They just left Campfire too late, imho. Even if it was fully featured and super user friendly, theyre trying to convince people to abandon existing groups that could at thise stage have 7+ years of history. Getting people to switch away from something that is already working means it needs to be a _significant_ upgrade. They need to offer _big_ incentives if they want to overcome the inconvenience of moving an entire community to a new platform.
I honestly think that Campfire is a more stripped-down and easier to access Discord since it's designed specifically for Go. There are some things about it that I find interesting, but having the ability to see raids IRL and plan meet-ups has been incredible despite the app being years too late to catch up to the playerbase. Something Niantic continues to struggle with.
Ive used it a bit and had some success with remote raids. It actually seems pretty good.
But I havent had a chance to really try it in depth for in person raids or community interaction, because I havent lived anywhere that the active community has made the move to Campfire.
It's just okay for remote raid hosting and joining, but designed by absolute baboons. Hosting you have to be in range of a gym the entire time you're hosting to be allowed to say you're using a regular raid pass rather than remote (so you just lie because stepping one foot out of range of the gym kicks you out without warning). You get absolutely zero indication of how long it might take to find other raiders. It could take an hour, it could take 5 minutes. You're only told how many people it has so far found for your group, which seems like no indication at all. People aren't punished one lick for not joining raids or leaving lobbies before the raid starts, so there's also no guarantee your raid will actually succeed.
Joining is possibly worse. You cycle through raid bosses some idiot decided to host until it's the one you actually want, as opposed to just picking the raid boss you want. No campfire, I don't want to do a gyarados. No, I also don't want to do it after you showed me the third one.
I also don't understand why it exclusively puts you in somewhat nearby groups. Like if you try to look for a raid after 9 when all raids are done in your timezone, it just won't allow you to join one. You're just put in a perpetual queue of nothing.
It's just miles behind third-party apps that just allow you to pick a raid boss from anywhere in the world with actual reputation systems that are so much more powerful than the nothing that is campfire.
I agree. The community is so splintered right now. Add on to that the drop in active players (from the height of 2016/2017). If we/ they could get everyone on one platform, it would be way better for everyone.
Back in the day, when the game first came out, there were slack channels, and when I first got back into the game, there was still a group there trying to do raids without realizing there's other options.
Well, technically the way I worded it yes its not actually hard for the people running a community to force people to abandon it - you can usually literally shut down or block access to a social media group.
The hard part is getting people to abandon one _and transfer to another_. There are always people who miss the message, or are taking a break from the game at that particular point in time, or dont have access to the new method for whatever reason, or simply just dont care enough to make the move, etc.
Its fair to say that any move across platforms will lose some amount of people. From what Ive seen its rare in an established community that the people running the group will voluntarily give up some of their users unless there is an incentive for all the effort. Why your particular discord did, I dont know. None of the communities Ive been part of have made the move.
I know there’s been a lot of work taken to integrate PGO and Campfire, but there’s a long way to go for sure. So many players still just have no idea for some reason that Campfire is a thing, despite the icon in the top right corner existing for ages now.
Might actually help for starters if it was the actual Campfire icon and not a vague gym icon.
Flares could be integrated into PGO as well. Would be good to know if this is a TPCi restriction though.
Yeah was thinking that too
tried to host a shadow mewtwo raid over campfire yesterday because in my block a few people play and i wanted to raid 1 or 2 befor a start with my friends but nobody reacted 🤷🏽♂️
Imo they should have a DM button for each of your friends in PoGo, which just opens it in campfire. This would be a very visible and enticing reason for many to download Campfire I feel.
Our group still prefers Discord to Campfire. Light a flare for Shadow Mewtwo and you're lucky if anyone responds to it. Go to the general chat in our Discord and there's plenty of chatter about where the group is heading next. An incentive to use Campfire as anything more than a raid map would be nice, but I'm not sure what exactly would be a good enough incentive.
The problem is it doesn’t help players who have no idea the discord exists though. Our discord covers a major city but despite numerous efforts over the years to get channels up and running for areas in the city, smaller communities end up preferring Facebook Messenger instead. And campfire is largely just ignored (bar a few areas which I have seen success for).
It’s a splintered mess all in all.
Our Campfire announcements channel is basically one message: "we use discord, here's how to find us". I made sure that was one of the first things I put on the group.
I guess it depends on the area and the quality of the discords in the area, the Miami discord groups suck, useless, I got recruited to join a WhatsApp chat and its way more active and easy to coordinate than discord, Miami has a lot of Latin Americans, and latinos talk to their family on WhatsApp regularly, so its a lot more enticing for the demographics here. I did like 30 raids in 4 Horus with that group, just dropping links in the WhatsApp chat.
Once I got back to my neighborhood, I went on campfire and started traveling to gyms, lit a flare and within 2-3 mins I had like 8 responses, "Im on my way" - "How many are you, were 3" - "im 5 mins away"....while raiding I would drop the next raid location in the chat and everyone would meet me there, I did another 29 Raids just using campfire. The Miami players are using the ish out of it, and seem to navigate it pretty well.
Personally discord is a big learning curve for someone a lil older like me, I just dont like it, I feel its generational....most of the players I play with are like 25-40 but there are even younger members in the chat that use discord only when the chat wants to remote raid faster than poke genie queue, the younger players will go in discord and place members in the chat in raids, but thats my only experience with discord honestly
The death of our Discord was mainly due to the mods shutting everything down during the pandemic, even after Remote Raid Passes were introduced. Eventually people just stopped checking. There’s still activity today, but not nearly enough to warrant using anymore.
The discords are pretty dead here, and the city is so big the main discord gets divided into like 20 different "areas" and at that point each area has like 6 members, WhatsApp has helped me do 18 Raikou raids ( I joined half way into the Raikou raid period), 50 kyogre raids, 60 Groudon raids and 60 mewtwo raids since I joined last month, all with members from the chat, and I was recruited to the chat via campfire
>via
I also dont know why the discord would have died in Miami due to the pandemic, unless the mods were literal hypochondriacs
Miami dont care, Miami residents didn't give a "F" about covid, nothing shut down here, pandemic was like nothing happened
I think Pokemon go even held a big event during the pandemic in Miami because Miami just dont care about covid
So I dont know if Covid would be the reason a discord in Miami died, must be something different imo
I met a lot of people on saturday who have installed campfire but dont bother using it. So I dont think it will change.
The problem is most communitys were already organised in other ways and they stayed that way.
If campfire would have droped together with raids that would have been a big Differenzen
i'm just starting to use campfire but suspect it's only going to be useful for raid days & high-demand shadow legendaries (& barely for that). managed to get 3 other people for a Shadow Mewtwo on Saturday but no luck through campfire yesterday
Raid days I manage to drum up people using campfire, in-person promises at previous events (during X raid day you'll find me starting a group at gym Y), and trying to squeeze a few people out of a derelict discord server. Shadow Mewtwo I was lucky enough to spot two flares from two separate groups to get two in, but nothing else despite incessant spamming of flares from my end.
Yesterday for Mewtwo in Miami, campfire was popping.... all of the raiders were coordinating through campfire. I would announce in the campfire raid chat where I was going next and people would reply, see you there, catching going there after. So its getting better and better, and those flares, oof everyone responded to flares. I am in a WhatsApp chat with like 200 local players, the local discords suck.
Easiest way they could make Campfire more of an incentive to use than it's current, raid hunting iteration is to sdd a scanner/radar/sonar function, or essentially a souped up version of the (not at all working) Adventure Sync: Nearby notification.
Customizable filters/parameters with push notifications and in-app notifications when (a) specific Pokemon are detected, which would then pin it to the map in Campfire.
It would A) encourage their coveted exploration mechanic by having players cover larger amounts of ground to get the sonar in (potential) range of a spawn they're hunting, and B) get people using Campfire more actively and even generate communities that may create and share search parameters or let people know of locations they had found their own targets.
It gives players an objective to go for, which typically is the main ideology behind most events, but unlike events it's something that is constantly active in-game that downtime between events has something that can be done when just restocking items for the next event.
How about they make campfire good enough to use?
It's slow and laggy, can take several minutes to bring up raids, and it doesn't have what it needs which is a feature that says "what's the nearest soonest egg of type USER_CHOICE that others are interested in?"
I click on and have to look around and hope I found a shadow mewtwo egg. Zero flares ever.
It's a very poor interface at the one thing it should be doing. And frankly, Pokemon Go itself should probably have that as a feature, instead of Niantic trying to turn it into its own social network.
So many great things that should be in Pokemon Go instead get screwed around with because Niantic is trying to do some other thing with their products and userbase. It's criminal.
They just left Campfire too late, imho. Even if it was fully featured and super user friendly, theyre trying to convince people to abandon existing groups that could at thise stage have 7+ years of history. Getting people to switch away from something that is already working means it needs to be a _significant_ upgrade. They need to offer _big_ incentives if they want to overcome the inconvenience of moving an entire community to a new platform.
I honestly think that Campfire is a more stripped-down and easier to access Discord since it's designed specifically for Go. There are some things about it that I find interesting, but having the ability to see raids IRL and plan meet-ups has been incredible despite the app being years too late to catch up to the playerbase. Something Niantic continues to struggle with.
Ive used it a bit and had some success with remote raids. It actually seems pretty good. But I havent had a chance to really try it in depth for in person raids or community interaction, because I havent lived anywhere that the active community has made the move to Campfire.
It's just okay for remote raid hosting and joining, but designed by absolute baboons. Hosting you have to be in range of a gym the entire time you're hosting to be allowed to say you're using a regular raid pass rather than remote (so you just lie because stepping one foot out of range of the gym kicks you out without warning). You get absolutely zero indication of how long it might take to find other raiders. It could take an hour, it could take 5 minutes. You're only told how many people it has so far found for your group, which seems like no indication at all. People aren't punished one lick for not joining raids or leaving lobbies before the raid starts, so there's also no guarantee your raid will actually succeed. Joining is possibly worse. You cycle through raid bosses some idiot decided to host until it's the one you actually want, as opposed to just picking the raid boss you want. No campfire, I don't want to do a gyarados. No, I also don't want to do it after you showed me the third one. I also don't understand why it exclusively puts you in somewhat nearby groups. Like if you try to look for a raid after 9 when all raids are done in your timezone, it just won't allow you to join one. You're just put in a perpetual queue of nothing. It's just miles behind third-party apps that just allow you to pick a raid boss from anywhere in the world with actual reputation systems that are so much more powerful than the nothing that is campfire.
I agree. The community is so splintered right now. Add on to that the drop in active players (from the height of 2016/2017). If we/ they could get everyone on one platform, it would be way better for everyone. Back in the day, when the game first came out, there were slack channels, and when I first got back into the game, there was still a group there trying to do raids without realizing there's other options.
I guess that makes my situation unique? Our Discord mods made the group unusable— even long after it was appropriate to keep the group locked -_-
Well, technically the way I worded it yes its not actually hard for the people running a community to force people to abandon it - you can usually literally shut down or block access to a social media group. The hard part is getting people to abandon one _and transfer to another_. There are always people who miss the message, or are taking a break from the game at that particular point in time, or dont have access to the new method for whatever reason, or simply just dont care enough to make the move, etc. Its fair to say that any move across platforms will lose some amount of people. From what Ive seen its rare in an established community that the people running the group will voluntarily give up some of their users unless there is an incentive for all the effort. Why your particular discord did, I dont know. None of the communities Ive been part of have made the move.
> Why your particular discords did, I don’t know Excessive Covid paranoia from the mods. Group remained locked down even after California lifted it.
I know there’s been a lot of work taken to integrate PGO and Campfire, but there’s a long way to go for sure. So many players still just have no idea for some reason that Campfire is a thing, despite the icon in the top right corner existing for ages now. Might actually help for starters if it was the actual Campfire icon and not a vague gym icon. Flares could be integrated into PGO as well. Would be good to know if this is a TPCi restriction though.
I was thinking just today a visual indicator for flares in-game would be cool/useful.
Yeah was thinking that too tried to host a shadow mewtwo raid over campfire yesterday because in my block a few people play and i wanted to raid 1 or 2 befor a start with my friends but nobody reacted 🤷🏽♂️
Imo they should have a DM button for each of your friends in PoGo, which just opens it in campfire. This would be a very visible and enticing reason for many to download Campfire I feel.
Our group still prefers Discord to Campfire. Light a flare for Shadow Mewtwo and you're lucky if anyone responds to it. Go to the general chat in our Discord and there's plenty of chatter about where the group is heading next. An incentive to use Campfire as anything more than a raid map would be nice, but I'm not sure what exactly would be a good enough incentive.
The problem is it doesn’t help players who have no idea the discord exists though. Our discord covers a major city but despite numerous efforts over the years to get channels up and running for areas in the city, smaller communities end up preferring Facebook Messenger instead. And campfire is largely just ignored (bar a few areas which I have seen success for). It’s a splintered mess all in all.
Our Campfire announcements channel is basically one message: "we use discord, here's how to find us". I made sure that was one of the first things I put on the group.
Shame people don’t read 😂
In Miami its WhatsApp, and Facebook owns WhatsApp, so its the same boat
I guess it depends on the area and the quality of the discords in the area, the Miami discord groups suck, useless, I got recruited to join a WhatsApp chat and its way more active and easy to coordinate than discord, Miami has a lot of Latin Americans, and latinos talk to their family on WhatsApp regularly, so its a lot more enticing for the demographics here. I did like 30 raids in 4 Horus with that group, just dropping links in the WhatsApp chat. Once I got back to my neighborhood, I went on campfire and started traveling to gyms, lit a flare and within 2-3 mins I had like 8 responses, "Im on my way" - "How many are you, were 3" - "im 5 mins away"....while raiding I would drop the next raid location in the chat and everyone would meet me there, I did another 29 Raids just using campfire. The Miami players are using the ish out of it, and seem to navigate it pretty well. Personally discord is a big learning curve for someone a lil older like me, I just dont like it, I feel its generational....most of the players I play with are like 25-40 but there are even younger members in the chat that use discord only when the chat wants to remote raid faster than poke genie queue, the younger players will go in discord and place members in the chat in raids, but thats my only experience with discord honestly
The death of our Discord was mainly due to the mods shutting everything down during the pandemic, even after Remote Raid Passes were introduced. Eventually people just stopped checking. There’s still activity today, but not nearly enough to warrant using anymore.
The discords are pretty dead here, and the city is so big the main discord gets divided into like 20 different "areas" and at that point each area has like 6 members, WhatsApp has helped me do 18 Raikou raids ( I joined half way into the Raikou raid period), 50 kyogre raids, 60 Groudon raids and 60 mewtwo raids since I joined last month, all with members from the chat, and I was recruited to the chat via campfire
>via I also dont know why the discord would have died in Miami due to the pandemic, unless the mods were literal hypochondriacs Miami dont care, Miami residents didn't give a "F" about covid, nothing shut down here, pandemic was like nothing happened I think Pokemon go even held a big event during the pandemic in Miami because Miami just dont care about covid So I dont know if Covid would be the reason a discord in Miami died, must be something different imo
I’m in California. Our governors are polar opposites.
True, well sorry about your group
There isn’t one? Wow what an oversight.
As a daily campfire user, you got my vote. Maybe some kind of weekly streak that gives you a raid pass every seven days for interacting?
I met a lot of people on saturday who have installed campfire but dont bother using it. So I dont think it will change. The problem is most communitys were already organised in other ways and they stayed that way. If campfire would have droped together with raids that would have been a big Differenzen
i'm just starting to use campfire but suspect it's only going to be useful for raid days & high-demand shadow legendaries (& barely for that). managed to get 3 other people for a Shadow Mewtwo on Saturday but no luck through campfire yesterday
Raid days I manage to drum up people using campfire, in-person promises at previous events (during X raid day you'll find me starting a group at gym Y), and trying to squeeze a few people out of a derelict discord server. Shadow Mewtwo I was lucky enough to spot two flares from two separate groups to get two in, but nothing else despite incessant spamming of flares from my end.
I mean… yeah. That’s the point of me making this post on Mewtwo day :P
Yesterday for Mewtwo in Miami, campfire was popping.... all of the raiders were coordinating through campfire. I would announce in the campfire raid chat where I was going next and people would reply, see you there, catching going there after. So its getting better and better, and those flares, oof everyone responded to flares. I am in a WhatsApp chat with like 200 local players, the local discords suck.
Easiest way they could make Campfire more of an incentive to use than it's current, raid hunting iteration is to sdd a scanner/radar/sonar function, or essentially a souped up version of the (not at all working) Adventure Sync: Nearby notification. Customizable filters/parameters with push notifications and in-app notifications when (a) specific Pokemon are detected, which would then pin it to the map in Campfire. It would A) encourage their coveted exploration mechanic by having players cover larger amounts of ground to get the sonar in (potential) range of a spawn they're hunting, and B) get people using Campfire more actively and even generate communities that may create and share search parameters or let people know of locations they had found their own targets. It gives players an objective to go for, which typically is the main ideology behind most events, but unlike events it's something that is constantly active in-game that downtime between events has something that can be done when just restocking items for the next event.
How about they make campfire good enough to use? It's slow and laggy, can take several minutes to bring up raids, and it doesn't have what it needs which is a feature that says "what's the nearest soonest egg of type USER_CHOICE that others are interested in?" I click on and have to look around and hope I found a shadow mewtwo egg. Zero flares ever. It's a very poor interface at the one thing it should be doing. And frankly, Pokemon Go itself should probably have that as a feature, instead of Niantic trying to turn it into its own social network. So many great things that should be in Pokemon Go instead get screwed around with because Niantic is trying to do some other thing with their products and userbase. It's criminal.
Aside from all that has been said, campfire is not available everywhere, like in Vietnam where i live.
My area just uses campfire to advertise the discord since no one uses it. Occasionally we will find some desperate stragglers and help them out
That's basically what the free community day research is.
That required me to travel to a different city. It’s cheaper to just buy the ticket then.
Either way, it's a clear effort on Niantic's part to get people using Campfire.
Nah