TIL, Pokémon Edition:

I've been using Pokemon GO as an excuse to walk more (Apple Watch Pokemon GO app review: Don't.), and was wondering when should I evolve which of my eevees. You know, normal, grown up questions like...

• Do I automatically evolve the one with highest CP? Or is the "sunset graph" more important?
• What does the sunset graph mean? Are all eevees on the same scale, or do some have more "potential" than others? (That is, if I have five with "max sunset", how close would they be to being equal?)
• Is there an advantage to powering it up before evolving? If so, how much?
• Are the higher CP eevees I catch later going to max out higher in their new forms (see sunset question, above)?
• Is there a CP threshold I should wait for before evolving an eevee?

That is, I didn't want to waste my candies on evolving the ones I have now if the next one I catch is likely going to be significantly stronger. But then what stops me from waiting forever?

And I don't want to evolve them too early if powering them up before evolution would increase their potential later. Etc etc. INACTION THROUGH INFORMATION DEFICIT!!!!1!

Aside: Didn't I mention I hate theorycrafting? This is theorycrafting.

Determining Pokémon Apititude

From a reddit manual about Pokémon GO:

There is NO DIFFERENCE in the end result of Powering Up then Evolving vs. Evolving then Powering Up, therefore the general recommendation is to always Evolve first to find out the move set. You can Power Up up to 1.5 levels above your Trainer level, at which point the white dot on the arc will be all the way to the right. Once you level up your Trainer, you can then Power Up again to the new maximum.

I think that suggests that you might as well evolve first, with the chance to cut your losses if you really dislike their attacks after evolution.

Assessing the potential of each eevee is called appraisal. I'd seen this when I started playing, but had completely forgotten about it 18 months later.

Each Pokémon has 3 "Individual Values", or IVs - Attack, Defense, HP/Stamina. Each IV can individually range from 0-15, and they are randomly generated when the Pokémon spawns (Pokémon hatched from eggs are randomized from 10-15 instead). The appraisal feature gives you an idea of what that specific Pokémon's IVs are. Depending on what team you are on, your team leader has slightly different phrases they will use. The first phrase tells you what overall range the stats are in, out of a possible 45 total (15/15/15). The next phrase(s) tell you which of the three stats is the highest (or multiple if tied for highest). The final phrase tells you how good that high stat is.

There's great detail on what your appraisals mean here. Here's a taste for Blanche, the Team Mystic (ie, "Blue Team") leader:

Phrase	Reason
Its stats exceed my calculations. It's incredible!	Pokemon has perfect IVs in at least one base stat.
I am certainly impressed by its stats, I must say.	Pokemon has IVs of 13 or 14 in at least one base stat.
Its stats are noticeably trending to the positive.	Pokemon has IVs of 8 to 12 in at least one base stat.
Its stats are not out of the norm, in my estimation.	Pokemon IVs are below 8 in every base stat.

Curveballs

It's apparently a lot easier to catch Pokémon if you can throw a half-way consistent curveball. From gamepress.gg:

Prior to this project, the Ball bonuses had already been discovered in a previous study:

Ball Type	Ball Factor
Poke Ball	1
Great Ball	1.5
Ultra Ball	2

The Curveball Bonus

Our analysis strongly suggests that the Curve factor is equal to 1.7.

So without any other bonuses, curving is equivalent to using 1.7 Poke Balls each turn. And since the Ultra Ball bonus is 2, a curved Ultra Ball is equivalent to using 1.7 * 2 = 3.4 Poke Balls each turn.

Balls	Poke	Great	Ultra
Straight Throw	1	1.5	2
Curve Ball	1.7	2.55	3.4

That means a curveball with a Poke Ball has a better chance of catching a Pokémon than a straight throw with a Great Ball. Good to know.

How to do this? From eurogamer.net:

To do this, press and hold on the Pokéball to make the circle appear, and then throw it when you're ready with a swipe. Remember, the closer you get to the centre, the better the throw type - it goes from Nice for most of the circle, Great for around half, and Excellent when it's close to the middle.

Also, here's an excellent YouTube on how to throw curveballs.

Here endeth the lesson.

Labels: Other Stuff, pokemon, Randmo

The Twitters told me today that Pokémon Go's Google account sign-in takes full access privileges, which is pretty obviously not good.

From Kotaku:

Update - 10:07pm: Niantic says it was a mistake that will be fixed soon. Here’s their statement to press:

We recently discovered that the Pokémon GO account creation process on iOS erroneously requests full access permission for the user’s Google account. ... Once we became aware of this error, we began working on a client-side fix to request permission for only basic Google profile information, in line with the data that we actually access. Google has verified that no other information has been received or accessed by Pokémon GO or Niantic. Google will soon reduce Pokémon GO’s permission to only the basic profile data that Pokémon GO needs, and users do not need to take any actions themselves.s

Let's look at that last line again...

Google will soon reduce Pokémon GO’s permission to only the basic profile data that Pokémon GO needs, and users do not need to take any actions themselves.

What does that mean, exactly? I mean, they do have full access, I guess. ;^)

Anyhow, my first and continued response to this is...

If only there was some way we could create fake, throwaway Google accounts with no personal data whatsoever to use for trivial purposes like this one.

Update: So this is the "real" issue, and one I wondered about when I created a login with my [throwaway] Google account:

Either Google goofed, or Niantic is doing browser automation to programmatically agree to Google's security warning. Major issue either way.

— SecuriTay (@SwiftOnSecurity) July 11, 2016

I didn't see the, "Pokémon GO is requesting these permissions" screen either. And that's the real issue with OAuth in any application that isn't a browser made, downloaded, and run from a trusted source: You can't tell for sure that you're not using an embedded browser, one where every keystroke is easily viewed by the app authors.

In fact, if someone was after your information, they'd almost do better (if you don't have two-factor security) to sniff your password as part of an OAuth workflow that asked for the appropriate level of permissions (ID and email only) to stop from raising the red flag we're seeing here.

Labels: pokemon, security