Best Of
Re: Niantic has “organisational update”, closes NBA All-World. No mention of Ingress at all
No surprise here. Niantic has kept trying to shoehorn different franchises into their AR platform without understanding why Pokemon Go has been the success it is. When you make a video game for video gamers, who have played this game their whole life on different platforms, they'll show up and try out your stuff. The core of pokemon was exploring a world and searching for things to collect. You just turned the map from stored into a Gameboy and made it the actual world. I would argue the remaining customers are addicts, not your normal run of the mill gamers who play a game to completion and then put it down.
Harry Potter people read books, you're making a big ask to get them to play video games. You would have been better off having them collect new pages to new canon stories to read within the app and put it together. There's no "hook" to keep people around or net new customers. It was just a bunch of "me too" existing Niantic customers rushing to be "first" and become the controller of their local community for the new game (like how owners of local discord servers for pokemon go communities became high in social clout).
NBA? Who that plays basketball in real life is a cross-section with video games?
Peridot? What people asked for this?
Settlers of Catan? Interesting idea, one of the better ones, but people who play board games want highly complex rules to manupulate strategies and look down on video games versus board games.
You're grasping for new markets with tools that don't fit those markets' desires.
If you want to find another well loved franchise that fits the AR platform you already have, Earthbound is pretty good, but old at this point, still might not have the same gamer base size like Pokemon had/has over time. Maybe you could shoehorn Ingress functionality into a Tron game. In the real world you exist, but in Tron you're manipulating The Grid, fighting off evil AI and fighting for the users. If you're willing to go more obscure, Shadowrun is a fantastic story and world which hasn't been tapped much. It's currently being played as a turn-based game in on Steam, I could see AR fitting in well with it.
Want Ingress to be more popular? It has to compete with PoGo in effort versus return. How about dropping fracker and beacon prices to 1/10th of what they currently are? you'd see more volume and use instead of people hoarding one or two of them and not buying new ones.
Realistically, the core values Niantic posted on their website when looking through their hiring process and company profile are just a copypasta of corporate virtue signaling and idealistic jargon. The most telling part of the hiring page is the following value:
Weather storms: We won’t always succeed, and that’s OK. When we fail, we look for how to improve, not who to blame."
Now, you're dealing with the result of having too many people that constantly fail and aren't held accountable to their stakeholders. You can't live within a safe bubble and run a business. It's a business first, not a place to push your ideals. Groupthink is a major problem which is evident when you see some minor developments, but the real problems of lag and performance aren't able to be fixed. Ignore the problems, just keep doing the "fun" stuff in the business, not the hard stuff.
Ingress will be next on the chopping block, Approximately 6 months after they finish the last of the swag subscriptions and the community finally reaches its tipping point being charged 20 dollars per bio card ID badge during anomalies with 3 or 4 bio packages available at the same time (would have to shell out $60-100 for all of them, not to mention somehow spend all the included gear). That's the only real revenue stream Niantic has left in Ingress... Bio badges. But, that will eventually be exhausted. Already at most I'll buy one of the anomaly packs and then also subscribe to the kits. Even so, I'm only subscribing to the kits until my user profile in-game is long enough to rival some of the "old guard" players who try and use that as the "i'm better than you" comparieson like PoGo players compare rares/max stat pokemon counts.
I won't rehash the full text of other revenue stream ideas again... But I believe Ingress needs to revise the game into more of an esport and have each year be seasonal with competitive stats. Follow the same formula used in online games like overwatch/league of legends where players earn a rank each season such as bronze/silver/gold/etc based on their participation in the specific season. I covered this in a different post: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/21498/ingress-seasons. Otherwise you're just stagnating players.
Re: Niantic has “organisational update”, closes NBA All-World. No mention of Ingress at all
I rarely agree with you, but this post is spot on, although I am unsure if Ingress will die so soon. Dropping item prices could help.
Niantic need to advertise their other games, such as Ingress and Peridot.
Community Days had zero knowledge of Ingress, we see no leverage of player sitreps/offers of help/zero social media advertising etc. XMA's and Ambassador feedback seems to meet deaf ears on the Ingress management side. USE THESE FREE RESOURCES.
Settlers of Catan COULD have been great - but it was way too simple. I wanted to build AR roads between towns (like Ingress Links) and it came down to basically a dull dice toss game.
Carcassonne - if well done, would be awesome as a Niantic game.
In summary - Niantic seem totally dysfunctional in:
Understanding their market
Marketing in general
Prioritizing development aims.
I also believe, apart from Pokemon, a lot of their games are simply diluting player base from their core games as people have pointed out above.
Hopefully this move by John Hanke is the kick up the back side that Niantic need. It's a shame to see Ethan go, who was a really great promoter of the game.
In general, is anyone listening to us? Who needs us?
I see how people write to the forum about their problems related to the game. and I don't see any responses or positive gameplay changes. I have repeatedly written about problems with the machine and the algorithm for the appearance of red portals, and in response to silence. Many of us wrote about the problems of the overclock function, and still the same silence. Agents asked to tick the language selection of the game client, since it is impossible to play in regional languages due to the quality of the translation, and in response, silence again. Many of us offered to help Brian translate the scanner correctly into different languages, and there was silence here too.
Why does the company treat its customers like this?
How much longer do we have to wait for the shaper cube to be opened and a bunch of other problems to be solved for which there is not even an answer?
Re: In general, is anyone listening to us? Who needs us?
But we don't have one of those. Used to be @RedSoloCup but he left us out in the cold with no one to hear our cries about broken stuff in the game. 😁 We thought @NianticThia would be "the one" but her role morphed into something else that no one seems sure what it is exactly.
Seeing how no one from Niantic really replies to almost any of the posts here (other than VK to close stuff), we can assume that what @NianticBrian says about folks reading stuff is true, but the lack of replies, the lack of fixing issues, the lack of any sort of communication means we are basically on our own. But I do hear that someone reads every single review for the game. But based on what is fixed in the game (HA-HA) those reviews are read but not acted on.
We get new features frequently, they are often buggy (ie Overclock's where the damn cube with the glyphs go & W-T-F is that damn glyph?) but prior features, are never really "finished", and old bugs, issues ect are often just seemingly ignored. Take a look at the bugs section and see what actually gets fixed and what issues have remained open for years. There's that pesky laggg issue that has been ongoing for how many years now? Either they know the fix and can't do it, or it's too expensive to fix, or they have no effing clue (god I hope not).
Maybe their team is just too small to give up one person from their normal job or jobs to check the forums and actually reply to forum posts.
Dang I really miss Joe now. 😥
Re: An Open Letter to Ingress Agents
The quality of the portals has fallen since OPR.
I have been also searching history and portals with a good story.
My learning was that only chapels are guaranteed to be 100% accepetd.
That is sad.
It is sad because exploring new locations, was the main reason i have been playing it so long.
Nia should realy find a system to get the quality of portals, not just the quantity.
Campfire Ingress Official group is chaos
I give up! Pokemon Go players have taken over the Campfire Ingress Official group. I have tried reporting them, asking them nicely to leave. Others have tried similar tactics. No one at Niantic is in charge of this group, so it will continue to devolve into chaos.
Re: [Discussion] Ctrl Anomaly Series - Details
Re ctrl connected ops, id be more keen to do if i can get the badge for the effort.
3 months of effort.
Awaiting whatever "punishment" randomly happens tomorrow to the game since ENl won again. =P
Re: Totally lost in control of the Machina links
The problem ate not the Machina Portals but the links….if machina cross my fields e Res destroy this is not a problem: I’m organised, I can found someone to help me or I destroy it……unfortunately in some area are not presents players, and if I make 100 kilometres to destroy the links they born again in same area the day after….the problem are not link where someone play, the problem is that the red link where no one play….
if Macchina links born but no one destroy it in one week (max) they would have to disappear because both is pulling new fields and to the birth of new players
