Best Of
Re: Ingress in 2024
They could do hexathlons again, i never did one but it sounded fun. Mix that with agent ops
Re: Ingress in 2024
Tasks need to be finished. There is so much opportunity here, not only in agent engagement, but in overall use of the game.
Drones need some love. Still annoyed these can be returned so easily. Go on a vacation to some cool city and my drone ends up returned before my flight home has landed, that’s lame. I also think different modes of travel would be slick. Would love slightly further hops or traveling by links.
Events and not anamolies. Would love a return to a 7-10 day event with some silly goal that takes planning and resource management. Make 1331 links or do 1000 hacks, etc. Get some medals involved. I think we had one in 2023? I swear when I started they had them every few months. I’m glad some of y’all can build triangles for AP everyday and stay content, but I’m not and I’m boredddd! FS/SS, boring… I like routine in some aspects of my life, but Ingress shouldn’t be it, so doing the same things all the time is kIlling me…
I say this all as someone who has mostly stopped playing due to some things I need to focus on in real life, but also because I’m just bored and don’t have anything holding my attention with the game. Chipping away at onyx medals could be a thing, but just…not my thing right now unfortunately.
Re: Removing POI on "restricted property"?
They need to change that rule.
Anything you need to be an employee for or require work in a specific field that allows access should be gone. (ie employees, couriers, guards etc).
Re: What’s the point in playing when…
It makes me sad that Niantic has essentially put Ingress on life support and that they are pretty much incommunicado when it comes to the players. It makes me sad that the game is stagnating and that I don't think they have a path to turning it around. Lack of communication and respect for their players has been a constant with Niantic throughout its history, and while I would love to see that change I don't expect that leopard to change its spots.
I think I kind of understand the lack of investment, though. Ingress ha a fairly small revenue stream compared to the rest of their portfolio, and while they've found some ways to monetize it the player base isn't large enough for it to be a cash cow. My gut tells me that Niantic is in the money hospital right now, based partially on Hanke's statement when they laid off a quarter of the company that their expenses had grown faster than their revenue. They've invested in several games that haven't turned into significant revenue streams (HPWU, NBA All-World, Catan, others). I have no idea how Peridot, MH Now, and Pikmin are doing financially but they certainly aren't taking the world by storm the way PoGo did. They seem to have thrown most of the company's resources into AR, and my experience with Peridot tells me that the technology isn't really ready for that. My Pixel 8 Pro bogged down after 10-15 minutes of play, and if a flagship phone can't keep going for very long I can't imagine what it's like on an inexpensive one.
[My personal take: They need game designers that can make the stock gameplay fun rather than monotonous. PoGo's slot machine aspect for getting rare critters helps some, and new critters get players excited for a bit, but for a long time I've mostly opened the app just long enough to do the daily tasks and then I was done. Peridot is visually appealing but mostly you're breeding and raising new dots and that gets both boring and expensive pretty quickly. I got bored with PIkmin pretty quickly because there was no strategy and it felt like doing the same thing over and over but with slightly different flowers. HPWU was... well, pretty much the same thing.]
The thing about Ingress is that competing for territory is a reward in and of itself, but creates sweet spot in terms of player activity... too little activity makes the game boring, and too much would make it unplayable. As a mental exercise imagine what would happen to Ingress if it got the same rush of players that PoGo got at launch.. the playfield would be constant chaos. It's worse, though, because they need to hit that sweet spot basically everywhere and not just overall . Having an optimal level of player activity in London doesn't make Topeka an interesting place to play.
TL;dr: Niantic isn't investing much in Ingress, and while I don't like that I understand the business decision. I think they're living off of one big hit and struggling to find their path to future success, but they've thrown a lot of stuff at the wall and so far nothing has really stuck. I sincerely hope they figure it out because I want them to be successful... and I also hope they find a way to make Ingress a viable ongoing product.
Re: Google Pixel 8 Pro - not in Niantic approved list for portal scans
This is a known from 2.123.2 issue that scan is broken
All we can is - ask Nia about clarification. @NianticBrian could U please test that thing on mentioned Pixel 8 Pro?
Re: Overclock-button is not disabled in remote portal/recharge view
Upvoted, but just fyi that the message and pop-up depends on if the portal you're looking at is OC activated, not if its looked at via local or remote view. A non-OC portal still gets the "more scans needed" pop-up via local view, and a OC activated portal via remote view replaces the "Move within 20m" message with a "Unable to Overclock remotely" message.
Still a good idea to remove it completely imo, as well as the Link button that can't be used remotely either.
Overclock-button is not disabled in remote portal/recharge view
The title pretty much says it all, but this is an infuriating bug especially when you're trying to defend a portal and keep accidentally hitting 'overclock' while charging the portal.
If I am not within 20 meters proximity of a portal, the overclock button must be disabled IN ALL VIEWS.
To reproduce this bug, find any key in your inventory to a portal which is not in your range, click on the key and the portal until you are in recharge view, and click 'overclock' in the bottom right corner. You'll get an annoying prompt "Insufficient portal data - Overclock is disabled. Overclock at this Portal can be enabled by. uploading Portal Scans. [Cancel] [Scan portal]".
If you click on a portal in your current view from which you are further than 20 meters, you will get a notify dialog that says "Enable overclock by moving within 20m of the Portal core." This is obviously better already, but it would not be the desired behavior for recharge view. The overclock button needs to be entirely gone from the recharge view.
Ingress version 2.132.1-bc733046
iOS 17.2.1 (but this concerns all platforms)
Re: Ingress in 2024
If you want to stop spoofing using Scans and OC, I would like to know how you solve the following issues:
- Devices not capable of doing one or the other: are you going to restrict the game to only devices who can?
- Determining what is the "truth": Niantic's portal database is littered with bad data (misplaced, fake, removed,...), if you want to use this to verify a users location, you first need to know what you are using to verify against is correct.
Re: Ingress in 2024
@Grogyan As far as I can tell, task systems are basically ways to make uninteresting games interesting. I still play PoGo but 99% of the time I open it, do the three daily things, and then close it again because throwing cartoon balls at the same cartoon monsters over and over again just isn't interesting on its own. Sure, every now and then a new critter shows up and generates excitement but after that it's just repetitive collecting without any sense of accomplishment.
Ingress is all about competition and controlling the playfield, and while it takes a bit of initiative the accomplishments on the playfield are their own rewards. "I'm going to do a ten-layer field over downtown today." "I'm going to take down the long links my opponent threw." "I'm going to clear out an area that's been overrun by my opponents."
As for scanning, I don't think that's necessarily the future of Ingress. Rather, Niantic wants to move gaming more toward AR with real-world interactions and they are using Ingress as a tool to get the data that they need. Right now one big problem is that phones can't really handle AR for long periods of time because the camera is voracious when it comes to battery and phones often overheat and bog down. I have maybe 15 minutes of Peridot gameplay on my flagship phone before it gets sluggish, and my Pixel 6 Pro was more like 5-10. Also, I can't think of any game I've played on my phone that made me wish that I could see the game in my real-world environment.
Re: Ingress in 2024
I don't think overclock is going to be used that way. I think it's simply to build other games. If I have to do a 2fa to interact with a portal then I'm done. Scanning isn't Ingress and neither is overclocking. Scanning portals does nothing for fields. And I thought that was the point of the game. Maybe it's not anymore and I'm disillusioned.


