amount of fanbase, would likely only last like, two years at most, and likely will never reach even half the amount of money that Pokemon Go generates.

So why did they bother having that many games? They should just focus on the franchise that clearly does well in game business, like Pokemon and Monster Hunter.


This isn't the first time I see something like this. In my country there was an MMO distributor company that took so many games, they ends up ruining the older ones that made the company big in the first place, while the new ones didn't last long. Nowadays most people here don't even remember the company's name, let alone what are all the games they used to have.
Considering the very first game they took is still a well-known name today, the company would have been still a big name today had they focus on keep improving the ones they already have and made them big in the first place.

Edited by ShiningStardust on May 10th 2023 at 1:55:23 AM

I haven't played Pokemon Go in a while, though I was hoping to get back into it-the game is apparently not doing too well is what you're saying? That's a shame.

I know one thing that bugged me was the new AR system started requiring you to let the camera scan the place, which is annoying because it means you have to pause to get things in AR. Though that change was introduced a very long time ago.

Edited by Protagonist506 on May 9th 2023 at 11:54:36 AM

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Well, it's still doing okay today, but there are issues with some events recently.

And then there's also a boycott regarding the increase in Remote Raid Pass price.

As for AR, you still can play without AR. There's a button to disable it. The only thing requiring you to scan the place around you, is tasks that asks you to do so, but thankfully as they are extremely location-based tasks, they can't be special research task, they're just regular tasks you can just easily delete.
It's highly suspected Niantic use those tasks to erase pokestop and gym locations they deem unfit, anyway, so most people just delete the tasks as soon as they see one, to avoid them and the community around them having less pokestops and gyms.

Edited by ShiningStardust on May 11th 2023 at 2:01:35 AM

I don't know if this has changed, since I haven't deleted my AR scan task in several years, but it's actually better to hold on to the AR scan task. Otherwise that task takes priority when spinning a stop/gym that has one. So just hold on to and never do one of those stupid tasks and you'll never pick up another one, thus letting you get the tasks that you actually faster.

As for companies not focusing on their bigger games, it probably comes down to taking it for granted, which, let's be fair here, is probably a not unreasonable assumption when it comes to Pokemon. Pokemon is just too big to fail, so the Niantic can kind of half-ass things and still get quite a bit of money. On the other hand, two new games does sound like them just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. Because it's hard to think of what they would otherwise think is strategically worth it these days when something as big as Harry Potter failed.

FE: New Mystery Fresh Cart Lunatic 7PM PT Sun, Mon, Fri; Expert Unicorn Overlord 7PM PT Wed, Thurs: http://www.twitch.tv/kuroitsubasatenshi

To my memory I've only ever seen a pokestop get removed once in all my playtime, and to be fair it was one for the sign for a library that had since been moved to another building about five minutes away by foot (and there are stops and gyms all over near the new library). Also, there's still another stop and a gym remaining near the old spot.

Several of the stops I regularly see that had AR tasks tied to them have since been upgraded into gyms, but I've only ever seen that one outdated library one vanish.

Edited by Tsuzurao on May 10th 2023 at 2:34:32 PM

Niantic doesn't seem to be doing a great job with any of their games. Granted it is rather dependant on IP but none of the others have gone anywhere near the success of Pokemon Go. I do currently play Pikmin Bloom but that has plenty of issues of its own; at one point they suddenly made the mushrooms (a major gameplay element) much harder without really improving the rewards. They now have regular events where you have to complete challenges to obtain limited-time decor Pikmin but a lot of those challenges are incredibly difficult to complete without paying and there's RNG involved so it's hard to complete sets. And now the newest challenge has added another layer of RNG...

I guess they came to the same conclusion after seeing that the only games with long-term success have been Pokemon, the most powerful IP on the planet, and Ingress, their own original IP that was designed for AR from the get-go. So they're trying another original IP, a more Tamagotchi-style Virtual Pet by the looks of it.

Edited by Anura on May 10th 2023 at 1:24:48 PM

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.

Correction to my previous post - it looks like they just moved the stop for the library over to the new library location (the stop picture still depicts the old library sign). It's among several stops in that area, and I rarely get to go to the library these days, so I hadn't noticed it until yesterday after I posted.

Anybody else no longer able to use tags?

I found a tiny Scraggy today and when I went to give it my dedicated “XXS” tag, I no longer had the option to tag it, and all the Fennekin I caught during the last CD no longer had tags.

(Also, I managed to hatch a Larvesta! Woot woot!)

Edit: Okay, they’re back. Maybe it was just a weird bug.

Edited by kablammin45 on May 26th 2023 at 1:08:37 AM

"Okay, yeah, I guess Ollie fits the goofy sidekick role, but being a princess doesn't mean I spontaneously sing about everything, 'kay?"

Nice hatch. I still don't have Larvesta XD

Oh well, I feel like it's gonna be in a community day eventually, so no big deal for me, I'll just wait for it.

I was lucky enough to join in on a Shadow Mewtwo raid in my area. We even managed to have 20 people in the raid, so it went by pretty quickly. I managed to catch it on my second-to-last Premier Ball.

I really don't like that Shadow Raids are local only, but I've resigned myself to the likelihood that any new type of raid introduced will be local only given Niantic's insistence on making things difficult for people who do not live in bustling places where you can see people playing Go anytime you walk outside.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on May 27th 2023 at 2:09:21 AM

I managed to join a few Shadow Mewtwo raids (local Discord group, not super active but gets enough people together for big events) but I failed to catch all of them. Still got a couple, but nothing particularly special seeing as I already have one from beating Giovanni.

---

Also, I finally reached level 40 a few days ago. I actually managed to get the "catch 200 pokemon in one day" task done already - had enough items stockpiled, and I can reach a few Pokestops from work desk. I was doing some work that involved a lot of waiting for software to do stuff anyway, so it wasn't difficult to multitask. Also used the opportunity to finally evolve the lure evolutions, which I'd been procrastinating for a very long time.

Next community day is Axew.

I wish Wailmer gets a comday too one day. Magikarp and Swablu got it, and I'm very sure Larvesta will get it too in the future, so would be nice if Wailmer, being the only "take 400 candy to evolve" mon left, gets a comday too.

Edited by ShiningStardust on Jun 1st 2023 at 1:40:04 AM