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Apparently due to a 4500+ link link star in Europe, the game is unplayable in many other locations including the middle of the United States.

My question is why? Is it the cheaper servers Ingress is on? Did someone turn down the resources again? Or something else?

This really shouldn't be happening.

I've rebooted my phone twice. I've loaded Ingress countless times now.

I get a black screen. Then sometimes I get to see the map. Sometimes I see portals.

It's really getting frustrating. It would be less so if I weren't some 200+ miles from home attempting to play ingress.

@NianticBrian any thoughts? Any way to get the app working again?

Has anyone else had the game just stop working? Either loads a black screen or if it loads the map nothing works, resonators dont load, attacks never launch, hacks end up with errors etc?

Too bad. We still have 50000keys. We want a world record.

Over the years, one thing I've learned: Trying to get a public facing Niantic employee to see logic and stop insulting the player base is an absolute waste of time. It's not going to happen, they'll keep doing it, and the only thing you can accomplish is burn yourself out on the game even quicker.

Krug told me to "stop spoofing" in an AMA response (in regards to 1.x's portal submission allowing you to put in submissions anywhere in the world), and wouldn't apologize for it. I lost my senses last year and tried to get Brian to see the point about the extra key locker some people were able to pick up for free during the 5 year anniversary, and how that key locker continuing to block people from buying more key lockers isn't a great move for them.

Niantic isn't going to listen, in my opinion, and it's a waste of brain cells to try to get them to listen.

Try to stay zen, and when you unfortunately have to deal with their customer support, try to remember that these are people who are probably putting in just enough effort to get a paycheck*, and don't want to be the person responsible for rocking the boat enough to cause the next social media outrage that this game has caused so many times in the past.

*Which I don't hold against them. It seems obvious to me that they don't have too much in the way of leeway, and they likely don't have days of time to deep dive into every account to get a full picture of each accounts actions. It's probably something like a stored procedure on the databases that reports on accounts performing various actions a certain number of times. For them, probably easier to ban everything in that report and then fix the ones that were actually legit players after the fact.

I'm not taking it personally as I didn't get one. But I think it's insulting to the rest of the player base.

Considering that almost all of the problematic bans that I know about have now been overturned, I don't think cheating was actually on the docket here at all. These were accounts that were clearly false-flagged by Niantic and the bans have been subsequently overturned.

"Ingress's community has had a long term belief that we deserve far more attention than our revenue stream warrants."

This is comically, hilariously off-base. Stop and think about what you're saying here, Bront.

Niantic puts out a game, players adopt it and start playing it enthusiastically, and they expect the company to communicate and engage with them, listen to complaints, answer questions, etc.

And what you are quite literally saying in response to that is, "Ingress doesn't make much money, so therefore we aren't going to give the community any attention."

Does the average or even extremely active Ingress player:

1) Know what Niantic's revenue or budget is for Ingress?

2) Understand Niantic's staffing, i.e. what communications, developer pool, QA, product team, and other departments look like in terms of size and runway?

3) Understand the product roadmap and feature release schedule?

4) Even remotely care about said budget, staffing, schedule, or revenue?

The answer is NO, and they don't need to.

First of all, you're wrong about your basic premise, because games that are put out by literal single-developer or 4-6 person teams have consistently better communication than Niantic. And they are operating on a shoestring budget. Yet they still understand that you need to communicate with your player base in order to keep them engaged.

Secondly, Ingress isn't some obscure open-source research project with big flashing disclaimers about how you use it at your own risk and have to compile it by hand and you won't receive any support. It's a known game with 10+ million downloads on Android alone. The average gamer who knows anything about Niantic at all instead knows them from articles like this, which says the company is worth a $4 billion valuation.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2019/01/17/niantic-valuation-245-million-series-c-4-billion-pokemon-go

Ingress players don't give a flaming **** if somehow Ingress has approximately 7 cents and a broken pencil to its name. They expect communication, and they expect MORE communication than they get from indie developers. And yet Odie from Cutlass, who is a single developer making Orna, runs rings around Niantic.

Once again, stop defending poor communication. It's inexcusable, no matter how apparently annoying and revenue-negative we are. Either you provide the game and you engage with your player base, or you might as well just shut it all down.

The other thing is completely unacceptable here is the emails that go out from Niantic to these players who had their bans overturned:

If the account ban is being overturned, then there were no transgressions and the agents already are following TOS & Guidelines. Why is this email so accusatory?