People were asking the question: will Pokemon GO really get people to go outside?
The answer: yes. So much so, in fact, that Sydney police have to officially monitor the situation.
[related title=”Pokemon GO” tag=”pokemon go” items=”3″]
A walk, as first reported by Rae over at Gizmodo, was organised by the PAX Australia and Oz Comic-Con content manager Guy Blomberg. It started out as a small thing, with only a handful of people.
And then it stopped being a handful of people. First it was a few hundred. And then over a thousand. And then a few more thousand.
At the time of writing: around 4000. That’s the number of Pokemon GO trainers who confirmed their interest in going for a walk around Sydney. The amount of people interested is a staggering 12,000 (approximately).
Understandably, several thousand people can’t just wander around the city staring at their phones without emergency services wondering what’s up. Blomberg told me that the Royal Botanic Gardens’ Admin and Bookings Office reached out to make sure they had the right permissions.
That led to a friendly chat with local police to make sure they were on board as well — after all, the last thing anyone wants is to be stopped when you’re in the middle of catching your 4000th Zubat.
The end result: the NSW Police is now officially monitoring a Pokemon GO walk.
Nobody even knew the game was coming out when this week started. Today, it’s so popular that it’s forced state police to spend a little bit of time just to ensure good public safety. The organisers have also asked the thousands of trainers to respect the gardens and their surroundings, particularly the bits with moving cars.
And it’s all because of Pokemon. What a day.
Update: Just a small reminder from the official Facebook page for the NSW Police.
Comments
24 responses to “Sydney Police Officially Monitoring Pokemon GO”
They need to send an Officer named Jenny.
Would be funny if Pokefans turned up at parliment house and kept walking through the streets and the news reported it as some street protest by mistake.
Awesome! I cant begin to say how positively I see this game. Hatching eggs requires kilometers of movement… its brilliant! Fittest gamers ever will end up belonging to this lol
The hatching also seems to use pedometer like tracking or disregards moving too fast, because driving doesn’t give the distance youd expect
From what people have been saying, if you’re moving faster than 20kms, it doesn’t count.
Now f you’ll excuse me, I need to go to the shops to get a single item and walk around for an hour. 🙂
20kph? Damn. Means I can’t do the KMs on my bike
Yeah 20kmph seems a bit slow really as that’s a decent road bike speed, 30 would have been more reasonable, nobody is going to bother driving around under 30 to do it and people with a decent bike speed can still do it.
If hatching the eggs is going too slow, I’m sure they’d prefer if you bought some extra incubators so you could hatch them in parallel. And then rebought them after the fifth incubation because that’s how long they take to wear out if they aren’t the magical infinite incubator you start with.
The randomness of eggs seems like such a bad real life money investment, if I pay any real money (other than the GO plus) it will be to expand my capacities, the only thing that seems worth putting real money into
The item and pokemon capacities were actually higher during the beta. I guess they ratcheted it down to get to a point where people would need to start actively managing their inventory or pay to increase it.
And I’d agree about the randomness in the eggs being a bit of a pain. It was a bit frustrating to walk 5 km and end up with a Rattata.
Well, so much for doing laps in front of the local day care.
<20kms you say, So I will be fine on my drive home from work during peak hour traffic jams on the M1.
I hate to be “that internet commenter” but it’s been out for all of like three days. Give it another ~three weeks for 80% of the users to get bored, lose interest and move on; it isn’t going to make for as great as a shift in general fitness as might be thought.
Who am I kidding, I love being that internet commenter.
I love your username combination 🙂
Honestly there’s lots of the actual game design I really don’t like, but I’m having fun and the more invested I get the more I’m getting out of it. Met a friend in Claremont for lunch and we just wandered around grabbing pokemon, found a stop in range of a bar and i dropped a lure while we had lunch with our phones out.
It’s hell on batteries though, I want to make one more run through my local parks but when I got in phone was at 1%, need a full charge before I can go back out.
I bought a battery pack today, something I’ve been meaning to do but only finally motivated by GP. Agreed the game design needs a lot of work (the battles? Wtf were they thinking there, completely misses the point of Pokemon imo) but loving it all the same. The collecting really brings back the feelings of gen1 where you were excited to get any Pokemon rather than skipping all but the essentials to min/Max your team.
I’ll pick up a battery pack tomorrow, too late now all my energy needed for one last trip =P
But yes was planning on finally getting one.
Yeah the excitement for any new or evolved Pokemon is real. Hell I still love pidgeys and zubats since I need all the candies and dust.
At least they will have some sort of protection from Team Rocket.
Man, I went on a walk today to play Pokemon Go, stopped at the local library which is also next to the town hall where I can retrieve some stuff from the game. Feels weird when behind the library there’s a playground with kids playing and a 23 y.o. is walking around with his phone out trying to catch some Pokemon and gather some items. Wasn’t good that I spent nearly 45 min there as the app was buggy and wouldn’t load correctly.
If you haven’t done so already, you might want to turn off the AR camera while catching pokemon in situations like that. This centres the pokemon on the screen no matter which way you’re facing, so you won’t have people asking why you’re pointing your camera directly at them.
Game is a bit too shallow for me atm. At least need player battles in real time by being within 50 meters of each other and challenging them via notification. I mean if you are logged in the server knows where you are right? How hard is it for others that are also logged in to be displayed on your map given the server would know they are there? And then the option to battle someone who is close (within 50 meters for example) again should not be that hard.
Forget the AR side of things as when you turn it off its just a game with pokemon popping up based on locations, and therea re location apps/games that show other in real time.
Not a developer nor have any coding experience but it just does not seem like it would be really that hard to implement.. Especially given they would be raking in the cash with in app purchases on this so money should not be an issue. Just seems like a lost opportunity for something that could have been insanely amazing, and just isn’t.
I just stood in the rain with a business woman and a hooded leather jacket wearing girl with a cig in one hand and phone in the other next to two poke stops and a gym. At least 4 other people at work I heard talking about it.
given I almost saw three people get squished at the most busy corner in Broadway, Sydney because they were too stupid and looking at their phones, I say good on the police. This city is bad enough for idiots on phones as it is now its just beyond silly.
I really wish I could play this but my iphone is about to hit the 2 year old mark and is starting to fall apart, first the wifi stopped working now I’ve got no GPS.
There where 3 Pokestops next to each other with lure modules on them in Adelaide street, Brisbane today and there where at least 50 people crowding around playing with more gathering by the minute. People just kept adding modules and it lasted for a couple of hours.
I work in Rundle Mall in Adelaide and it’s great. People constantly have modules up and as I’m inside the GPS stuffs up and drifts all over the place so I don’t have to walk very far. Drifts all the the city which is fall pokestops and all kinds of pokemon