Pokémon: Global OffensiveFollow

I could see the popularity cresting pretty quick. Seems like the sort of game where the commitment to be "productive" ramps up pretty quickly once the novelty of seeing a Snorlax in your laundry pile wears off.

Yeah. There are a lot of people talking right now about how Pokemon Go is affecting everything. People getting out of the house, socializing IRL, going to smaller stores/restaurants because they're pokestops, etc, and how that's changing everything.

That's probably an incredibly short term thing though. The popularity is probably going to fade pretty quickly and when it does most people are going to go back to their previous routines and habits. Years from now people are probably going to look back at the "2016 summer of Pokemon" as an interesting social experiment, not as some fundamental change to society.

Do you just collect a pile of skulls or something? Gotta behead them all?

After playing for a weekend, this checks out:

Ya, I see a lot of Ratata and Pidgeys. I caught a Spearow at the post office when I went to pick up a package.

Then today I went to my grandmothers, and outside her house (a few miles away from me, still sparsely populated) I found a Venomoth (185 CP, took over 12 tries to catch) and an Eevee (one shot).

Still haven't actually battled anything. Seems like I should be able to battle these wild pokemon, I only played the first couple generations of the game, but I seem to remember tall grass and wild pokemon fights.

Still level 4. Only hit up about a dozen pokestops, some on the first day around work, and then the other day when I went to the post office there were a couple around it and the Library.

It's actually much, much easier to attack a gym than it is to defend one.

Even if you have nothing but pokemon with low CP, your odds of winning against a gym are always in your favor. For starters, when you defend a gym, you can only put in 1 pokemon per person to defend it, whereas each person attacking the gym can use up to 6. There also does not seem to be any limit to how many people can attack the gym at the same time.

Let's say you have team A defending gym with 3 people. Each one puts in their strongest pokemon to defend it. Now team B comes along with 3 people as well, but all 3 of them can attack at the same time, with 6 pokemon each. So basically it becomes a 3 vs 1 battle, and 18 vs 3 overall. So even if you leave a godlike Snorlax with 2500 CP, it will only stay there until someone from another team bothers to take it down with whatever hodge-podge of level 500 pidgeots they have. Hell, even if you and 5 other people put all your best pokemon up to defend a gym, all it takes is one person with semi-good pokemon to tear it all down. It's kind of annoying, because it feels kind of pointless battling gyms when it's so easy for them to turn over like that.

One other thing I've noticed that is kind of ****** is how certain pokemon are much, much stronger than others, regardless of CP and type advantage. For instance, if you have all 3 elemental eevees final forms, you will begin to notice that Vaporeon is way stronger than the others, even if they're all the same level. Vaporeon has much more base HP than the other two, and can attack at a much faster rate. In any other pokemon game, there is no reason at all a Vaporeon should be able to take on a Jolteon twice its level and win, given electric is super effective against water-- but no, for some reason Vaporeon in this game has been made to have this huge advantage.

Having found this, I have been completely neglecting my other pokemon and strictly leveling my two vaporeons using all my stardust on them and nothing else. Max HP and attack speed seem to be the only two things that really matter in this game, and you can't even tell what their attack speed is until you try it out in battle.

This implies a level of coordination I will never put into the game.

Which is also why I think the popularity will crest relatively soon. You have a ton of people who are just like "Haha, look at that screenshot of a Meowth next to his cat" and downloading the game. Once the novelty of seeing Weedles wears off and you're expected to "do things", I see the game getting set aside by a lot of people.

That said, I was amused to see that my usual lunch spot is a Gym so I'll have to try lobbing some Pokemon at it 'cause what else am I gonna do with them.

I'm hoping in the near future they will address how easy it is to flip gyms and make it at least a little more balanced. At this point it doesn't really matter how strong your pokemon have or how many people you roll with when ONE GUY with crappy pokemon is all it takes to bring down pretty much any gym no matter how long the other team worked on it.

Seriously. You could leave a magikarp with 10 CP at a gym and it wouldn't last any less than your best 2k Lapras. It's just a matter of time before someone from a rival team shows up either way.

Are we playing the same game? I'd like to see it be more balanced the other way.

I get that higher level people have higher level pokemon and that 2000 CP Vaporeon guarding the gym is going to crush my puny 600 CP Hypno. On the other hand I get annoyed knowing that when I see a gym filled with 1500+ CP pokemon I can't even make a dent in it. It'd be nice if lower level players could help out, even if only a little bit.

And that's great, but I'm only level 10 and my highest level pokemon are only in the 4-600 range. My strongest team can barely even dent a 2k snorelax.

I believe she's saying that she wishes lower level players could contribute more to gym fights so they had something else to do besides catching rats until they're level 20. Especially as the game ages and the gap between casual players and more heavily involved players increases. And she doesn't find, in her experience, beating on high CP Pokemon to be fruitful (and thus, not enjoyable).

There's several ways that could be handled but it would be in their interest to think about it before the game gets a reputation for not being worth playing if you weren't on the ground floor or willing to spend tons of time trying to catch up.

I think a solution involves tiering the gyms, or something similar in effect.