1. How I made over 4000$ with Pokémon Go
I am a pretty big Pokémon fan and just like many other people, I had to participate and jump in on the hype train. It was actually even more than that. It was more like jumping in front of the hype train. Pokémon Go was released July 6, 2016 in Australia, New Zealand and USA and since I am from Germany, I had to wait.
From the experiences I had with multiplayer game releases prior to Pokémon Go, i knew that there was quite a bit of money to be made by being one of the first. And as a student, money is always good. Money means not having to eat spaghetti day after day.
I had no idea how big Pokémon Go would really get, but I knew that if i wanted to get anything out of it, I had to be quick. I had to get this app before anyone else did. So I went online, but there were no .apk-files to be found. Those came just one to two days later. So I asked a friend who lives in New Zealand to download the app and send the apk to me. While he was busy extracting the app and sending it to me, I went ahead and made a brand new Gmail account. My plan was to train the account as fast as possible and selling it on Ebay. But I still had to figure out how I wanted to train. All I knew was that to sell an account effectively, I would need a disposable email, because I imagined that you wouldn't be able to change your email address afterwards.
One hour after contacting my friend, I had the .apk and the account was up and running. After about an hour more of getting to know the game, the dynamics and especially the best ways to gain experience, Pokémon Go didn't work anymore. I thought that I was banned and that I really had to wait until it's official release in Germany. I knew that that would be too late so I declared my plan as failed.
Meanwhile, the Internet started to pick up on Pokémon Go and the first videos and screenshots were uploaded. With them came the first stories of server issues. After reading more about the server issues it dawned on me that my account wasn't banned at all. It might have just as well been the server issues that kicked me out of the game. I stayed up the entire night, trying to log in, and somewhere around 3:00am I was able to get back in to the game again.
Since I already knew some parts of the game and how to make experience, my plan was to directly try to get the game to work on my PC and write a simple bot that automatically plays the game for me. Nothing too fancy. A fancy script would obviously take too long. The rest of the night was used on trying to get the app to run on my PC and on trying to get some sort of GPS faker (GPS spoofer) to work. The server issues on the next morning came in really handy to combat my sleep deprivation.
Once I woke up, I came up with another idea to automate the game. Instead of writing the bot, I found a way to train that was so repetitive that it would be faster to just record the bot. I set up a list with GPS coordinates that were all located at places with 3 or more pokéstops. Then it would activate all pokéstops, giving 50 experience each, and teleport to the next location. A simple color recognition script that i wrote with Autohotkey would then start and stop specific mouse recordings at different states of the game. It took about 2 hours to record (a bit of writing, too) the bot and the rest of the day to make it work reliably so that it could run for about 3-4 hours before crashing.
Once everything was set up, it felt pretty amazing. It would take half a day for an account to reach level 20, which I found to be just the right level to sell them. Obviously, since I had to be quick, the script took control over my mouse so I couldn't use my PC in the meantime and i could also just make one account at a time but I figured that the compromises I made were worth it.
I was able to sell the accounts for 100€ each on Ebay and once the hype arrived Germany I even sold one account for 1100€. After that, the prices began to fall rapidly. In fact, just 3 days later the price dropped under 20€. I also realized that "real" bots were popping up that people could buy. Those were much more advanced than mine and probably got much better experience rates than what my bot would ever be able to do. That was the point where I decided to retire my bot, cash out the money and leave it be. In just a couple of days, I had successfully made around 3700€ which is about 4100$.
2. How this story relates to Steemit (maybe even to life?)
Fun fact: For me personally, this story relates to Steemit because one woman paid with 50€ in Bitcoin instead of Paypal. I was into Bitcoin trading before, but I wasn't up to date with the cryptocurrencies. Before exchanging the Bitcoins to Euros, I decided to read up on some crypto-topics because I felt like i missed quite some important things. This is how I came to Steem. But more about that in my next post. ->introduceyourself
In a broader sense, there are many parallels between my Pokémon Go story and Steemit.
Please note that the following part will be riddled with my unscientific opinions.
Parallels:
2.1 Being able to foresee the future
2.2 Responsiveness to new things
2.3 The need to put in effort
2.1 Being able to foresee the future
"Which wave to surf?"
You don't want to sweat the small stuff: Don't write a bot for a game that no one cares about. Don't spend your Voting Power on posts that no one cares about. It's about knowing when to wait and when to react. This might seem difficult but with experience comes knowledge and with knowledge comes power. As with everything: Expect to fail and learn from your failures. It's not like this was the first bot I've made, yet it was the first time I made a significant amount of money off it.
2.2 Responsiveness to new things
Once you've decided on which wave to surf, you need to act. There is no time to lose. You want to surf the hype. You don't want to swim behind. If you've decided on a bot to write, do it. If you've decided on a topic for a post, do it. Chances are that tomorrow someone else already milked the topic you've been thinking about.
2.3 The need to put in effort
To some of you, this might come as a shock. But in my experience, it's always worth it to put in some effort to stay above average. It's not that hard if you think about it. You just need to stay ahead of what is normal/ expected. Once you have the head start, it's easy to keep your position. If I had played Pokémon Go as an average player, this wouldn't have worked out. If I had programmed a bot in the average amount of time that you need to program a bot... Well, you know what I mean. In the following (unscientific) chart, you see that you don't get half the reward for doing half the work. You may get literally nothing.
This not only applies to Pokémon Go or Steemit. I found it actually also very relevant in the even more important parts of life: Love & friendship. Sigh! :) Why not put just that little bit extra effort into a relationship?
3. Free account for you
Ok, enough of this. Let's get back to business. I have one spare level 22 account that I don't need. Whoever gets the most upvotes on his/her comment by tomorrow will get the account. If the winner isn't interested, the account will go to the second place etc. Good luck and thanks for reading :)
4. tl;dr
I wrote a bot for Pokémon Go and sold two accounts per day for up to 1100€ each. There were no difficulties and I didn't even get sleep deprivation. The story relates to Steemit because you can earn money both with Pokémon Go and Steemit. I was able to sell all of my accounts. Not a single account was left over! You didn't miss anything by skipping to this part.