Best Of
Re: Audio is on at startup in 2.9despite having all sounds turned off
Ah dammit, you were slightly quicker in writing the bug report 🙈
Same happens to me, after muting all sound and restarting, the sound is enabled again until you open the settings, at which point the app goes "oh wait I'm supposed to be quiet" and mutes itself again.
v. 2.94.1
Android 11
Oneplus 8 Pro
Sony LinkBuds connected (if this is somehow related)
Re: Niantic to lay of 8% of staff - Is the Ingress team affected?
Might I suggest that you change your agent name to OneNoteVam? Or perhaps find a different deceased equine to flagellate?

XM Ambassadors 1:1s with NianticThia
Hello!
Following up on this post, I just want to let you know that yesterday I had my 1:1 videocall with @NianticThia.
We adressed many topics, including the XMAs rotation. I think it was a nice chat for both 🙂
With this, I would also like to announce that I am stepping out from the program. I had already become pretty innactive in the past few months. Still, I've waited for the opportunity to chat with Thia before going public with my resignation.
If any other XMA wishes to use this post to let the community know about its own 1:1 with Thia, please feel free to do so (beware of the NDA 👻 Oooooo! 👻).

Re: What should keep people excited about Ingress future?
to me it feels like they think they have figured out. There is apparently enough agents out there who will just keep playing with the current level of communication and care from the ingress team, that worrying about these forums or trying to actually increase people playing seems like an afterthought.
Kinda beating a dead horse here in the forums, but just kind of a bummer to see no real active interest from them. I started this game in year six and seeing all the videos and activity and excitement (which was dying out at that point, I’d later learn) had me super excited about the game. I realize that there was a budget for all that and it’s not likely to do those things forever, but it just seems like such a different game, communication wise. And I’m not talking about the forums, but in all means. Seems like a couple folks doing damage control in the forums and other places people frequent, Brian just posts on twitter, other folks, more or less gone. But no one from Niantic hyping this game up and staying involved. People want to feel like their “parents” love them and are wanted. I don’t get this feeling from anything at Niantic. It’s a stark difference even in year six when I first downloaded the game. But this must be okay. They hired a community specialist who seems to only do support and post randomly on twitter.
This game needs a dang hype man…
edit, just wanted to add that it seems like Ingress has become this resume builder for people like Brian and the other devs. Features that no one asked for or have any real interest in using, but we keep getting them while other features have bugs or just never seemed to be completed or long since updated. Missions, long overdue for some attention. Drones, are we done with this, at least three super easy medals that could be dropped for this and get "some" people excited. But you can sure as heck by some expensive headphones to hear a couple new sound files while you try to defend portals, but struggle because a lag issue that has been around for about the past year. I'm all for new ways to play and experience the game, but it kinda feels like devs are more interested in padding their resume with these things they helped with rather than work on keeping the game fun, fair, balanced and exciting. Oh well. That's probably why I spend more time on my PS5 or drinking beers with my homies versus dealing with this game lately.
Re: Politics v Game
@joecain That isn't off the table, but there's a whole lot of real estate between choosing whether or not to play a game and uprooting one's life. At this point I think that working to improve my country is a better path.

Re: Politics v Game
I personally believe that our game desperately needs minefields, stationary turrets to fortify areas, and drone factories that could produce drones to attack enemy agents nearby. And I also believe that the game definitely needs a third faction and the introduction of several types of exogenous creatures.
God no, those are horrible ideas.
Re: C.O.R.E. Annual Rewards Idea
Personally, I don't think there should be a reward for a paid service that affects the game.
These type of rewards are better suited towards Recursion benefits. It would be open to everyone, not behind a paywall.

Re: I hope they don't go back to 5 min hack cd
5 min CD is just boring and doesn't add anything.
I really love the 90sec so i can spend my time fielding not f** wait on a portal to hack it again.

What should keep people excited about Ingress future?
TL;DR: Has Niantic thought what should keep Agents in the game? What should be exciting to them? Why they should continue opening scanner daily, far past Level 16? What future they should look forward to? Then WHAT THAT IS?
During the 6 years I'm in Ingress, I tried everything of my interest the game could provide. From participating in, and then organizing, a few dozen of field arts and BAFs, to Field Test, Hexathlon, NL, Anomalies, decoding (Tessellation). I had a global shard in my neighborhood and intel operated the world's first level 7 homogeneous field. I spent weekends in towns of 3 hours train ride away just to make all 28 submissions coming from Prime+Redacted so those towns could have 30 portals instead of 2. I took down someone's guardian portal at day 140 in the forest in winter at night. I tried to submit a banner and completed a whole lot of banners. I created a fan site and wrote IITC plugins.
I thought Superposition would be a blast, a spark that would return some of Ingress glory, but then Niantic made the stupidest thing possible (which isn't surprising) and decided to give badges to anyone interacting with 10 battle beacons... thus making lots of people canceling their bookings. This is such a slap that if I could participate and have already booked, I would only come to see friends, maybe also for a Mission Day and auxiliary events, and not participate in the actual anomaly. Leave those 10 BB badges to yourselves thanks. This joke of an anomaly isn't even going to have recharge rooms to participate remote properly with at least some degree of organization and teamplay.
There was a talk about the start of Mission Day applications "this winter or early 2022". According to this https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/18751/transcript-24-march-2022-q-a-with-brian we were supposed to have the application form and the guide back in April. Today is end of June. Does anyone know where I can submit a Mission Day application?
Where are Dev Diaries?
What future awaits Ingress? Does the future even exist? When will Niantic understand that surprise releases don't work and instead share what's coming?
When will Ingress team properly communicate now that it has a Community Specialist? Why Andrew Krug still participates in chats, while the Community Specialist whose job that is, does not?
(Pinging @NianticBrian @NianticThia of course because honestly I don't believe they read everything by themselves)

Re: Ingress 2.94.1 Release Notes
Why is this excrement being pushed out to users? Many don't even have sound on, and this is what you show for the last update cycle, it's a slap on the face to all subscribers..
We don't want your AR, fancy sounds. We want a game that works.
Hell, here's one thing with minimal development time that would be 100% positively received: a quickly accessible setting that allows you to select the Complex / Normal / Simple and Key / No Key commands by default on every Glyph.
