Would you pay real money for an advanced tracker?
I imagine that Niantic's top 3 priorities are to make money, make the game more fun, and reduce costs (server load per real trainer) by reducing the number of bots.
I think if Niantic sold an "advanced tracking scope" in the shop, and you could only get it with real money (not pokecoins), they could accomplish all 3 goals:
give high level trainers - who have demonstrated their willingness to invest time and money into the game - something worth buying in the shop. I can afford to invest a few bucks a month in the game, but the odds of getting what I want from an egg are so low that I don't generally buy incubators any more. the nearby and sightings features that we have today are frustrating because mostly you see worthless stuff, and you miss good stuff that may be nearby. Chasing down rare creatures is the best part of the game for me, so I would pay money for a better hunting experience. After all, people pay for third party trackers. a better game tracker would reduce demand for third party trackers, which I think mostly use bots with fake accounts that eat up server capacity. But the premium tracker needs to cost real money or the bots will use it too.So, what features would you want to see in an advanced tracker? I would want smart, customizable filters so I could get rid of the pidgeys, rattatas, weedles and venonats that clog my sightings, and see more of the things I actually want to chase. And I'd want custom alerts or notifications when the specific mons I'm looking for are nearby at pokestops (so I can safely and easily find them). I would probably even be willing to pay a small "per use" fee for custom notifications, if that's what it takes to keep the bots at bay.
What do you think? Would you buy it, and what features would you want?
Answers
I think filter out all the useless stuff so that we could only see the pokemon we want to catch. If its a pokemon I want to go and catch then I can go. Its random where that pokemon you are looking for would pop up.
Im level 34 and I have a go plus. I dont even open the screen that often because I know its all useless stuff. I did donate to third party trackers when I was actually hunting because that gave me more rare pokemon to catch than the actual game tracking system.
The twitter feeds really help, I perfer those because they notify when a rare pokemon has spawned.
Pokémon filter, IV filter, 2 tabs, one for Nearby, other for Sightings. remove spawns and make the rest more variable, at the beggining of the game I had like 5-6 spawns around my apartments building I could reach within 5 minutes, on those first months I saw Blastoise, Venusaur, Snorlax, some Dratinis, Chansey and Porygon without even playing too much.
A lot more spawns have been added during the time, now I can see like 20 spawns on the same area, but always trash, 99% of them are rattata, pidgey and weedle, not a single rare or semi rare mon on the last 3 months or so, it make me feel very frustrated every time I open the app and look at the nearby...seeing 9 pidgey on the closest stop makes me even mad sometimes.
At least with the old tracker if there were 9 pidgeys I only saw one on the tracker!
I like the 2-tab tracker of Meloscomo below (or above, I guess, at present), if not perhaps a 3-tab tracker where players controlled the third tab. What could work is if the "Sightings" tab generated pokemon that other players chose to report (after encountering it on screen) to the general population. If a player moved a pokemon from their Sightings tab to the active tracker and then encountered it, everyone that reported seeing it would get a candy for that pokemon per such person (up to 5).
