Statistics, July 2016

Tags

AdVenture Capitalist, Ingress, Marvel Heroes, Pokemon Go, Vikings

I’m a little bit late for this statistical review having just returned from Yosemite and parts nearby.    Even in 2016 the Internet coverage for Verizon in the area is really bad.

Vernal Falls. No Internet nearby.

Ingress

Got a bunch of Ingress in and it remains my traveling game.

• 35,284,000 AP.   1.2 million for the month, not bad considering I spent a week in Sketchy Internet Land.
• 2,307 walking kilometers (IE, 1,434 miles), so I added 64 to this badge.   That’s going to take a while yet.
• 1,712 Unique Captures and 3,438 Unique Hacks.   Added a bunch as I traveled.   And yet, not even halfway to platinum for either.
• 1,823,000 MU scored.   That’s 28k for the month, which is really low.

Pokemon Go

In the one month the game’s been out I find myself kind of bored with it, but still playing it.   Great way to kill time while waiting for an Ingress hack timer to refresh.    Level 15; Caught 60 Unique Pokemon, and seen 61.

AdVenture Capitalist

They’ve changed up the game somehow – I think they’ve added additional spots for you to buy higher % efficiency for your angels.   Whatever it is, it’s working – I’m at 4600 newspapers on both Desktop and Mobile, looking forward to 5000 coming at some actual reachable point in the future.

Marvel Heroes

31 heroes at level 60, and passing the cosmic trial on more of them ; Hawkeye has passed as has Black Panther.    It’s all about two things to pass the trial – Good artifacts with Blessing of Hela; and Omegas.    With DCL not having gone live yet I am going to try and pass as many heroes as possible and see where that comes up.    The odd thing is, if they all pass it, I feel like I’ll be done with the game.    And if the trial disappears I might also be done with it.

Have they Ruined Ingress ?

Tags

Ingress, Pokemon Go

Work is very busy.   But Friday wasn’t bad.   I spent a lot of time cleaning up the messes and documenting, and finally got finished.   So that meant, I felt good at last about taking a 20-30 minute Ingress walk again; haven’t done that in two weeks or so.

Ie, Before Pokemon.

Outside the Story Tavern Portal/Pokestop

Downtown Burbank is transformed.    3 pm on a Friday saw so many Pokemon players.   A group of four 20ish men playing in front of the Fuddruckers.    Three 15ish teenage boys pounding on the Chinese restaurant’s pokestops.   Solo 18ish teenage girl awkwardly walking along and searching for Pokemon.    Two 30ish men walking along with a tablet out and trying to decide where to go next.

Now me, I’m good.   I have been walking the streets of Downtown Burbank for 18 months or so, trying to avoid detection by anyone I know.    If they see me, I don’t want them to see me playing Ingress.   Ingress players are very thin on the ground and tend to be invisible; it helps you to play the game well.    Yet I’m sure some of them looked at me and said “He’s gaming”.   The stupid half-smile on my face as I spotted people might have tipped them off.   My walking straight to the portals/pokestops would have helped too.

My overriding reaction is – They’ve ruined Ingress !   How am I supposed to wander around invisible now ?    Anyone paying attention knows that these groups of people are playing a game, and I’ll be seen the same way.    I may be good, but I’m not THAT good; people are still going to make the connection, especially with all these other hamfisted players staggering around or sitting staring at their phones.

I remember my noobness in Ingress, oh yes, I was the same as you once young trainer.

Downtown Burbank, Saturday Morn 7/16

The Ingress traffic is lighter.   No doubt about it, either Pokemon, or summer vacation, is making the turnover a lot less.   I did a lot of this, and cleaned out a bunch of green, and it’s still standing after Friday night.    So that’s good, as far as I’m concerned.

Not once did I start the Pokemon app during the walk – too much Ingress to do.   But I now have 230 pokemon and will need to evolve them soon.  Not much to do today, so I’ll be AR gaming if I can manage it.

I’m sure Ingress isn’t ruined, but I’m not welcoming the change in the game.

When you launch a game but don’t tell anyone how it works

Tags

Pokemon Go

What is the maximum level for Pokemon Go ?    Not disclosed.   My previous certainty of knowing the answer – based on a CNET article – has been unsettled after multiple trainers report 20-ish levels achieved.

What is the maximum number of Pokemon in the game ?    It is suggested by my game that there are 133, but rumors of higher figures exist.

What is your inventory limit ?   Not disclosed.   I currently have a 350 item limit – which used to be 250 – and a 250 pokemon limit.

What do you get by owning a gym ?   “Stardust and Pokecoins”.   How much ?   Not disclosed.

What is the maximum level of a gym ?   Not disclosed.   How many gyms can you control ?  Not disclosed.

There is a real vacuum of information about this game.   Apparently the most important Pokemon is Gyarados.  Maybe I’m supposed to know based on Internet lore and from the past game wikis, but I never played a different Pokemon game.   I don’t trust a wiki for a different game, for my current game.

Fear my deadliest Pokemon.

After one week of enjoying this, I’ve settled into Pokemon Collector mode.    I’m waiting until I get to “Max Pokemon Inventory”, then I plan to pop a lucky egg and evolve as many beasties as I can, keeping the top three survivors in CP for each Pokemon.    What remains to be seen is if it’s worth keeping any of the “Lower Tier” Pokemon.

For example, Machop evolves into Machoke.   If I have a Machoke, should I keep any Machops ?   It’s difficult to say.   I discovered that they both share the same pool of candy currency, suggesting I should just dump the little guys.

Niantic and Nintendo don’t seem to be trying to enlighten us, and I don’t have the programming savvy to take the app apart.   I’m sure someone is working on it right now.    Niantic is working on expanding the global launch, which in all fairness is a good thing for them to do too.    Given that I read one estimate of $1.6 million a day in Pokecoins purchased – and ONLY ON APPLE DEVICES – it sounds like they’ll be raking the cash in.

From what I can tell, the gym battles seem to be twitch based contests instead of the more cerebral/nerdy types of battles I prefer.   It doesn’t help that most gyms I see have 600+ CP Pokemon sitting on them that would lay waste to Pinsir.   I’ve even seen one beast with over 1000 CP daring us all to go after him.    So based on all of that I’m not really battling at gyms.   The first things to go to free space in inventory are healing and revive items since I don’t use them.

The nearest gym

This gym changes hands several times a day, suggesting that the kids are much better at the gym battles than a “barely senior citizen” like myself.

How long can/will I find it interesting to grab more of the same 40 pokemon available in my area of SoCal ?   Not disclosed.

Poke-car plus Halfway To Max

Tags

Pokemon Go

My favorite thing about Pokemon Go is, I now have something to write about.   Suck it, Writer’s Block !

Some of the mechanics of Pokemon Go are getting figured out.

• It’s all about your level, and the maximum level is 20.    The level of your trainer controls what creatures you will see out there, so the higher level you are the better.    This makes me want to spin the wheel at every Pokestop (50xp each) as well as catching all the little creatures.
• There do not have to be portals/pokestops nearby for you to find Pokemon.   I am finding them everywhere.   This is actually an important game improvement over Ingress, which if you wanted to play, you could only do it at a portal.
• I hear a lot about people trying to find the little buggers.   The nearby ones show up on the bottom right, hinting that you should wander around and look for them.  I’ve not bothered with that yet, and I’ve reached level 10.   If one pops up, great.   If not, I’ll keep moving.
• I do not think the Pokestops have a burnout time.   You can spin the wheel every five minutes and sit there forever.    So of course, my inventory is full and I keep discarding items.   I have a desktop pokestop.
• The Gyms can probably have 10 levels – the 30 levels in the Beta changed.

Then there’s cargressing – that’s the term for playing Ingress in the car.   I suppose this is Carpoking or Poke-Car instead.   How does Pokemon play in a moving vehicle ?   I set out to find the answer since I got into these games because I crawl in traffic for hours every day.

The Pokemon show up on your phone even if you’re going 60 mph.   Good luck tapping one in time if you’re doing that, to start the capture battle.   If you’re moving at a reasonable 15 mph or even less, it’s much easier to tap them.   And that’s all you need to control that Pokemon – at that point, it will either be captured or it will disappear.

I’ve driven 10 miles with a pokemon in “combat mode” ready to throw balls at it, then stopped, then captured the thing.    I’ve done this multiple times too, driving along and catching one, then continuing to drive and catching another.    This leads me to the conclusion that Pokemon does not have a speed lock.

Pokestops seem to be the same, but the spinning mechanic pretty much guarantees you can’t spin many while driving past.    Add in the huge connectivity issues and you can forget it – this is a monstrously laggy game.

So one thing is very enjoyable about this – no matter where I am, a Pokemon might pop up on my phone to be captured.   So I’m finding the app is staying open now, instead of Ingress.    You keep Ingress open all the time for XM capture, which is not really that important anyway.

Now we’re talking.

Now, it does not bode well for longevity in the game if I’m halfway to maximum level after a few days.   Other than filling out my pokedex with all 133 beasties, I’m not sure I’d want to do anything else in the game.

The Pokemon Juggernaut

Tags

Ingress, Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go.    Today I am seeing it covered in Google News.   Not in the “You might be interested in” category, or technology etc.   This is being covered in the Big Story section.

Wow. Hard to believe.

I am smack in the middle of the biggest gaming phenomenon that I’ve ever been part of.    I can’t recall anything this big, where it literally hits tons of normal people, and I’m in it.   I counted 8 articles on Kotaku in the space of a few days, and Wilhelm did a good job covering much of the media hype.    People are even talking about this in my office – all these financial types with no interest in gaming.

Every news outlet is talking about this.    The Pokemon Go Subreddit is now one of the largest, I believe 4th most subscribers.   The Reddit memes and jokes are in every subreddit.    And again, Wilhelm did a great job linking up all the gamers blogging about it including sending yours truly some traffic.

The game has been out for less than a week – then again, that’s not that weird.    Movies are popular when they first come out and are forgotten in a few months after that.    But it’s out for one week, and everyone is playing it, and I do mean that literally.

Sunday.   My boy is back from camp and I’m letting him veg out.    But I’m going out to do a few things –

1. Buy him a bike seat.
2. Buy propane – camping trip soon.
3. Ingress, Canyon Country is too green.
4. Pokemon, if I remember to play it.

As I do the drive past portals I switch between Pokemon and Ingress, then come up on a spot with a gym.    I try out my first gym battle.   Blue has taken the portal with a single Raticate.    I try training/adding a Pokemon, which means I have to fight the creatures already there.   I lost.   I just tried out non-evolved and non-powered-up Pokemon with low CP against a 300 point creature and I got smacked down hard.    I glyphed the Ingress portals nearby and got ready to drive off to the next spot.

And what do I see  ?    A gang of about 6 kids walk past, clearly playing the game, and take the gym for Yellow team.   They put a 400 CP monster to guard it.    I smile and drive off.

With phone on dashboard, your trainer runs like a maniac along the roads at 45 mph.

Then I get to the bike store.    This is a neat spot – directly behind it is a cluster of four portals (A church property) I can use to blue up a significant chunk of Canyon Country.    But why is that guy idling in the parking lot of the church for ?   I spy the Pokemon app on the passenger’s device and snicker.

I didn’t end up snickering for long.    While I bought the bike seat and Ingressed, no fewer than FOUR vehicles showed up to Pokemon the area.   I waved to the one couple, who looked at me standing outside of my truck with interest.    The universal greeting seems to be to hold up your phone and smile.   That’s when I realized, this game is BIG NEWS.   When they say everyone is playing it, they ain’t kidding.

Evolving a Rattata to a Raticate. I told you this one would be the first.

As I ran the rest of my errands I saw other people walking and staring at their phones – the tell seems to be holding the phone vertically, which is how the AR in the game works.   I turned off the AR view but most people apparently don’t.    The spot by the drug store that had a lot of Pokemon did not disappoint for the live version – I captured six in this little alley by a dry wash, amusingly represented in Pokemon Go as a river.

On the way home I stopped by a different gym and tried out my now-evolved creatures against yet another Red gym.   I burned down a thousand points off of it but it stayed Red.   That’s fine, I’m clearly outmatched here, a successful fight was good enough.   The combat is kind of stupid – tap the phone repeatedly.   Hope your Pokemon kills the other one.    I suppose if I still had good twitchy reflexes I could dodge and time things better but button mashing the screen – is that screen mashing? – worked well enough.

Grew this little guy up into a decent fighter.

But that was yesterday.   Today, I’m at work in Beautiful Downtown Burbank.

There are a lot of Lures deployed out there.

I took my lunchtime Ingress walk across Downtown Burbank and was amazed at the number of people with smartphones out, probably playing the game.   I didn’t spy the game on anyone’s screen this time, but judging by the number of Lures in use (A cash shop item, no less – people are paying cash money already) there are multiple people/groups playing the game.

It would be better if it was actually a better game.    But it’s fun, for now.   And being part of a phenomenon like this is pretty interesting.

Accumulating More Knowledge

Tags

Pokemon Go

I’m beginning to suss out the mechanics of Pokemon Go, now that I can actually log in to the game.

• They DID introduce a point to the gym battles.   The team that holds a gym, will receive various rewards such as pokemon coins and stardust.    I have yet to participate in the gym battles, at least in the Live version, and this was not present in the Beta.

I have found a wild Machop. Time to catch him.

Here is the “Non-AR” version of catching the Pokemon. I like this one best.

Once you work to capture the little guy, this screen pops up which does not use the phone’s camera.   He is at a distance from you – if you’re standing on top of him you barely have to throw the pokeball.    If he’s far away, you really have to chuck it.   This mechanic is well implemented, and irritating if you miss that one that is just too far away to hit.

You can also do the AR version.

It’s kind of interesting.   They have somehow figured out how to put the Pokemon characters onto an appropriate place in the camera stream.   It looks like they are standing on the ground, etc, in whatever your camera is recording.   My Machop sorta looks like he’s standing on my desk.

After throwing a couple of balls –

Captured !

Then there is the Evolve/Power Up mechanic.

My toughest Pokemon, so far.

I have a number of Candy points (Ie, game currency).   I get some each time I capture a pokemon, or release them to the Professor.    (Who is this guy ?   I am probably supposed to know enough Pokemon to know, but I don’t).   The candy are specific to the Pokemon.   Squeal like a pig son !   If you want to evolve your pokemon, you need a LOT of candy for that specific type.    And there are three levels of evolution for each little beastie.

I also have some Stardust.   Unlike the Candy, Stardust accumulates when you capture only, and is a shared resource across your account.    Evolving is the thing you’d really like to do.  It makes your Pokemon a lot tougher.    Power Up makes them incrementally more powerful.

I wonder how long it will take me to accumulate 50 Candy for any one Pokemon type.    I’m laying bets right now, that the first one will be Rattata.

The leveling, clearly, is extremely easy. I think I’ve caught 20 pokemon.

Launch Week for Pokemon Go

Tags

Ingress, Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go was released worldwide over the last week.    The launch was anything but smooth as most launches go, but they did a few things right.

1. They barely advertised the launch.   They seem to have let word of mouth do the work for them, which was good, in the sense it gave them more time to balance the server loads.   This was important, because….
2. The login servers were overloaded.   Or something.    The number of times I tried to connect and got errors was just ridiculous.

This is how you play Pokemon Go for the first 3 days after launch.

I gave up and didn’t worry about it.     Strangely, this the most anticipated and hot game release I’ve seen recently does not have much of an online community or presence.

The beta was basically “Play the game for us!”.    I am sure there were ways to submit feedback, but I couldn’t get past the fact that it was beta (and therefore, not something they wanted anyone to access, only their testers) and there didn’t seem to be any determination to have us give feedback.   Maybe they got enough from others and I was just the load balancer, which is fine.

For the release, I am amazed at the number of places that Pokemon Go is popping up.    This game is all over Reddit for instance, with dozens of memes and jokes.   The real world has found it interesting as well, considering a player found a dead body because she was playing it, and Darwin does not want you going into their police station looking for a Pokemon.

My favorite graphic of the difference between Ingress and Pokemon Go

Now – this is how it works, people.   They buy/rent servers and anticipate low for a game.   The fact that it mucks up the game experience is unfortunate, but they have to find out how many are really going to play.    I’ve been able to log in intermittently since then and actually play, so I’m assuming they are working on smoothing that stuff out.

Pokemon Go is a game about catching Pokemon and little else.    As you wander around the world, which has been sliced up into sections of environments for Pokemon, you find Pokemon and catch them.    “Gotta catch them all” – this is a refrain I’ve heard even as I’ve barely tasted the Pokemon Universe over the years, but it seems like an accurate way to describe the game.   Stop at a Pokestop to get gear for the game.   The Pokestops, are all Ingress portals.

It’s interesting what they did with the Ingress portals.    Some are present, but not all.   The Niantic team seems to have decided to keep only the ones that are not “too many” in an area.    The beautiful Downtown Newhall cluster of portals is not Pokemon’d – there are a few, but nowhere near the 100+ from Ingress.     And their function is mostly to give you pokeballs and other game gear.

Then there are the gyms.   Certain Ingress portals were determined not to be Pokestops, but Gyms instead.   At some point I assume they’ll patch the game and make them have a point, but for now, you can control a gym because… you want to control it for your team.   Many pokemon can be stacked on a gym to control it.    Other than that, it’s a bit boring.  There’s something called candy which allows you to level up your Pokemon, but I haven’t quite figured it out.

Because Pokemon and Ingress, in a sense, share the same reality-based environment, I feel very comfortable making Ingress my ARG of choice and playing some Pokemon at the same time.   So after you do your Ingress thing in an area and wait for portals to cool down enough for another hack, you can start up Pokemon Go and try to catch some little beasties.

What I’m very disappointed in is the loss of the Pokemon environments.   At one point in the beta, you could see them.   The map was a wonderful and colorful chaotic mashup of the real and the not real.   But sadly, they are gone, for whatever reason, and the map is just a flat cartoonish representation of the real world, with pokestops.

Normally I would take more screenshots, but I can barely connect to the game.   See the map under that ?

As I write this I’m again trying to connect and not having success.   Maybe next time.   Assuming I keep playing the game – this really is much more of a kids game than one for the cranky old geeks generation.

Pokemon Go for July 9th

 

Pokemon Go Release Imminent

Tags

Pokemon Go

The Pokemon Go Beta/Field test is ending soon – June 30.   I’ve been part of the test, and I’ve been asked not to disclose anything about it so I will not.   But a couple of things happening make it pretty obvious it’s coming soon for LIVE :

• The Field Test app will stop working June 30.
• Niantic Staffers announced at E3 that the game would be up “Early July/3rd quarter”.
• It is the 3rd quarter.   This is big business, folks, and quarters count.

So I am hoping soon to get started on this game, and document my impressions at that point.    It’s like an irritating scratch that I can’t quite reach, playing the beta, and not being able to blog the experience.

The XM drought – finished (?)

Tags

Ingress, Pokemon Go

It’s been a few days now of having Ingress increase the cube drop rate, and my impression is that effects of the drought are drastically diminished.   The trick now is, instead of XM laying on the ground, it’s taking some of your inventory slots instead.

Not quite rain, more like cubes though.

One effect I hadn’t considered includes the effect on newbies.   They have a lot of trouble getting into this game, despite the often expressed help that experienced players try to give – there’s serious trust issues to overcome, along with a drastically different game model than ever played before.    Phone games do not involve meeting strangers usually.    And with having no XM laying on the ground, they find themselves without any XM to do anything.   Whoops.   Cutting out new players is never a good idea.

So at this point I expect the drought is considered rebalanced, and is now either

1. A permanent game feature.   I hope not !
2. A temporary feature until the next anomaly series, or some future date.

I may get a chance to find out what guiding a newbie feels like.    I have my buddy interested enough in the game to want to try it out.    Now, the trick is, he needs to get a job, which will allow him to get a smartphone, and thus be able to play.   He’s never been able to before since he couldn’t talk his office into buying him a smartphone, but this time he should get one.    Believe me once I get talking about this game I’m an evangelist, and I think I’ve talked him into it.

Ingress is literally a sea change in gaming, and I expect to see my grandkids wandering around the city playing the Farmville of 2036 which involves location-based gaming somehow.    Yet I’m playing the first iteration.    This is the wild west and it’s exciting to be a part of it, and to share it with your friends.

And then there’s Pokemon Go.   Apparently being tested in both Japan and Australia, we’ll see how much fun it ends up being.   If it ends up literally sharing the same portals as Ingress there’s not much stopping everyone from playing both.

No good title for this post

Tags

Ingress, Pokemon Go

The ebb and flow of Ingress has changed a fair amount in Santa Clarita.    Thanks to less blue activity, the disappearance of one L16 agent, the inactivity of some others, and a very energetic green agent moving to the SCV, the valley is almost completely green right now.

Slimed !

I am locked in a bitter battle for specific portals along the 14 freeway, which trade hands constantly, and are key to preventing the SCV from being fielded.    It was a blessing that this week, the kids are not at school; so Dad can get up and Ingress in the early morning hours of the day.    This certainly will not stop the trading of these key portals, however.   But it’s all good.

At Level 15 I find myself much more focused on the best thing I can do for the big picture.   It’s nice to make fields, but I’m mostly trying to decide what will enable the Resistance the best; or conversely (and honestly, most of the time) what will cause the most frustration to Enlightened plans.

That’s all different in Burbank however, where Blue rules the daytime, while often Green makes an appearance at night.    I’ve been pretty successful wiping out green in the Downtown area.

Mostly blue. The ENL put some of that green on the map while I was driving home, natch.

This tiny little area is portal dense but perhaps 2k MU when fully fielded.   I have fun patrolling my area.

One of the merchants knows me now, we always say hi to each other.   This dude is always on his phone outside of his hair salon.   I’m never sure if he’s talking to me, or to whoever is on the phone with him.   I’ve not explained what the hell I’m doing wandering around his business, other than exchanging a few words about people being on the phones all the time – Me Ingressing, and him voicing.

I’ve got the walking down much better.   I *never* backtrack anymore.    I do whatever it is that I’ve decided to do in a line, and walk forward, around blocks, but rarely do the stutter step of “Oh yeah, gotta link that” and jump backwards towards a portal.   Short walks, in the official “break time” that I get, help keep everything blue.

I traveled up to Silicon Valley again, hit some more uniques.  I now have an MUFG dedicated to reproducing “interesting” keys, we’ll see if any of them are ever useful for something like a multi-county field, long block, or who knows what.

In the meantime, from of all things a Reddit comment, I got some interesting information about Pokemon Go.   All to be taken with a grain of salt, since the guy might not know a damn thing, but he was pretty informative about the direction of the game.

• Three teams, not two.    Sounds like a very bad idea to me – keeping three balanced teams just does not happen in traditional MMO’s, everyone flocks to one side.
• Ingress Portals are probably living inside the Pokemon universe.   This could be temporary for the alpha/beta, or could be permanent.   Not sure how that would make sense, but we’ll see.
• Guardian portals will be in areas of high traffic.   Not every portal will be eligible.   The idea being, that if you can hold a portal in an area like that for a long time, it’s a real achievement.    This sounds very positive after the constant cries of Guardian Hunting and my frustration at convincing no one *not to do it* .
• No fielding and no linking.   Not a surprise, that’s not part of Pokemon.    This is also the reason Ingress might survive as a separate game – making triangles is fun as hell.
• With less server load, there might be much more responsive game play.    The number of times I fire a burster and wait for a couple of seconds is way too high nowadays.

But in the meantime, still bursting.   Still fielding.   And lots of linking.