Users spend more minutes per day in Pokémon Go than Facebook(techcrunch.com) |
Users spend more minutes per day in Pokémon Go than Facebook(techcrunch.com) |
I don't care much for the game, but details of why the servers weren't (aren't?) able to handle the traffic interests me immensely.
For instance they don't cache pokestop images, my phone keeps redownloading the same images from pokestops and gyms, if it just cached the top 10 most visited pokestops and gyms that would be a decent reduction in data use.
Also it would help if they offloaded some of the work of the GPS onto the local phone steptracking/direction trackers it would help.
I can understand if they don't want to send coordinates of "nearby pokemon" down to the clients because that would inevitably get hacked, but the phone has to repeatedly poll.
If the phone tracked more locally it could not poll GPs until it detects locally that it's moved enough, so if you weren't moving you wouldn't be updating your position very often.
Also I read something that reckons that the game servers are currently all hosted in the US, which would explain the laggy battle experience in Europe. (Freezing at 1hp left, never being quite sure what's hit your character or good times to attack).
That's how the Android Location service works, unless you intentionally bypass it. You ask the location service to update you when it determines the user has moved X feet.
I suppose that would enable further cheats such as not wasting pokeballs on ones you know will fail by peeking into the future.
The throw itself is client-side though, so I suspect it's already possible to cheat with "perfect throws" every time.
For example, they don't cache anything client side (even Pokestop assets), nor do they timeout/retry/prefetch after a network disconnect during a Pokemon capture (which is very annoying on spotty 3G networks). Last but not least, battery consumption is insane. Don't go out without a spare battery! Backend side, I also noticed a few cases of "blinking pokemon" in the nearby grid. Surely symptomatic of synchronisations issues between instances of distributed systems (dirty reads?).
I enjoy the game a lot, but regarding the number of issues, it's still a beta.
1. I tried playing this game, but really don't enjoy it. It feels to me it's not about strategy as much as it's "the one who puts in the most hours of playing wins". Felt actually like work to me.
2. I don't see this game being a long term super success, as it is now. I'd imagine cohort analysis would show the first cohorts waning in usage in the next several weeks. I imagine as more people begin playing, the overall popularity of the game will continue to rise for a while, but that hides the fact that the game has a limited shelf life with the masses.
Just watch where you're going, okay?
A few people have been sprinting and using Pokemon/Pokestops as rest time.
It all depends on how much exercise you want.
(I've walked/biked like 20km in game so far. About 5-10km was hiking at altitude in Colorado, on rough terrain.)
You're finding common interest (but in real life). You're connecting (but in real life).
I'm playing in Germany.
We get it, Pokemon Go is popular. Seesh.
call me if that's still the case in 3 months.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/15/pokemon-go-go-go-go-go-go-...
Of course, if you don't already have one a Bluetooth GPS receiver appears to cost at least 5x as much as a low-end external battery and 2-3x as much as a pretty substantial one.
I'd love to instance that local shopping mall :).
Just hide if you're not personally interested. IMO flagging that would be an abuse of the facility and just wasting moderator time.
2. Sure, many players will play less as time goes on, but with the kinds of numbers they're seeing now they'll be massively popular for a long time.
I certainly couldn't see myself being a devotee even if they added those features, but kids the world over devoted countless hours to the gameboy games, and that's pretty much what they were.
P.S. When "playing" equates to "biking around town, walking around town, etc", I'm A-OK with play volume being an important element to "success"!
http://www.businessinsider.com/pokmon-go-will-get-pokmon-tra...
with less users, the issues have manifested less often. i was starting to wonder if they had addressed their scale issues, but i've noticed less people on the streets playing, so it might just be that the demand is much less.
Not having proximity based P2P battling tells me the implementors never played Pokemon. It's the other half of the game.
It's like directing a Batman movie without first reading the comics. It shows a complete distain for the culture, history, players of the Pokemon universe.
However, games that implement vegas like mechanics turn their games into an addiction. I can see that happening with this game as there are 720+ pokemon and only 150 in the game currently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon
Though, this game is kind of like the iPhone, it's "cool" to be seen playing it (I presume, I've never played but do witness the pokehorde often). It may stick around for various reasons.
Idly playing on your phone outside is not so bad in summer, but in winter? Forget about it. The new season of [xyz] is back on.
The level differences will become more marginal as well as the experience required to level raises exponentially.
I'd be interested to see articles detailing technical difficulties that they may have overcome, but I've seen way too many articles just saying "Pokemon GO now has more X than Y".
I feel rather hipster about it, haha.
My prediction for the next big thing? The AR equivalent of snapchat filters that you superimpose over yourself, your friends or enemies, visible to people whose cameras are running the AR snapchat app. Unfortunately, adverts.
Also: obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1705/
I'd like to know how many users have AR mode turned off. Because while it is a fantastic part of the app, making it more immersive, if most users don't actually have it turned on it means that AR still isn't there yet for smartphones.
Copycats better make original IP first.
That said, they'd probably swim in cash on a Pokemon one.
I change the names in my replacements to something like "The King".
For a level 10 pidgey that's a lot of confidence.
I do this for a few reasons: 1) I can. 2) It's fun and keeping gyms is ridiculously hard. 3) It gives new players a chance to unseat my gym and get their daily bonus. 4) Powering up gyms is way under powered at this point. 5) This also gives other people on my team to power up the gym and reach their own goal if they like.
I'm already seeing groups of random people gathering around gyms when they see they are taken by their team/in the process of being taken away.
The meta-game that might develop is interesting, and only possible due to wide adoption.
Whether you like it or not, it's become an overnight GLOBAL phenomenon and a unique one at that.
Could that not be what's intriguing? I.e. everybody is paying attention to it now? We're wondering if this will be the first "killer app" for AR?
My friends playing it have all discovered new things in a city they've lived in for years because of Pokemon Go. So even if they play the game with the camera turned off while catching a Pokemon, there's still a map always on showing how in-game places match up with the real world.
This translates to a weird phenomenon: the other day when we were standing outside a gym by a church, my friends and I noticed on our phone screen that a battle was happening at this gym. Instinctually, me and a few others took our eyes off our phone and turned our head to look at the spires of the church, since gyms are shown in-game as tall structures.
It sounds strange, perhaps even cheesy, but Pokemon is engaging our imaginations in a pretty interesting way.
Isn't that how augmented reality works? I can't think of any other way to do it, unless you are tracking specific objects and overlay something on top of it.
I was hoping for something like this: https://youtu.be/GnuQzP3gty4?t=22s
Of course in reality the market pressure for protection from death is much greater than the market pressure for improved battery life while seeing weaker results in the market. Your battery life is not a market pressure issue.
Which is 100% untrue for Overwatch. They've clearly learned their lessons.
It's "good enough" for the week of the sale, upgrading all the servers for a week of super heavy traffic just to see them idle the rest of the year isn't a great business plan
However, in the real world it might not be reliable enough or might be too costly in terms of battery life to justify putting it in a phone app that was developed as quickly as possible
That SLAM thing is interesting though, especially if you can integrate it into an AR game. Because it can make 3D maps of the environment, you might be able to use players of said AR game to go out and scan the world. One can incentivize scanning unscanned areas by placing 'rare pokemon' in them or giving in game items for areas scanned. If one has enough people playing, one could build google streetview style maps that are updated everyday.
Except we can do much better than streetview because we have the 3d model of stuff. A big continuously updated 3d map like this is valuable. We can use it for mundane stuff like 'does the local bar have any specials today', but we can also use it for stuff like navigating robots. If one has a big map of where all the trees and buildings are, it makes it much easier to do drone delivery.
[0]http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/ [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3s3M0mokNc [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBI5HwitBX4
As for the using an AR game as cover for 3D scanning and mapping of the world at large, technically it's a grand idea but on the other hand the privacy implications would be immense. You'd have to be very careful how you did it.
There's just a staggering difference between the number of 9s offered by game companies vs more reliable parts of the industry. Shit most online games still don't have login servers that scale easily to meet dynamic load.