4/24/2023 0 Comments Ultraball at pokestop rate![]() So I thought I’d go back to just playing while walking, like I had been doing from the beginning. I decided it was no longer worth my time to go there. If I asked where the Pikachu nearby was, I got a bunch of mumbles instead of enthusiastic help. There were no flash mobs chasing after a reported rare Pokemon. But I stopped going to Central Park because that wasn’t happening anymore. If they hadn’t found it themselves, we’d go looking for it together. Previous nights I could ask where the rare Pokemon in my Nearby list was and just about anyone I’d ask would answer either with some idea or an exact location for it. Instead of an energetic crowd of players shouting out their team names or rare Pokemon they spotted, everyone was just standing around in little groups, quietly catching whatever popped up, with barely a word. That is, until the two nights I went and had a completely different experience. It seemed like the best place to spend my evenings. I stayed until nearly midnight because I just couldn’t get myself to go home. I went to Central Park a few times and collected a ton of Pokemon I’d never seen before while chatting with other players. Plus, I admit it’s pretty cool seeing friends who never play games posting screenshots on Facebook of the Pokemon they’ve seen, and being able to discuss the the game with them. But even if I had, I can’t imagine it would have been nearly the same experience, simply because far fewer people were playing. I never got into Ingress, Niantic’s first augmented reality game. That’s never happened to me before with any game. The Pikachu we tried to find disappeared, but it was fun running around like we were on some treasure hunt. ![]() When tracking still worked to some degree, I tracked down a Ponyta with a complete stranger I just met. As I mentioned in my early impressions, I started to enjoy bumping into other players and chatting with them, even hunting down a rare Pokemon together. So the more I played, the more frustrating the game got. If you waste them on common Pokemon, you could end up without any when you encounter a rare one. Thankfully, the game starts giving you stronger balls to use, but they’re much rarer than regular poke balls. ![]() I started wasting more balls and for the first time, I had Pokemon flee on me. ![]() I noticed that the higher my trainer level, the harder it got to catch Pokemon, even weak common ones. But after a certain level, the game started showing its free-to-play colors. So it seemed it worked out for them without being too aggressive about the in-app purchases (IAP). Despite that, Pokemon Go has been the highest-grossing iOS game since its release in the U.S. Even the most useful shop items, such as lucky eggs or incubators, are not necessary to enjoy the game. Sure, it’s always been very grindy, since you don’t actually train your Pokemon so much as turn them into food for the other Pokemon you catch. With lure modules that can be bought by one person but benefit everyone, it seemed the game would meet the perfect balance to allow both non-spenders and spenders alike to get the most out of it. I already played games while walking, but none of them were meant to be played that way.Īlso, the items you can buy didn’t seem to affect the game that much. Still, I like Pokemon and I already walk a lot, as walking and biking are my main modes of transportation. As I’ve heard others put so well, the game becomes more about avoiding spending money than playing the game. I know how they work, starting off enjoyable and getting more and more frustrating the longer you play, pushing you to spend some money on consumables to relieve some of the agony. Normally I wouldn’t let myself get sucked into a game with micro-transactions for consumables. The game also seemed a lot fairer than I expected for free-to-play. The server issues have since improved greatly and, even if they’re not perfect, I appreciate all the fixes they made since that first week. The tracking was never perfect, especially with all the lag and constant crashing. The app has also always been a battery hog and it aggravates me to no end that eggs can’t incubate while I walk unless I keep my iPhone’s screen on and waste more battery. The only use for the Pokemon right now are bland gym battles that serve almost no purpose. You don’t get to use them to weaken wild Pokemon you encounter or battle other players, or even non-player characters. They mostly just fill my Pokedex and then sit in my bag doing nothing, while I try to catch more of them. And even then, there isn’t much to do with the Pokemon I catch. Instead, I would need to catch lots more Charmanders if I wanted to ever evolve him. My very first disappointment came when I realized that choosing a Charmander as my starter didn’t mean that, as in the Game Boy games, he would grow with me and I would eventually have a Charizard fighting by my side. Sure, the game had problems from the very beginning.
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