A lot of what I wanted to say was said by others (mostly Alexx, except that since I was already playing Ingress, I haven't run into data cap or battery issues; I'm already tooled up for this kind of usage; I'm just switching between Ingress and PG now rather than purely playing Ingress when I want to play on the go or farm while I work. I played Pokemon this evening in between performing various tasks in an Ingress op, which had the dual duty of letting me accumulate pokemon rewards in between stops and keeping my scanner quiet (pokemon go does not reveal -nearly- as much information about who you are and what you are doing as Ingress does, plus someone watching for Ingress activity won't -necessarily- look for the little to no activity you give off in Pokemon [if you're just farming, none]).
But the Magic comparison is apt here. Nintendo/Niantic/Google have the bull by the horns here; not just the obvious growing pains (for Magic, not being able to keep product on the shelves; for PoGo, frequent server crashes and a -variety- of hilarious client-side freezes available), but also the inobvious pains that will likely result in the player base shrinking to a tiny fraction of the current one if they don't deal with them; primarily the disastrous upper end of the game, where gyms are simultaneously hard to hold on to, even with top level pokemon, and also ludicriously hard to build big (except, possibly, by having a team of 10 rolling gyms by exploiting what might be an intentional feature). And also, of course, the fact that once you've levelled a lot and collected a bunch of pokemon, there just isn't that much to do; you can fight for gyms and build up your ability to get free game money, but unlike Ingress, where the much simpler mechanics have rich elements of emergent gameplay, resulting in actions that have a highly visible effect on the game but require tems of tens or hundreds of players to perform, Pokemon Go's emergent gameplay seems to mostly consist of people flocking to places where Lures are, or going to Lured areas and getting to socialize with other Pokemon Go players. Additionally, as player level inflates, it will be harder and harder for new players to do much mroe than collect or evolve pokemon; sure, the game is attack-favoring in numerous ways, but that doesn't mean a player with only 500CP pokemon can do much in an area where most gyms have 2000+ CP pokemon, and lots of them.
Obviously, these are soluble problems. Gyms can be solved by giving gyms multiple tiers so that you have something closer to solo Pokemon games where early play involves fighting low level creatures and gyms, and only once you can compete do you have to face much more powerful foes. And there are lots of endgame elements they can add to keep the gameplay rich for both obsessed kids and adults alike. But the execution is key; quite a lot of what they have now is a combination of network effect, a solid property, and a good-enough execution despite the bugs, but if they start leaking players at both ends it will be hard to retain this kind of excitement.
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But the Magic comparison is apt here. Nintendo/Niantic/Google have the bull by the horns here; not just the obvious growing pains (for Magic, not being able to keep product on the shelves; for PoGo, frequent server crashes and a -variety- of hilarious client-side freezes available), but also the inobvious pains that will likely result in the player base shrinking to a tiny fraction of the current one if they don't deal with them; primarily the disastrous upper end of the game, where gyms are simultaneously hard to hold on to, even with top level pokemon, and also ludicriously hard to build big (except, possibly, by having a team of 10 rolling gyms by exploiting what might be an intentional feature). And also, of course, the fact that once you've levelled a lot and collected a bunch of pokemon, there just isn't that much to do; you can fight for gyms and build up your ability to get free game money, but unlike Ingress, where the much simpler mechanics have rich elements of emergent gameplay, resulting in actions that have a highly visible effect on the game but require tems of tens or hundreds of players to perform, Pokemon Go's emergent gameplay seems to mostly consist of people flocking to places where Lures are, or going to Lured areas and getting to socialize with other Pokemon Go players. Additionally, as player level inflates, it will be harder and harder for new players to do much mroe than collect or evolve pokemon; sure, the game is attack-favoring in numerous ways, but that doesn't mean a player with only 500CP pokemon can do much in an area where most gyms have 2000+ CP pokemon, and lots of them.
Obviously, these are soluble problems. Gyms can be solved by giving gyms multiple tiers so that you have something closer to solo Pokemon games where early play involves fighting low level creatures and gyms, and only once you can compete do you have to face much more powerful foes. And there are lots of endgame elements they can add to keep the gameplay rich for both obsessed kids and adults alike. But the execution is key; quite a lot of what they have now is a combination of network effect, a solid property, and a good-enough execution despite the bugs, but if they start leaking players at both ends it will be hard to retain this kind of excitement.