It's true that my posts here are fairly negative sounding, but to be honest, I am coming more from a consumer's mindset of how marketing is used to manipulate the digital consumer, not necessarily me railing against Niantic and not their manipulation of the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) factor.
With that said...
Being a F2P (Free to Play) player became tougher since year one... but it's still quite doable if you're patient.
Niantic likes to coerce their customer base into playing the game every day. They do this in a number of ways...
-The 7-day catch bonus... you better catch at least one Pokemon a day, then on day seven, you get a big bonus on day 7. If you don't catch a Pokemon, your seven-day streak stops and you start over.
-Spin Pokestops at least once a day for seven days, and on day seven, you get big bonuses. Break that consecutive count, and well, you start over.
Both above items have nice incentives to keep players starting up the game because day seven feels like a decent bonus of items.
-They give you incentives to engage your fitness tracking apps with the game, so you get bonuses for walking after seven days.
-They have special events that motivates players, to gear up and spend 'money' to prepare for or play.
-They have Boss Raids that are fun to come together with other players to defeat and possibly capture. But I seem to have this weird pattern I've noticed... the more raids I do, the more goodies I receive per raid. But as I stop playing so much, the fewer items I'd get per raid.
-There are 'Research Rewards' they dole out after you've filled out seven challenges, and then you get a chance to catch it, the 'Research Reward.' But the Pokemon you catch as research rewards are poorly powered, which, forces players to drop oodles of time (and money) to power up to decent levels.
-Right now they are teasing everyone with extra stardust for catching things, but it seemed weird, but it was taking more and more pokeballs to catch things. It felt like I was paying for the stardust with my pokeballs.
-Players are now getting an extra incubator per day, when you spin a pokestop. That's a nice cool incentive to keep spinning Pokestops.
There really is nothing wrong with any of this, but at some point, I got tired of being manipulated into playing a game.
But I have to say, it's been over a week since I played the game... I just up and stopped cold turkey and to be honest, it's nice not trying to coordinate everything I do in my life around this game. It's refreshing to quit worrying about what I'm catching, if for anything, the stardust. It's just nice to stop having this invasive game dictate what I do with my life. Hell, just this morning I went out for an hour's walk and only used 10% of my phone's battery life! Boo ya!
No, I won't quit completely. I'll still do raids when it's convenient to, but raids will no longer dictate my day. If they happen on my lunch break, so be it, Otherwise, nah, I'm not going to worry about it anymore.
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