I Do Not Miss POKEMON GO

If you may or may not remember, I got kicked out of Pokemon Go a few months back after attaining 30th level. They had updated the app and rearranged buttons so one day not long after that, I had a connection issue, and instead of hitting the continue button while the app was having issues, I hit the new location of the log off button.

Oops, but then I could not get back on.

Pokemon Stuff on Amazon.

I valiantly tried many different ways, including reaching out to support, but they said I had no account.  Hmm, all that time burning 1% of my battery juice per minute, chasing shit down, going out of my way to nab creatures that were going to run away any way, and having burned countless hours and it seems I had no account to get to 30th level?

They suggested I had connected my Google account to the game, but to be honest, if that were the case, it would have been the very first time ever, that I would have connected any account to any online service/game/app. It's just something I have never done. Ever.

So there I was, left out in the cold, and I started having time to reflect, how back then, the app/game was making nearly a million bucks a day. And how I now have a ton of free time to be a productive human in society once again, instead of chasing an obsessive compulsion!

And suddenly, the progression of the game and how it manipulated people became pretty apparent, once I wasn't knee deep in it.


I remember when it started, we barely were given enough monsters to catch but had plenty of supplies.

Then they had a few "special" events, or, just them letting loose on various Pokemon to take advantage of the theme of the holiday weekend. And then they noticed that if people were given enough monsters to catch, they would rip right through their supplies and they would start buying more supplies.

So low and behold, we suddenly started getting more and more monsters while we ripped through our supplies, and obviously, people were buying supplies. And to be honest, of the millions of players out there, they would only need a few percent of them to drop a dollar or two here and there to make their millions.

Think about it, as of early April, Niantic still had around 5 million users a day. And as of January, it's estimated that Niantic has made around $1 billion. It only took them 90 days to hist $600 million!

And of course, to spruce things up, they're adding baby monsters and more new/other monsters from other "era." Or, in layman's terms, it's all the same crap with a different wrapper. But people are eating up the seeming newness of the new monsters.

And this keeps people around, as long as it seems or feels fresh.

Whatever.

So I stopped having to plug my phone in to some power source every hour or every chance I got. I now only plug it in once, maybe twice a day, and that's refreshing. I've gone back to broadening my mind by reading all the Kindle App books I have on my phone. Or I have the juice to watch my downloaded Netflix episodes of the new Mystery Science Theater 3000. (It takes a little getting use to, but they pick up the pace nicely by the third episode.)

And there you have it. I busted out, thanks in part to Niantic and the Pokemon Go Trainer's club, and once my emotional withdrawals subsided, I have never regretted getting booted out and I have never looked back. Good job reorganizing the buttons Niantic. It saved this life so I can go have a life to live.

But I have to tell you, those first few weeks, I kept looking to where the spawn points and gyms were, thinking to myself, yep, there's a gym there, in that fantasy alternate reality, and no one knows about it. But after a while, I stopped remembering and moved on.  You can too if you're knee deep. It's never too late to free yourself of the game and get on with your life!

THANK YOU Niantic! You did me a good set of services with that game update, and having lost my account somehow. No complaints here.

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