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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.
Levels past L8 don't really matter though. I've been L16 for months, but that's just numbers, no one besides you cares what level you are. If you're playing for the leveling up part, you're doing it wrong.
Go have fun with the actual game. Troll a whiney player. Build a big field. Take over a new neighborhood. Anything but mindless stat grinding.
... 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.