Apparently, you would inherit some of the flaws in the model, such as people walking out into traffic, off small cliffs, and into the waiting arms of muggers. Maybe make it more like a pedometer and less like an interactive game. Go is entirely too interactive.
That is like inventing a new sport and blaming the inventor when players hurt themselves. It is not the devs job to prevent people from being stupid.
On the tracking thing: The idea of using GPS is obviously flawed, but there are other means to track somebody. The iPod touch uses open Wifis to determine its position. If you know where a wifi spot is and you can measure the strength of the connection, you can triangulate your position once you find at least two of those spots. The simplest idea would obviously be to use this. Another idea would be to create dedicated spots similar to nodes. To incentivise people to place those spots, you could share the earnings of players with them, when somebody accesses their spot. to prevent them from playing themselves on their own node the whole time, you could create tasks that need to be fulfilled. Those tasks would require players to visit nodes that are far away from each other, so they have to travel there.
American football. Those guys have been knocking the dog shit out of themselves since the inception of televised sport, and the NFL is taking the heat. In my opinion, it's the fault of both parties. My safety supersedes the sport, and the sport should understand that there are fools, and you have to look out for them. This is why rules evolve in sports, like spearhead tackles being illegal.
But agree with the feature suggestions. Like the tasks, I was trying to figure out a way to make the player activities actual useful and non spoofable.
