Best Of
Re: Where To Next?
Hopefully IUENG will never be "official" - I cannot participate due to an admin vendetta against me.
Where To Next?
Obviously as suggested by Niantic is the Ingress Reddit community:
But as a lot of people are aware, Reddit has experienced an exodus of people due to the impending IPO and are not happy with how Reddit is being run.
I would like to encourage agents to join the player run "Ingress Updates" channel on Telegram, as well as the associated XFAC chat which has a much more likely discussion than Reddit and also these forums.
Re: Maybe we should let the greatest of games quietly go to another world?
I think people need to accept the beginning of the end has just occurred, with the announcement that the forums are closing down in April.
I really can't see Ingress lasting more than two years at most. I personally think it will bow out at the 13th anniversary, next year.
As I posted on another thread, the game seems to be an increasing 'cheats paradise', and that is partially helping to drive the honest and worthwhile players away.
Make the most of the game whilst you can.
Hypothesis: Ingress is a great game, but only at relatively narrow range of scale
Time travel back with me a little bit to pre-Machina Ingress
Imagine that you are the only player within 100 miles. Ingress would not be very interesting for you because there's rarely going to be any competition. There have always been a few people in this situation and over the last couple of years a lot more have found themselves without opposition. Ingress really isn't a very good game in those circumstances.
Now, imagine the opposite extreme and every single person on the planet plays Ingress. That wouldn't be a very fun game either because everything would be a highly-contested area with no ability to ever build up high level portals or control an area. Ingress isn't a very good game at this extreme either.
Somewhere between those two extremes there's a sweet spot for Ingress where there's enough competition to make the game interesting but not enough for the playfield to become perpetual chaos. I don't know how to quantify that sweet spot but it's obvious to me that it exists and that getting too far outside of it makes the game less interesting.
Machina has been introduced to help players out in areas that have very little competition, and it does help some but it's not a replacement. Machina can't throw an annoying field over you, and it won't care if you throw one over it. It's never going to (deliberately) throw a strategic blocking link, it's not going to smash up your farm, and it's never going to rent a 15-passenger van and roll hundreds of P8s through a city. It's an interesting chaos agent but it's not active opposition.
Competing as a team against another team is what makes Ingress great, IMO. Unfortunately it is likely to be its downfall as well since it needs to retain a minimum player base but there's also a cap on how big the game can get and still be fun. That makes me sad, but unless the game radically adapts it will be the eventual outcome.
Re: Goodbye Ingress forums
Then I was provided bad intel, sorry folks.
I edited my original post to prevent any more confusion.
Re: Tessellation forum badges
Thanks for the reminder that these exist. It's good to have a chance to go a bit down memory lane and view those pixels, even if this is the last chance. To some extent, these forum medals correlate to Paragon and/or Knight of the Tessellation in scanner, but Tracker is a little bit extra special, having been earned by only 85 agents: https://community.ingress.com/en/badge/tracker
It's a shame to lose the record of the Tessellation, which was one of the only times that everyday agents got invested in game lore, but at least we have a chance to save our screenshots.
Re: Goodbye Ingress forums
Well that sucks.
Is anyone crawling this forum so we can have a mirror to refer to? (I know the announcement refers to WayBackMachine, but that's imperfect at the best of times.)
When Google+ closed they gave us more than three weeks' notice AND a tool to download all your Google+ stuff. With Niantic: no one needs this, let's just delete it.
Re: Goodbye Ingress forums
I looked thias history now, she last posted march 2023.... so 1 year no posts here....