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Re: Make Fielding Great Again!
If I were John Hanke, I'd be making every effort to make going places a bigger part of all of Niantic's games. Every location-based game will get boring if your game can be played stem to stern without going anywhere new. Encouraging exploration provides endless opportunities for every one of Niantic's games to be endlessly interesting.
If your town has a big giant field over it, and you really want to make tiny triangles you should need to go somewhere new to take them down. If you want to make a BAF, you need to go somewhere out of the way so it'll stay up for more than a few minutes. You need to explore. And you need to work together.
Pokemon Go should have more reasons to visit a mountain-top Pokestop.
Pikman Bloom should give players a reason to go somewhere new and experience new things.
That's how you keep these games from getting tired and old. It's an advantage that no other game has. You'll get tired of Candy Crush. You'll get tired of smashing pigs. It's pretty hard to get tired of exploring the world around you.
That's how every single one of Ninatics games can grow endlessly.
Re: Make Fielding Great Again!
If it was such a "toxic playstyle" and the game is SOOOO much healthier now, where did all the players go? Why aren't more people picking up the game and staying with it anymore?
I'll tell you why. People get bored. There's less community to keep them involved because the changes that have been made are skewed towards individual players and away from things that required teamwork.
Guardian hunting - love it or hate it - required teamwork. When the guy you battled with on a regular basis in your hometown went on vacation you had to find an agent to clean up after them. That required teamwork and networking. Teamwork and networking keep people involved and playing the game. When someone from another state contacts you and asks you to go neutralize something, it gives you a reason beyond making tiny triangles to play. Yes, some people found it toxic. Yes, some people hated being hunted. But like I said, love it or hate it, killing guardians was the first nail in the coffin and it drove a lot of people away from the game.
And from there on, as I've said, most of the changes that have been made to Ingress cater to individual, and urban play. Linking under fields, key dupes going away, all of these changes make it easier for individuals to play the game and in no way shape or form increase the requirement for teamwork.
Used to be even anomalies could be influenced by teamwork and fielding over an anomaly site. Now, it's all about battle beacons and shards. And yes there is teamwork involved in beacon and shard anomalies but that's the ONLY time a larger community really influences the game anymore - at least here in the US.
There has not been a single change that makes going to a hard-to-reach low-signal portal more significant. For me, that's the funnest part of the game. Going places I've never been before, having to figure out ways to get a signal in the middle of nowhere. And yeah, no key duping means I have to go back again. But it means I'm going back again and again to the same place if I want to keep using a strategic portal.
I will grant that Quantums made it too easy to dupe keys. And I am all for that aspect of the game being removed. I do however, believe there should be a mechanism that makes it harder to dupe keys but doesn't remove the feature entirely from the game. And kinetics seem to be the perfect answer to that problem.
People have been arguing against large fields for a long time. And you're right, it does seem to be a part of the game that's going away. But to say that the game is better off now that you've gotten your way ignores the reality of the shrinking player base. The game may be less toxic but it's also less fun and less community oriented. And a less toxic game with nobody playing it is the road we continue to travel.
Re: Make Fielding Great Again!
I'll copy and paste my comments about this from a previous thread:
niantic has waged a war on fielding for some time now.
They took the "control" out of "Control Field" when they introduced under-field linking. This disincentivized strategic fielding for many agents and likely drove agents away or at least into "casual" play.
Then, niantic took away key duplication when they stole everyone's muffys. Again, more agents likely peeled off forever because there was no program for kinetic key duplication as was mentioned.
Re: 100 AP for hacking friendly portals
Basically yet another "feature" no one asked for, no one wanted.
Now we get to watch all of those little L3 accounts finally level up...
Re: Make Fielding Great Again!
Let's not forget that niantic has slashed the Ingress team and resources compared to 7-8 years ago, so expectations should be appropriately adjusted.
The once very frequent ingress reports and other lore content videos/posts directly drove player activity. This has all but vanished.
We *never got* the once-much-anticipated new backends. Luckily, dwindling player activity has allowed niantic to get away with a bargain basement server host.
Agents (not me) are spending hours of their time, loads of data, and much electricity to scan portals, but so far there is absolutely zero resulting benefit to ingress. Prove me wrong on that.
Agents have been desensitized to the once outrageous appearance of store items in the item carousel. Now ingress has gone full P2W with multiple gear items in the store.
Anomalies are a fraction of their former glory, with very few satellite sites and no connected cells, which alienates many agents who don't have the means to travel to the few distant sites.
Where we once had multiple active, engaged community managers, do we even have one now? Where are the AMAs?
What function do vanguards and XMAs perform? Have these groups had any "new blood" or member cycling recently?
Make Fielding Great Again!
I think Gigafields and BAF's are a huge part of the game that's wasting away. There hasn't been a gigafield of either color over the US in years - and large fields are a primary reason for community and connections within factions.
Coordinating a huge field brings agents from around a region or even an entire country together to work on an operation. There are usually dozens of agents clearing blockers and throwing for multi-state fields. Look through any of the news channels on Telegram at the photos of agents in SITREPS - Look through the photos of agents in SITREPS on this forum - Lots of smiling happy people enjoying the community aspect of the game. They go out to dinner together after an op, they drive hundreds of miles together. They hike together and they communicate through so many different channels to make these amazing fields happen.
But folks who don't like not being able to link under a field gripe. And Niantic has listened. And big fields are dying.
Big fields are dying because spoofers keep getting away with their shenanigans - because the other huge reason for regional communication went away with the **** of guardians - because key duping is gone - and all of this because players who just want to make tiny triangles in their backyard and level up by themselves have, so far, been the ones catered to the most.
Make fielding great again.
Re: Kinetic Capsule Program: Portal Keys to Portal Keys
@P4rzivall writes:
reproducing keys has always been essential for operations with strategic portals.
That is factually inaccurate. I did lots of ops with strategic portals long before MUFG (later renamed Quantum) capsules existed. If we needed keys to strategic portals then we either figured out how to get people there to farm them or we arranged a network of travelers to get them from the origin to the destination. Here's one real-life example of how keys traveled:
- I picked up my friend Alice at the airport as they returned from a trip and collected a capsule full of strategic keys.
- The next day I met up Bob, who was visiting my area from another state, and handed off a specific subset of the keys.
- Later that day I drove 600 miles each way to deliver the remaining keys to Charlie.
- I arranged for David to collect the keys from Charlie a few weeks later when they were visiting Charlie's area.
This particular one was a bit more extreme than most because of recharge range issues but it was quite common to recruit travelers to mule keys for ops, and doing this was part of planning an op.
MUFG capsules were introduced in 2015 and effectively changed the strategic portal game to easy mode. Players no longer had to work hard to get more keys to durable portals, and they no longer had to budget their use of them. You needed 20 keys to a portal for an op? No problem... the team had hundreds of them floating around and they could grow those 20 back in days.
If you've only ever done ops on key-duping easy mode then I understand why losing key duplication would be frustrating. The reality is that key duplication has broken the game by making it too easy to use super durable portals... some of which are essentially inaccessible. Removing key duplication hasn't solved that problem because high-value portals now have thousands of duped keys floating around but at least the situation is no longer getting worse.
Re: Kinetic Capsule Program: Portal Keys to Portal Keys
Don't need yet another repetitive duping thread either, but we got a new one today.
Re: Make Fielding Great Again!
Do it! Organize a giga. Cover half the freaking country. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Re: Kinetic Capsule Program: Portal Keys to Portal Keys
Another thread with the endlessly recurring theme of, we want free keys again. Don't make us go hack them, give us a way to reproduce them at our leisure. And we promise not to abuse whatever mechanism you give us. Trust us, really, just because kinetics are incredibly easy to abuse we would never do that for keys...