#campfire app

i gave back my friend's spare phone so it's just me and no alt pokeymanning around now. it was kind of annoying to have to manage two phones all the time but it was also nice not being alone. i can just about solo a T3 raid now on my main but I'd managed to get the alt up to level 31, which meant he could actually be useful for those. I still couldn't do mega raids with just the two of us though. That's the dream, a lot of the mega raids are ones I want to do.

I tried the Campfire TeamUp feature a couple of times, once I was on my own. The first attempt, I waited fifteen minutes to be paired with a raid, missed the notification when I finally was so I had to start over (which is bullshit, i was staring at my phone the entire time and it did not pop up anywhere) and had to start the queue again, waited another fifteen minutes and then got into one which was great, but then I waited a full ten minutes beyond that and the host never sent invites, so I had to leave-- I hadn't budgeted for basically a full hour of just waiting by my phone. It didn't take up a raid pass at least but like. That was so frustrating. My second attempt went better, but only in that after I missed the first notification and then just stared at the app for the whole second fifteen-minute waiting period I got into a raid that then the host sent invites to fairly promptly so it only took another like five minutes of waiting, and then we did the raid pretty easily.

I keep thinking I should try to host a raid instead on that feature, but that means I have to get to a raid near when it begins and sit around on my phone for ages coordinating stuff, and I just haven't had that kind of time.

Anyway. Remote passes are stupid expensive and I'm in-game brokety broke.

i cannot begin to untangle all of what is going on, having come to this game so late, but. 1) there is no chat or socialization available within Pokemon Go itself, for myriad reasons but among them the simple one that any app that lets people talk to one another is going to have issues with needing moderators or some kind of abuse policy fairly directly. PoGo has the added complication of course that Pokemon is a thing kids are into, and ALSO the compounding factor that it's based on geographic area; one can only imagine the complications that arise from an app that is used by so many children, and has as a basic feature of gameplay a pretty basic guarantee that players reveal with a fair amount of precision exactly where they live, having any kind of chat function.

but 2) you need to coordinate with other users in order to win raids or trade creatures, two fairly important components of how the game is played.

This has meant of course that third-party apps and sites have become the primary method of organizing raid crews. I personally lucked out and found a reasonably active local Discord server; there's apparently also a local Facebook group. There are also entire apps one can use that pair with the Pokemon Go app itself and let you arrange things with other users-- there are a lot of supplemental apps that go along with PoGo, for many reasons and purposes, and I have rather deliberately avoided finding out about any of them because that way madness lies and also my undiagnosed, unmedicated ADHD ass could not handle that.

Niantic has themselves made an app, however. Campfire, which is meant to sort of overlay Pokemon Go and also some of their other games. There are limited chat and interactivity features in Campfire. I managed to get an invite to it, but it has not proven to be super useful, largely because it was such a limited roll-out that there were no active groups really posting or chatting. I don't really know how to use it, but the main thing I enjoy is that you can scroll around within the map to look at other areas, and it shows every gym. (It doesn't show stops, which would also be useful, but I get why it doesn't.) It shows you what gyms have eggs on them, and you can see what rating the eggs are, and you can see when they hatch and what creature they hatch. So that's cool.

I have manually scrolled myself 300 miles east to see the map around the farm and have confirmed it's pretty dire LOL. Not a lot going on there. But the city's only 20 minutes away.

Anyway they seem to be rolling out access to Campfire to more users, to coincide with the ongoing nerf of remote passes, so here's hoping that turns out to be, idk, some kind of usable feature?