You hit the nail on the head... I don't even think the developers know the point of the game. They just know that people will play it mindlessly, and many will spend money to get ahead in it. To them we're just sheep with credit cards. They know people will tire of it eventually, but not before they've made millions.
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Is the point of Pokemongo to just collect creatures?
I am confused about what the point of Pokemongo is at this point.
Previous to this last update the point seemed to be a regional battle between 3 teams to control territory. I was collecting creatures and resources to help my team. We were constantly battling the other 2 teams to expand/recapture territory.
I made some new friends in my neighborhood and we were all working together as a team, which is what I thought PokemonGo was about.
But with the new changes that is gone. There is no way to hold territory. The is no difference between putting a 2,880 CP Snorlax into a gym or a 10 CP Pidgey.
Why should I bother trying to power up my defenders or search for better creatures? Is there any point to getting more stardust?
Last night a Dratini popped up outside of my house. I didn't get excited because what is the point. How is a Dragonite going to change anything for me?
In the end I went and caught the Dratini, but I honestly don't know why.
So my question to this community is: What is the point of Pokemongo in this current state?
Is there an actual game to be played?
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Answers
Do a basic search. The point of the game is to get outside.
Interview with Niantic CEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpMPSt3vPlM
The balance change is very good to stimulate this I believe. You don't need to grind to level 30+ to be able to contribute in gym fights! Yay for most people! Nay for the top 10 strongest players in the area that were hogging all the pokecoins, who now have to go outside and fight again.
Yup they are making this game for casual players as much as possible and a "casual" player is just out there to catch all the pokemon. Problem is, only the competitive are left playing this game. If they really cared to make it more competitive they'd ban more spoofers, make leveling up 30+ more rewarding. But nah, being level 30+ doesnt matter, defenders don't matter. You are just a blend of everyone else in the crowd of pokemon players that don't matter.
We need more pokestops and gyms, pvp to make it more competitive and to give sense on the power ups, several changes on gym mechanics, exchanges, some quests, legendary poke, mew and mewtwo. The only thing that gives me hope is that the game is only 0.45 and have too much changes to be worked. All this things that i said should be worked BEFORE think about 2nd generation IMO.
The point of this game is:
* To be outside.
* To explore your neighbourhood.
* To go on pokemon adventures in the physical world.
And the short story is, to do that you need a reason to go outside constantly. Whether that is to catch pokemon, to get candies or to fight battles.
And high turnover of gyms is MUCH better at achieving this than stagnant gyms, because...
As a defender you won't hold a gym for long, so to get your coins, you need to go OUTSIDE and fight for it, again and again.
As an attacker you now have a reason to attack even if you see snorlax, lapras and dragonite stuffed into a lvl 10 gym. Think of the pain and agony you will cause them if they have to train it back up! But to do this, you will need to either get a lot of potions or train your pokemon up strong. To do this you need to go OUTSIDE.
Also there is nothing good about being able to defend a territory. If your neighbourhood is 70% on one team, then nobody benefits. The gyms will go stagnant and people on the same team can't get coins because it's full. The other teams won't have a reason to attack. The only ones winning in this situation are the people who did some hardcore grinding or the GPS spoofers who miraculously managed to rack up 5 fully powered dragonite and is on the top of every gym in the area.
I applaud this balance change.
Edit: right now I'm looking at a freshly converted gym, trained up to lvl 3. In it are:
245CP Golbat from a lvl 7 player.
376CP Chansey from a lvl 22 player (not sure what happened there).
1103CP Hypno from a lvl 20 player.
It's adorable! And I'm really happy to see even level 7 players in gyms now.
Before the patch I went outside to play PokemonGo all the time.
Now I just wait until 1 hour before my coin turn in time. I go out and quickly collect my coins and then I turn off the app.
I don't see how these changes encourage me to play more as everything I do between the time I turn in for my reward and the next time I can collect my reward is meaningless.
That means you're outside at least once a day. Which is still mission accomplished for pokemon go's game design.
You surely have read about the Gen 2 pokemon being datamined from the app's code. I'd like to see you claim when those are released you have no reason to go outside. Probably you're going to have, mmmh I dunno, roughly 100 reasons to go outside more than daily.
My point being, Niantic is doing their best to keep as many people as possible entertained enough to go outside frequently, while making money, while not killing anyone in traffic. And all the changes I see them making are reflecting this.
If I couldn't accept this more casual nature of this game, then it's the wrong choice of game. You want competitive, play an e-sports game. CS:GO or something or train up for tournaments with one of the main pokemon games.
I am only doing this while I wait to see if they change they system in what I consider a positive direction. If they don't change the system I will not be around for Gen 2 as there is simply no reason to collect Gen 2.
Without a vibrant battle system where your pokemon have some affect on the system then Gen 2 is meaningless.
The game system is nice for weak players, this is certainly "adorable" but this is totaly unfair.
Is it fair to spend time outside catching thousands of pokemons when you can stay lvl 12 and play half an hour a week?
There is no recognition to those who invest time to the game...
In addition this system is a great help for the players playing only by themselves.
By now you can play alone, there is absolutely no problem to destroy gyms.
On the contrary you must play with different teammates to upgrade your gym.
Gym that can be down so fast that teamwork became useless...
What is the point now to make a lvl 10 gym if only one guy can take it down as fast as you can upgrade it with 3 or 4 guys?...
What was interesting in the patch we had before was that the community started to play all together, establishing strategies, placing pokemon strategicaly in the gyms so that it could be hard to take down for other teams that were attacking.
The last system was promoting teamplay for attacking but also for defending gyms.
That was much more exciting to play with other players than staying all by yourself.
Where I live there are only a few players in the yellow team.
That didn't mean they were absolutely banned from the gyms by blue and red team.
They were only a few but they were so organised that they were controlling a lot of gyms in more than 5 cities nearby.
All the point was organization.
And we could see a lot of different defenders, not only snorlax/lapras/dragonite.
There was slowpokes, machamps, venusaurs, polywrath, etc.
It was interesting to see all the struggle for one gym.
Even before we could have level 10 gyms going down when players were organised.
By now how do we play?
Only attack other teams' gym, put a pidgey in and grab the coins?...
As you say... adorable... but so ridiculous.
Edit: If they really want new players to take place in gyms they'd better create a system with trainers' level.
For example gyms for lvl 2 to 10, for lvl 11 to 20, etc.
But you will say that this is not fair for the lvl 11?
Well that will give him motivation to lvl up then.
It's also a way to make people play "outside" if this is the real goal of Niantic.
you didn't catch the point.
The problem is not low levels in the gym.
The problem is to play alone with this new patch.
People are no longer playing as a team with other guys. They are just going to play alone, taking a few gyms and leaving it lvl 1.
And what then? Everybody is going to have it's turn to the gyms and take is coins/dust leaving the gyms lvl 1?
What a selfish point of view...
The patch we had before was much more interesting strategicaly speeking.
Even if you didn't know your teammates, everybody found ouf that they could have a strong gym by having different types of pokemons. And their place in the gym was also very important.
Having 3 dragonites in a raw is so week... no need to change pokemon. You keep using your dewgong or cloyster and that's it.
That was much more interesting because it forces players to meet others, to play together in order to attack gyms of the other teams but also to defend their own gyms.
Last update was more competitive. You could take down a gym by yourself but it could take sometimes 45 minutes. And a nice amount of potions.
This is why it was necessary to play with others.
And in the end isn't it more funny to play with different guys instead of playing alone?
If you are using different accounts it doesn't make you play with others.
For a free to play game with no ads it's extremely good. That being said, there's a lot of lost potential. I can say I've had a lot of fun playing it, but sad at how gyms were implemented. I want to invest in crappy Pokemon and make them good. I don't like dragonites, snorlaxes, etc.
They are thinking waay too long term with Pokemon releases. They should be releasing a few new ones every month to keep things fresh. It's a freaking mobile game, it needs to hold our attention with quick content. Not once a year or whatever they plan to do.
The game's not perfect and I think they've yet to find the perfect balance on gym dynamics but I appreciate the fact that they're trying changes. Allowing six trainers did shift it horribly to Level 10 gyms filled with nothing but tier 1 defenders. The new changes have arguably made it a little too easy to knock down gyms. How they find the happy balance I don't know.
For me gyms are a fun part of the game, but completing the Pokedex comes first.
It's tricky to design a game that both encourages new players to partake yet rewards endurance and dedication. The only thing I can think of is limiting gyms to one of each Pokemon.
This update completely kills the point of gyms simply because there is no reason for underdog teams to even fight gyms anymore. The team with the higher local numbers will always have a stronger presence because there's more of them to go around, but now they've made it so that it's near impossible for the underdog teams to fortify their own gyms or hold the gyms at all. As an Instinct player, level 10 Instinct gyms in my area still lasted less than 12 hours even with fantastic lineups before the update. Why would I even bother trying to take gyms anymore knowing in advance that there is even less of a chance for the gym to get strong or last even a few hours. Niantic needs to realize that the people who are more likely to continue playing and spend money on the game are the people who are playing competitively. This severe handicap to the competitive aspect only increases their odds of losing more players as the serious players will likely lose interest now and the fair weather players they're trying to attract are gonna leave anyway as soon as they get bored.
I am also on team Instinct, and before the patch the Instinct players had managed to takeover a part of town. The gyms were constantly under attack with one or two flipping every day (sometimes all of them flipping in a single day), but as a team we worked to build them back up and maintain them. It took a lot of work, but without that effort there would be no Instinct gyms at all.
Since the patch almost all of those gyms have flipped. All of the level 10 gyms that are left are red or blue. The yellow gyms were the first to go as Instinct has the smallest player base.
We had developed a community of Instinct players that were working together. We would meet and play together, and we really did develop a community around our team. We even had team Instinct chat.
But that is all gone. Now it is just everyone for themselves. None of the gyms go over level 3 or 4 anymore.
The team element is gone.
Yup.
The whole point in going outside was to collect Pokemon.
The whole point in collecting Pokemon is so you can battle them.
If you take away the point of collecting Pokemon, you take away the reason to get out of the house.
I've been feeling this way for over a month. Quitting on and off.
I don't mind them involving newer players but seriously, the fun is in battling the Pokemon. If that's not fun, I'm not going to collect them anymore.
Otherwise, you're literally just doing it so you can stare at pictures of made-up creatures on your screen. It's bad enough they took away the RPG element of leveling Pokemon, which makes you feel connected to it and like you had a hand in it being strong....now they're taking away the battling too.
It's a shame.
Players just have to accept that the game is slowly evolving, Nantic has to be reactive a present and some of the short term fixes are less than ideal.
I complained about level 10 stagnant gyms, there are now fewer of these and over time more gyms will be in play which is a good thing and fair to lower level players.
At the same time, I understand that higher level players who are used to camping in gyms for days on end are perhaps unfairly disadvantaged by the most recent changes.
Getting a game balance that is fair to all is very difficult and is obviously taking a bit of trial-and-error.
Nantic are at least proactive and are trying a number of new approaches.
They haven't got the right solution yet, that may take more R&D and some trial-and-error.
But IMO the game balance shifting from time-to-time is a good thing.
Stacked level 10 gyms were too difficult for solo player players to take down in terms of resources and time. For beginner players they were no hope.
Now some of the lower level players get a chance to participate in gym battles when there were frozen out for a few weeks.... short term that is a good thing.
Long term the right balance is very elusive, variations on this discussion could still be happening if 5 years time. (Perhaps with a different generation of players.)
I guess the point of PoGo will be different for different people- for me it's just a way to wind down and encourage me to walk a bit further than I would otherwise.
I must admit I've taken it fairly seriously though and am getting a bit frustrated to be at level 24 with no Snorlax, Lapras or Dragonite yet... very disappointed every time I hatch another 10km egg...
I've never played computer games before, but I guess most games probably go through a stage where people get frustrated.
i think they did this for the game to be more open to all kind of players, since the low lvl. you see, before this patch all gyms were lvl 10 full of 2k - 3k beasts, and even when one gym is from your team you cannot put your mons there. Now you need to go and reclaims all gyms almost everyday, and everyone gets coin. Only the selfish / hardcore / lazy players didnt like it, just accept it.
Exactly. Of course most of the people that frequent forums will be upset, they take the game serious and tend to think it's their right to be in all the gyms for some reason. I doubt niantic expected people to hold 10 gyms for any amount of time.
People should just be happy to hold the gym closest to their house. It's just a casual mobile game.
It still takes a dedicated player to take down a gym. In my area, some gyms were built up again to lvl 6-7, but no one took it down. Even if it takes 20-30 minutes, people (adults with kids), don't really want to waste the time to even do that...as it is still 20-30 minutes and more if it's a lvl 10.
I can see in college areas, gyms change hands constantly, but in my suburbs, even 20-30 minutes is too much it seems...
Overall, I think gyms will still get built up, but maybe in not all areas and not by the same people since some people aren't as skilled and don't dodge and it takes a lot longer...With 6 mons, you should still be able to get 500 a pop or more.
