I’m sure by now that everyone has heard of Pokemon GO. Before it first came out, the game had a huge following (over 30 million people) and everyone was hyped over it. It’s been out for months now and although the game is declining in terms of user-base, it is still one of the most used apps today.
I was a huge fan of Pokemon when I was a kid. I owned the original Pokemon Yellow up to Pokemon Emerald. I’ve always been entranced by the different versions/generations of the game and heedlessly followed it throughout the years. But, over the course of time I lost interest in it. When I heard about Pokemon GO for the first time, I wasn’t really excited by it. Being an avid gamer, I knew that the game will fall short in many ways (and it did).
Since the game carried the Pokemon franchise title, it had a lot of expectations to meet. How can a mobile game like this bring Pokemon into “reality”? A mobile app that uses GPS will have difficulties meeting that expectation, especially in terms of interactivity between the Pokemon and the user. Needless to say, I was right.
When the game was finally released, it had a significant amount of game-breaking bugs and issues that ruined my experience. One of the main game-breaking issue was the server problems that the game had. It took me hours and hours to try to connect to the game. When I was finally able to connect to the game, I was only able to play for about 3-5 minutes until I was kicked out by the server (seriously?). Another issue was the tracking system. It wasn’t that accurate and after some updates, Niantic decided to remove it. How are we supposed to find Pokemon now?
After two months (July-September) of playing an unstable game, I finally gave up. I stopped playing the game since it was so buggy, repetitive, and also because Niantic wouldn’t listen to its player base. If there’s one thing that I truly enjoy about this game during those times, it was the fact that it brought so many people together. It made people social and helpful towards one another. We were all seeking the same goal of becoming the very best (like no one ever was).
After two months of not playing Pokemon GO, I decided to login again and check out the current state of the game. The gameplay seems to be so much better now. The overall graphics seems to have been polished and there are no more server crashes. Not only that, the game now also has daily catch and login events. However, it is still as repetitive as before. There’s nothing else to do in the game but capture the same things over and over again.
Will I play this game again in the future? Probably. Will I play it again any time soon? Probably not. There is no reason for me to continue playing this game. I’ve reached level 24 and managed to catch 143 Pokemons out of 151. I’ve attained my goal already. Maybe I’ll come back to it when they release Gen II, but until then, I’ll be “afk” from this game.
A New Player Has Arrived 
Good post. I really wanted to continue playing Pokemon Go, but once they released the update that made it impossible to play while on a bus or tram, it took away a lot of my reason to keep going. I don’t have that must time to explore and walk around, so playing the game on my commute to work was one of the only ways I had to play it. It’s a shame really. I’m still hoping they’ll fix this issue sooner rather than later. I heard rumor that Gen II is supposed to launch in December even 😀
LikeLike