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neat coincidence
Sep. 1st, 2018 02:12 amEverything around here is stress and logistics, and will be for the foreseeable future. But a cool video game thing happened on Wednesday.
I play Pokemon Go somewhere between casually and obsessively-- I fire it up most days, I actively go out of my way for raids and new Pokemon, but I don't minmax anything and I am decidedly a solo player. I use the new friendslist feature, but it has all of two people on it that I actually know, and the rest is full of internet random. (That said, if you play and I know you and you'd like us to be on each other's friendslists, let me know.)
A few months ago, Pokemon Go added a feature called Field Research, where you do small tasks for small rewards, and after you've finished seven tasks you get to catch a very rare Pokemon. This is one of the only ways you can get some of the Legendary-types, especially if, like me, you only do solo raids. Which very rare Pokemon you can get through Field Research changes every month. I went into August with seven tasks done, and only had to trigger the encounter to get my nice lightning-dog-thing Legendary Raikou... supposedly. The darn thing wouldn't load. Whenever I triggered the encounter, all I'd get is a blank white screen, and the app would freeze until I turned my phone on and off again. This was extremely aggravating, especially as August wore on, and I became worried I'd miss this particular Pokemon entirely.
In addition, back in like May or June or so Pokemon Go added a feature called Special Research, where you do a lot of small-up-through-aggravating tasks for small rewards and then get to catch a Mythical Pokemon. This is the only way you can get the Pokemon in question, period. I did fine right up through the very last bit of the very last task, which-- okay, so when you catch a Pokemon, you throw a ball at it by swiping with your finger on your phone. The throw can be various degrees of good according to the game, everything from normal to Nice to Excellent, and you get rewarded with experience points and a higher chance of catching the Pokemon for better throws. Additionally, you can throw what's called a curveball, which is trickier, for even more bonuses, and those also go up to Excellent. The final Special Research task to get the Mythical Mew was to throw an Excellent Curveball.
The thing is, my phone lags. I mean, it really lags. The ball is perceptibly dragging behind my finger, so my timing is always borked. Also, I don't understand the timing of an Excellent throw anyway, and watching tutorial videos was doing nothing. So I was stuck on that Excellent Curveball for well over a month. Which was extremely aggravating, because I couldn't even tell if I was getting better at it. I was trying to throw everything as a curveball, and going through Pokeballs like there was no tomorrow, on the theory that surely it would happen eventually just through sheer luck, but mostly what this resulted in was taking six times as long to catch anything and a lot of swearing.
The combination of the two things I couldn't do was driving me away from the game, which was sad, because I have been doing this for like a year-and-a-half now and it is one of the few things keeping me sane through some parts of baby-wrangling, but every time I thought about opening the app I would think about how it wasn't working and become annoyed.
Finally, it occurred to me that simply closing and restarting the app is not actually the equivalent of 'have you tried turning it on and off again', so this past Wednesday when I had a free moment I uninstalled the app and then reinstalled it from scratch. And opened it, cautiously, and triggered the encounter... and there was my Raikou! It loaded!
Of course, I still had to catch the thing, so I started throwing balls at it.
And the third turned out to be, completely by chance, an Excellent Curveball. So I got my Raikou and my Mew within thirty seconds of each other, thereby eliminating everything that has been annoying me about the game since, like, May in one swoop.
It's not even a dopamine hit when that sort of thing happens. It's a dopamine high.
Especially since all this took place on my actual birthday. I'm not saying that the game should have gone around pissing me off for several months in order to cause me to grin like a loon for the entire afternoon of my birthday, but, on reflection, I'm not saying it shouldn't have.
I play Pokemon Go somewhere between casually and obsessively-- I fire it up most days, I actively go out of my way for raids and new Pokemon, but I don't minmax anything and I am decidedly a solo player. I use the new friendslist feature, but it has all of two people on it that I actually know, and the rest is full of internet random. (That said, if you play and I know you and you'd like us to be on each other's friendslists, let me know.)
A few months ago, Pokemon Go added a feature called Field Research, where you do small tasks for small rewards, and after you've finished seven tasks you get to catch a very rare Pokemon. This is one of the only ways you can get some of the Legendary-types, especially if, like me, you only do solo raids. Which very rare Pokemon you can get through Field Research changes every month. I went into August with seven tasks done, and only had to trigger the encounter to get my nice lightning-dog-thing Legendary Raikou... supposedly. The darn thing wouldn't load. Whenever I triggered the encounter, all I'd get is a blank white screen, and the app would freeze until I turned my phone on and off again. This was extremely aggravating, especially as August wore on, and I became worried I'd miss this particular Pokemon entirely.
In addition, back in like May or June or so Pokemon Go added a feature called Special Research, where you do a lot of small-up-through-aggravating tasks for small rewards and then get to catch a Mythical Pokemon. This is the only way you can get the Pokemon in question, period. I did fine right up through the very last bit of the very last task, which-- okay, so when you catch a Pokemon, you throw a ball at it by swiping with your finger on your phone. The throw can be various degrees of good according to the game, everything from normal to Nice to Excellent, and you get rewarded with experience points and a higher chance of catching the Pokemon for better throws. Additionally, you can throw what's called a curveball, which is trickier, for even more bonuses, and those also go up to Excellent. The final Special Research task to get the Mythical Mew was to throw an Excellent Curveball.
The thing is, my phone lags. I mean, it really lags. The ball is perceptibly dragging behind my finger, so my timing is always borked. Also, I don't understand the timing of an Excellent throw anyway, and watching tutorial videos was doing nothing. So I was stuck on that Excellent Curveball for well over a month. Which was extremely aggravating, because I couldn't even tell if I was getting better at it. I was trying to throw everything as a curveball, and going through Pokeballs like there was no tomorrow, on the theory that surely it would happen eventually just through sheer luck, but mostly what this resulted in was taking six times as long to catch anything and a lot of swearing.
The combination of the two things I couldn't do was driving me away from the game, which was sad, because I have been doing this for like a year-and-a-half now and it is one of the few things keeping me sane through some parts of baby-wrangling, but every time I thought about opening the app I would think about how it wasn't working and become annoyed.
Finally, it occurred to me that simply closing and restarting the app is not actually the equivalent of 'have you tried turning it on and off again', so this past Wednesday when I had a free moment I uninstalled the app and then reinstalled it from scratch. And opened it, cautiously, and triggered the encounter... and there was my Raikou! It loaded!
Of course, I still had to catch the thing, so I started throwing balls at it.
And the third turned out to be, completely by chance, an Excellent Curveball. So I got my Raikou and my Mew within thirty seconds of each other, thereby eliminating everything that has been annoying me about the game since, like, May in one swoop.
It's not even a dopamine hit when that sort of thing happens. It's a dopamine high.
Especially since all this took place on my actual birthday. I'm not saying that the game should have gone around pissing me off for several months in order to cause me to grin like a loon for the entire afternoon of my birthday, but, on reflection, I'm not saying it shouldn't have.
