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Pokemon Go: What Nintendo Needs To Learn From Ingress
An anonymous reader writes: Pokemon Go marks Nintendo's biggest move into mobile yet: the augmented reality mobile game makes use of your location as well as your phone's camera to let you interact with pocket monsters in the real world. It's an audacious idea — with an accompanying trailer — but as one writer points out it will have to nail a lot of different systems to build up an active community in the same that developer Niantic has done for its previous game, Ingress. The author looks at Ingress to see where Nintendo and Niantic may draw inspiration, pointing out that the game's portal modding system could prove a great mechanism for allowing Pokemon evolutions. Expect plenty more Pokemon amiibo to interact with the upcoming wristband, too.
[T]he augmented reality mobile game makes use of your location as well as your phone's camera to let you interact with pocket monsters in the real world.
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What Nintendo Needs To Learn From Ingress
When I saw the title, I thought they misspelled Ingres.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
If it is done right it could really work well.
Ingress doesn't seem worth it once you hit a certain level.
Probably the worst criticism of Ingress is the inconsistent application of the rules; Niantic sometimes changes the rules at will. The players refer to this as "calvinball". They're notorious for this, and though they usually do nothing, no one in the community trusts Niantic to do the right thing when they do intervene. We expect them to fuck it up at this point.
Whoever is admin'ing this game needs to learn from the mistakes of Ingress: Be consistent with the rules and stick to them. If some edge case is ambiguous, define it ahead of time instead of simply changing the rules while a global strategy game in in progress.
Considering that Ingress never moderates anything (quick, anyone who's played, what's the dumbest Ingress portal you saw that was never the less accepted and has never been removed?) and completely ignores blatant cheaters (last I checked one of the teams was a billion points ahead of the other, and team scores can never realistically break 200 million), I can't see what could possibly go wrong with this new Pokemon Go thing.
Keep in mind Ingress's portal moderation is so bad that it was news when they decided to remove portals from Nazi death camps.
(My answer to the first question is a car. There's a portal near me that is literally a car. The car has since moved. No amount of reporting the portal for non-existence matters, even when you can clearly see it doesn't exist in Google StreetView. Then there are the portals in the military base near me...)
Niantic is not part of Google anymore. Moo yourself.
I'm glad to know it has an accompanying trailer. For anyone who's interested in seeing the trailer, rather than just being told it exists, it's here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sj2iQyBTQs
...until you realize that there are people who are unable to separate games from real life. What ruined Ingress for me was the continual harassment and bullying from people who forget that it's a game and that there's limits to what is acceptable behavior in a social setting. Shit-talking in a video game is one thing; you generally have a way to squelch unsavory people or otherwise ignore them, but you can't ignore the psychotic tryhards who threatens to shoot you in person if you take their couch portal and they're crazy enough that you're not sure whether they're joking.
If Pokémon Go has PvP (which it seems to, from the trailer material), then I can't wait to see what happens when some neckbeard threatens a little kid over losing a fight or steals/breaks their phone.
This is AR's big moment, its foothold into the mainstream. I've got my fingers crossed that Nintendo can pull it off.
... to build a community.
In fact they were totally surprised how the Ingress-project has worked out.
They were never able to communicate with their community. They never responded in a timely matter to technical problems like outages or major bugs, they never reponded to social problems like Niantic-employees mis-using their power, they changed rules during events, they blocked legit players without giving any reason, while cheaters made the game impossible in whole cities for weeks. They only responded when the pressure of the community was so big that they couldn't ignore it.
However: the Ingress-product is so strong that it survived this, but If there is something to learn, then how you turn large groups of players into indifferent or hostile customers.
but as one writer points out it will have to nail a lot of different systems to build up an active community in the same that developer Niantic has done for its previous game, Ingress.
Nintendo. With Pokemon. Will have to build up an active community. In the same [way] that developer Niantic has done for...Ingress.
Nintendo. Pokemon. Build an active community. In the same way [as] Ingress.
Pokemon. Build community. Same [as] Ingress.
Did I wake up in some other dimension today where Ingress was somehow more popular than Pokemon? Is there something I'm missing, or is this just a joke article?
"Friends don't let CA buy their friends" - Several friends of mine had worked at Ingres, and when Computer Associates bought them, if you wanted to stay you had to sign a really aggressively pro-company agreement, with lots of non-compete and similar clauses (and I assume lower salaries.) They all quit, some of them in groups. CA got the intellectual property, but lost a lot of the intellect and corporate knowledge that gave it value.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Is that it is extremely boring after a while. Do not copy it.