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Niantic on Pokemon GO – Masuda and Miyamoto’s involvement, regular updates planned...

It’s kind of hard to tell how exactly things work. For example, the ring that forms around the Pokémon when you throw the Pokéball – there's not indication for when the best time is to throw the Pokéball. Did you intentionally make it obtuse in order to drive the community to figure the game out?

I can’t say that we were that clever, no. We tried to create UI that people could figure out, but if it’s so obtuse, you for example were having trouble figuring out what it’s supposed to do, then that’s just a failure on our part. We got a lot of feedback during the beta, we made a lot of improvements, we fixed a lot of bugs, but I would put it into that category of something we’d love to make that more so that it’s more obvious.

Interviewer just ruins this guy's day accidentally
 

Cardigan

Member
I bet Nintendo wishes they could do a hostile takeover right about now lol. With their usual QA rigor gotta be a bunch of execs over there tearing their hair out over the connectivity issues. I'd be busting down Niantic's doors to add a few server farms if I were them.
Yeah, cuz if there is one thing Nintendo knows and is experienced in, it's developing and supporting complex online infrastructure!
 
Dude has a point, I went into my first gym battle and just sat there because I thought my Pokemon were going to auto attack. Somethings should've had an explanation

Oh no, he's totally right, I was just amused by

"Boy, this thing sucks! It's clever you made it suck, though."
"That was unintentional."
"Moving on!"
 

wmlk

Member
I don't think it's a bad idea to not explain some things, though. If this game thrives off of social interaction, then you should sorta depend on that to help other players.

The catching thing is dumb, though.
 

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
He seems nice and the updates incoming sound nice and all...

But...

How can he be so clueless on things like virtually no onboarding process then wondering why people don't know wtf they are doing. Like he just seems to shrug off a tutorial.
 

True Fire

Member
Gen 2 was basically an expansion pack of Gen 1 anyway, so I wouldn't mind if they added them in a few months from now. There was also a lot of baby Pokemon that should be included sooner than later.

Gen 3 should be a year off. It was a pretty big overhaul to the Pokemon roster and there's too many Legendaries to really make sense of right now, especially if they keep making factions or faction equivalents.
 

Teknoman

Member
Having teams pitch together to improve stops and gyms sound cool. Being able to find a way to have local battles between teams spark by just passing someone would be cool.
 
I don't think Nintendo could have prepared for this level of stress on the servers. This is pretty unique.

No they were not to know. I get that.

But what they CAN have prepared for is to say, ok, if our servers are overloaded *how will the app behave*. Will it hang? will it give confusing errors? will it ask people to "sign up" when it means "login" and then hang? if the servers get slow, will the app apologise and show proper messages not let people think they're catching something and then force them to kill the app. Can we take it all down and put a message up explaining how long its down for and why.

All that stuff. Stuff that supercell now does well. It takes just one guy, one system engineer, to outline what has to happen when servers are overloaded and to simulate it during app testing. One guy they don't have on staff.
 

Magni

Member
^ they're hiring for server infrastructure folks, they clearly need them. But they also need PR/social media people. The silence has been deafening, it's 2016, not 1994 anymore.

Well, I haven’t talked to Miyamoto-san post-launch

It's not like Miyamoto can play the game anyways, since you still haven't released the game here!
 

Cardigan

Member
Did you just forget they made Splatoon ?
Which was launched smoothly and almost with 0 bugs and is a nice online shooter ?.

I'll give you that the Splatoon experience was smooth and relatively pain free. But at the same time, Splatoon was not in any way complex infrastructure. They took a pre-existing online multiplayer model and implemented it. In a few days Pokemon Go has almost doubled the entire sales of Splatoon, so it's on an entirely different scale.
 
Did you just forget they made Splatoon ?
Which was launched smoothly and almost with 0 bugs and is a nice online shooter ? >.>


Look again at the trailer, one part they show map tracking.

It's probably some wifi workaround. It 100% won't work in places without Wifi connections
 
No they were not to know. I get that.

But what they CAN have prepared for is to say, ok, if our servers are overloaded *how will the app behave*. Will it hang? will it give confusing errors? will it ask people to "sign up" when it means "login" and then hang? if the servers get slow, will the app apologise and show proper messages not let people think they're catching something and then force them to kill the app. Can we take it all down and put a message up explaining how long its down for and why.

All that stuff. Stuff that supercell now does well. It takes just one guy, one system engineer, to outline what has to happen when servers are overloaded and to simulate it during app testing. One guy they don't have on staff.
Yeah, there is some bullshit going on to.

Use incence for 30 mins

Servers are down...

WASTE!
 

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
No they were not to know. I get that.

But what they CAN have prepared for is to say, ok, if our servers are overloaded *how will the app behave*. Will it hang? will it give confusing errors? will it ask people to "sign up" when it means "login" and then hang? if the servers get slow, will the app apologise and show proper messages not let people think they're catching something and then force them to kill the app. Can we take it all down and put a message up explaining how long its down for and why.

All that stuff. Stuff that supercell now does well. It takes just one guy, one system engineer, to outline what has to happen when servers are overloaded and to simulate it during app testing. One guy they don't have on staff.

There is a lot of shit like this that I don't know how it wasn't brought up in team meetings.

Like how do handle the on boarding process? What should we do to bring people along? Do we need an in-depth tutorial?

What happens if we get slammed server wise? Should we implement a queue system? How should we communicate to the player base about servers?

Pokémon is a much bigger brand than Ingress so how can we achieve better player balance?

It feels like they didn't even ask half the questions let alone fail to implement.

Boggles my mind.
 
it boggles my mind how they can build and run a game like Ingress for years, and then even contemplate doing it with Pokemon and not think of these things and make sure that no matter how badly their server side collapses, and how dodgy mobile providers might get overloaded and fail connections etc, that their app won't waste peoples time.
Which is what it is doing now.

I don't mind it being unavailable. That's fine. Expected, even. The first free to download global pokemon game on mobile is too popular. What a surprise.

Just don't build a product that doesn't know when its borked and overloaded.
 

DarkKyo

Member
Only thing I really care about is species variety. No legendaries is one thing but you could have at least given us 2nd gen species.
 
It's not cool to copy and paste the whole interview. Post a portion so the site can get traffic from people hitting the link to view the whole thing.

They're really vague on the details.
 

Usobuko

Banned
Imagine if they do some sort of a boss-raid annually in say Times Square or famous / pivoted location around the world.

Fight Mewtwo with a huge group of people? Yeah.

They have some more ways to up and maintain the interest.
 

udivision

Member
Would kill for actual PvP and Trading the game is fairly bare bones now.

Trading is the next thing they want to add.

there’s a wide variety of things that we want to do in the game, things on our roadmap, but in the near term, trading is something that’s not in the game right now that we’re committed to adding to the game. So that will be I think fairly soon in the future.
 
Gen 2 was basically an expansion pack of Gen 1 anyway, so I wouldn't mind if they added them in a few months from now. There was also a lot of baby Pokemon that should be included sooner than later.

Gen 3 should be a year off. It was a pretty big overhaul to the Pokemon roster and there's too many Legendaries to really make sense of right now, especially if they keep making factions or faction equivalents.
I think introducing new pokemon not based on generations would be better, imo. Use it to slowly introduce people to pokemon outside of Gen 1 by filling different niches and showing different kinds of pokemon. For example, the first update could include all baby pokemon and evolutions for gen 1 pokemon that didn't appear until later generations. As well as include other popular pokemon from different generations. For cross promotion for Sun and Moon, I could see them adding a pokemon like Rowlett to the game.

While I'm glad they are focusing on improving the core mechanics and expanding on it, I hope they realize people will eventually tire of seeing the same pokemon, especially the common ones.
 
I think introducing new pokemon not based on generations would be better, imo. Use it to slowly introduce people to pokemon outside of Gen 1 by filling different niches and showing different kinds of pokemon. For example, the first update could include all baby pokemon and evolutions for gen 1 pokemon that didn't appear until later generations. As well as include other popular pokemon from different generations. For cross promotion for Sun and Moon, I could see them adding a pokemon like Rowlett to the game.

While I'm glad they are focusing on improving the core mechanics and expanding on it, I hope they realize people will eventually tire of seeing the same pokemon, especially the common ones.
Yeah, generations seem obvious to long-time fans, but there's a lot of other rollouts that seem more logical for this game.
 

MrMephistoX

Member
How would people feel with a wonder trade system being implemented with Pokemon go?

I would love for PvP and trading!

Thoroughly enjoying the app. As are older cousins who were gen 1 Pokemon players back in the day! It's not even officially released in the UK but it's already a phenomenon.


This! I also want to have the option of actually battling Pokemon to capture them instead of just using balls...the game would be perfect with that option.
 
I would love to see them improve the actual pokemon ar, like have them hiding behind objects like real ar, moving around e.t.c rather then just a single basic animation in the middle of the screen.

Mobile phones have grown powerful but nowhere near powerful enough to do this. What you're asking for would probably be difficult for a modern desktop to do consistently.
 
One surprising thing from this article is that Miyamoto is a bluegrass fan AND plays the banjo.

That's been known for years my guy.

29a5746c9c7b39036498daed07a79aa1-650-80.jpg
 

Durante

Member
They made M59?

Holy fucking shit. This is the first real MMORPG. Before UO.

What a fucking legacy to have. Goddamn that is impressive.
Yeah, that was the most interesting part for me. Good going!

Also, I find the idea that Nintendo of all companies would have created a flawless server infrastructure for this type of insane demand at launch ludicrous. If it was Nintendo, it would probably have launched in Japan only.
 
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