So sometime last month this game called Pokémon Go was released into the wild and app stores blew up and Niantic managed to bring the global gaming community together to support each other while waiting for servers to stop burning.
I work in the city and so I had the joy of seeing the city map fill up with lures all throughout the workday. You always knew when something cool popped up because people would be standing in the same corner together, the suits and the jeans. And everyone would be making that same gesture on their phone like they've never used a touch screen before. Yeah, you know that gesture. Pokéball GO! GO! GO!
The one advantage of being in a rather ill-tempered area like the middle of DC is that you don't get as many people who stop or meander in the streets as they catch Pokémon. Folks familiar with the city know to step aside or risk getting to know what the wrong side of someone else's bed looks like.
I work in between two Pokéstops, which was pretty sweet. I say "was" because I admit I don't play much anymore. I've been level 22 for most of August. I fired up the app today because a friend had posted something about upcoming features. The map was a lot quieter. Perhaps everyone had finished using up their free lures. Maybe most folks just got a bit bored of it, like me.
There just isn't a good end game for me right now. No, I wasn't an avid Pokémon fan before this game launched. I didn't know much about Pokémon at all. The game has gotten me interested in learning a bit so I watch some of the episodes. I'm a gamer and I've always thought a game that got people moving would be cool. That guy that caught them all said he lost like 10 lbs doing it (and a whole lot of sleep).
But for someone like me who doesn't have the childhood dream of "being the very best" and "gotta catch'em all", the game lost its appeal very quickly. There just wasn't a good connection between catching Pokémon, throwing them in the meat grinder, feeding them as delicious candies to your other unwillingly cannibalistic Pokémon, catching more, training more, rinse, repeat. And then gym. And then get your most powerful Pokémon kicked out of said gym before you get around the block. It wasn't a particularly well thought out system. It wasn't created to handle the level of activity the game got. Half a dozen people standing around a gym swapping it back and forth for the equivalent of $0.10 got stale very quickly.
One night we were out in our car battling a nearby gym when we saw another car pull up. We went into stealth mode (read: we dropped down our seats and turned off our screens). Sure enough, it was a fellow Pokémon Go trainer. They fought the gym, assigned a Pokémon and then sped off. A short while later, their name appeared in another nearby Gym. So that was what you needed, at the time. To drive fast, be in a city with lots of gyms, and hope to get the maximum number of gyms before collecting your coins. $0.40? $0.50? I'm pretty sure their gas cost more than that.
Now it seems there's been a bit of chatter on Reddit by some code sleuths who say that it looks like trading and legendary Pokémon may be on the way. A Reddit user posted some interesting Pokémon Go code snippets like Trade_offer and activity_catch_legend_pokemon.
So my parents are going to Asian next month and I told them to get me some Farfetch'd. Since you know... they're region specific Pokémon.
Code sleuthing in gaming has become quite a thing. There are a lot of gamers who enjoy digging into code and looking for the next tidbit. Call me cynical if you'd like, but if a (good) game developer really wanted to keep something quiet, they can and will. If users dig up little morsels of information it is generally because developers leave them there for us to find. So it all boils down to Niantic acknowledging the features that users have been asking for the most, features like trading and legendary Pokémon. They can just say they're working on it. But who hasn't heard that line a hundred times before? Instead, they say it by adding these new ids in and letting users find them. It seems more real. But I think it's healthy skepticism to realize this discovery is also engineered and make them look closer than they are. They've got warning signs for that, you know.
So the question is: when? I'm not quite ready to be hooked back in, especially if one of those upcoming features doesn't include more incentives to battle. Maybe give me a gym badge or something... Gym badges that level up for those gyms! I hope you caught that Niantic, because these tokens are so bland.
