It’s OK, My Lawn is Your Lawn

[bryant]

My perspective: veteran Ingress player, no previous experience with Pokemon Go, a fair bit of mobile gaming work experience.

I’m not gonna do the whole “wow, look at the wild news story!” thing. Hot take: geo-located gaming generates interesting behavior patterns. I do have one item I can’t resist sharing, though. Pokemon GO chauffeur services are

Comments

[mneme]

I think this will probably help Ingress overall. Sure, we'll lose people, temporarily or permanently to the new shiny, and people who were max levelled (or as close as they can get), not super-interested in the metagame or the never-ending gear treadmill, etc will peace out. But in the end, Ingress -is- a richer game (for now), with much more interesting group and metagame play, so people who are into that will likely be lured over the fence and stick around for a while

[bryant]

I think the mere fact that the game says "hey, you need to hit level 5 first" is an improvement in the early game. You make a good point about inevitable dominance of gyms, though. Give it another couple of weeks and we'll know.

The end game really is key.

[mneme]

Well, it's -a- big key, since it determines whether players are still playing 2 years fron now who are playing now. If people peel away as fast as they joined, it won't be pretty. But also there's the question of whether the endgame messes with the onramp to the game. I mean, gyms are to an extent as weak as their weakest member, so there's not a huge incentive for strong players to artificially level gyms to make it easier for lowbies (and by lobies, I mostly mean 5-8) to put pokemon into them. But there's an incentive to put stronger and stronger pokemon in there--and to, when you take out a gym, immediately stock it with your strongest defensive pokemon, so the other sides can't as easily take it; far different from Ingress where there are many ways for a portal to go white (ie, decay, splash, deliberately leaving a portal white to help new players level, deliberately leaving a portal white to make it harder to make blocking links). I know I've seen a pattern of escallation; over the weekend, portals were typically stocked

[bryant]

Yah, that's what I mean. One aspect of the current virality is the easy on-ramp. If that changes by virtue of gyms being clogged, it's problematic.

[bluegargantua]

While out for a walk last night, I was amussed to see two gaggles of kids looking for pokemon on a bridge over the river and then they had a throw-down battle there. Fascinating behavior.

later
Tom

[r_ness]

TechCrunch had an analysis of gameplay mechanics as well: https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/11/the-brilliant-mechanics-of-pokemon-go/