An important question for the game developers.
The quarantine is coming to an end, and an important question arises for the game developers. When you read about the news from Pokemon Go or Harry Potter, you are amazed at how much new things happen every month directly in the gameplay itself. Events, balance changes, new materials in the game, new mechanics ... What do we have? One long tesselation event and triangle painting that hasn't changed since redacted.
Okay, with the new, you haven't been able to finish the old for how many years. For many people, Prime drains the battery of old smartphone or a modern model in an hour!
Why is there such a stagnation in development and new additions in Ingress?
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coming to end the covid-19, says who ? there will be no real events until next year even then its unknown how things will look.
niantic is looking at other type of events, global trekker and missions drones in the near future, also battle beacons should come soime time this year.
subscription is something we can expect in the future also.
Haha pandemic coming to an end? United States would really wish this to be true.
In my country, quarantine has already been relaxed.
Many agents are really interested in why during the entire existence of Prime, there are no significant changes in it?
Even if we take the time before the quarantine, there were many updates in the style of "we raised the menu button by half a pixel, fixed old errors and added new ones." There are people who, like me, want to support developers with money. But they have no place to invest them. Keylockers were bought long ago, avatars for the arrow too. And the pictures that are useless for victory, hanging over the portal or things that fall out of the portals, are simply not interesting to many.
Compare Pokemon Go changelog and Ingress changelog! In Pokémon, you can invite friends to raids, fight with the R team, (and much more) additional development branches have appeared in Harry Potter, but what about Ingress? Added levels 8 to 16, and recursion. But for what??? Many people get tired of the monotonous process of taking level 9. They know that there will be no new items or features at level 10. At level 11, the gameplay will not change in any way (except for the length of the charge ****). That's the problem.
I have a thought on this, though as with everything in this thread it's purely speculation.
My guess is that Niantic is focusing most of its resources on the games that are profitable. At the same time, they are trying to figure out how to make Ingress profitable as well but are doing it with a shoestring budget compared to the other games. It seems to me to be a classic chicken/egg situation where they can't make the game profitable until they invest and they don't want to invest to make it profitable.
My greatest fear is that it is going to turn into yet another checklist/collection game like PoGo and HPWU, Every day countless PoGo players go through the process of flinging three treats at a buddy, rubbing their thumb in a circle a few times, and tapping a button. Most of the time they're taking the photo not because they want the photo but because it's an item on a checklist that gets them a tiny benefit. In HPWU they pick something up off the ground whether they want the item or not, battle in a low-level fortress just to knock off the daily accomplishment, and go through the ritual of returning N traces of type Y just to check things off of a list for some sort of treat.
I play PoGo casually, though a bit more during the pandemic because Ingress gameplay has mostly ground to a halt and there's not a whole lot to do at home. My phone is filled with photos of pokemon that I took just because it was a hoop to jump through, not because I wanted a photo. My greatest fear is that Niantic is going to take Ingress in that direction, with things that you have to grind just to have done them.
Quarantine might be coming to an end in your country, but in others it's being either reintroduced or extended. This pandemic is far from over.
quarantine lifted in areas doesnt mean its safe worldwide, not until WHO says it is over which it wont be for very long.
There is no stagnation in Ingress development, there is in fact the most development activity on the game for quite some time
We know something BIG is coming sometime in August, relating to the Drone.
The development of the drone was likely made more important than other new features due to the pandemic.
As for Prime causing high battery drain, this is false, the causes for the high drain have been fixed, if there is excessive drain, then it must be something else, not Ingress.
For comparison, Prime, PGO, Wizards Unite all have relatively low power consumption, And ALL had high battery drain issues when first launched.
Catan, which is new, has high battery drain, even the first update alone has shown good improvements.
We must wait for new servers.
New features to a dying game, yeah sure. The only thing they prepare is setup Catan on the current ingress servers.
Who on earth wants to play a game against hordes of spoofer cheaters? Just people only interested in walks with any kind of gaming and people in big cities where spoofing is not that obvious.
Anyway, times of competitive gameplay is over and any feature other than single game play is pointless. So keep calm and let it die. And pray for lessons learned in Catan.
ALL of Niantic's games has spoofers.
Even Catan
So far Ingress is the most rounded and mature game. Pogo was damaged before world launch because of rampant spoofing, thus I lost interest
There are updates for ingress prime:
We have drones, Portal scanning new medals etc.
Have you read up on this topic which the admins hinted on the upcoming events as well?
https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/11347/update-on-anomalies-and-events-for-2020/p1
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There is a very interesting meme that depicts a beautiful multi-colored large Pokemon Go logo under which it is written (now you can invite friends to raids, fight the R team and much more). Also next to it is a tiny ingress logo under which it is written (hurray, we finally have a faster map loading !!!). This meme is not sarcasm - this is reality. In Pokemon Go, there are many things that can be obtained through the hack of the PokéStop, or the store. Ingress doesn't even have items higher than level 8 and the store is forced to sell old badges. The facts speak for themselves.
Ingress had a chance to become a large-scale battle, with many types of goal achievement, but it remained a game of drawing triangles.
data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABQAAAAUCAQAAAAngNWGAAAA/0lEQVR4AYXNMSiEcRyA4cfmGHQbCZIipkuxnJgMStlMNmeyD2dwmc8+sZgxYJd9ErIZFHUyYYD7fkr6l4/rnvmtl7+KitrqV/fq2Y5eLY3Z9S48eRLe7BmVZ9qhTLhQ0algzZWQOVKSsCF8OjAnwbxDTWFDUhPK/jMr1H6HE/IqRky2DyvCefuwItwZzodVoYRiLqMkVCXrwpJ9twZ+sgfDYEFYl8wIWxZ9uFf7zkallxlJh4YrLGsKjZRx7VGHhLqwgFUN45DGdb8MeXGpgB4ABZdeDcpZEY51A+hyLKz4S1W4MQWm3AibWtgWmk6dyISa1pSdyWTOlLXVp0+eL9D/ZPfBTNanAAAAAElFTkSuQmCCWhy is there such a stagnation in development and new additions in Ingress?
Simple. Ingress is paid for by those other products, not itself. Even the roughly 300-500k of yearly income, doesn't pay for more than a few developers salaries. So our updates are slower, more targeted and focused on the critical issues that we can't live without, because we don't have a 200 person development team.
Battery drain is high? Battery drain has always been high, even under Redacted. There's a reason why Ingress was a driving force behind multiple major battery developers in the early years. Why Cheerio and Anker both have Ingress themed batteries. Because we used to drive heating blocks with 10k batteries connected to them.
What do we have in terms of new features?
What about gameplay changes?
Largely Ingress is a solid and continuing gameplay that only really requires tweaks around the edges. Less cubes, a bit lower shielding, more US, etc. Those are the type of tweaks that the gameplay warrants. Even PoGo's gameplay changes are largely related to the pandemic, and we have the double deploy, reduced decay and faster hack times and counts. We don't need major gameplay changes, and making them would probably damage the game.
What do we need?
A revenue source. R8s in the store were a good start, but the Pandemic has dampened their effect for now. A single use incubator style object would also be a very worthwhile element, though how to put that in while balancing the game is a good question. VR items should not be duplicated like the "walking MUFG" request, because it would flood the gear sales market. Maybe charging up an oversized cube with walking? Would require a dramatic drop in cube drop rates (which we need anyway), but the one two punch would be labelled a money grab immediately.
Its difficult to add monetization into a game that was specifically designed without monetization, but we don't have Google backing up the cash dumpster any more.