I think the semi permanent fields in urban/suburban areas are the issue. If the semipermanent field goes down, the people responsible for it, put it back up within 5 -10 hours and wipe every piece of obstacle out of the way in the process, assuming it does go down because the people responsible are notorious rechargers. It is these fields and attitudes that damage ingress at a notch lower than spoofers.
The really obnoxious lighthouse or facility you get arrested if you don't belong I'd put in a different class as the semipermanent urban/suburban fields that are defended with ferocity.
In those cases I'd like to see tech have the power to on/off portals that have limited public access (seasonal), or make them decay at exponentially faster rates than normal white/gray/silver portals,(15% a cp decay rate or faster?) and give them a gold color status.
These "Brigadoon" portals if they go away and fields are on them, rotten luck.
Some rewards for capture/takedown/hack of "high value" portals that make them higher value targets would be interesting. The hard part is play balance. What would be reasonable play balance to encourage action but not be too good?
In a Covid free world that would happen. It's not. and it may be six months to a year before movement does happen.
I always wonder how much covid people think they'll encounter on a solitary hike up a mountain. Or down to an isolated lighthouse, or kayaking out to an island.
People need to get out of the mindset that movement is impossible, especially when Ingress is easily tailored to take you away from the beaten path where all the virus vectors are.
Actually, that's precisely what you're claiming to know. So if you don't know why those portals are grey, it could be because there are no other agents in the area and never were. The fields could be completely irrelevant to why the portals are grey. Maybe it's just one player who started there after all the other players stopped, and he's making big fields because he can't be bothered going to every portal with no opposition.
You claim that people stop because they're permafielded and therefore fielding must change, then admit you have no idea if the fields affect anyone playing.
Despite the source of the idea, it's actually not a bad idea.
One of the biggest problems with people rethrowing durable fields, before Quantums, was the difficulty of obtaining keys in large enough quantities, while hiding the fact that you were doing it.
Go to a hard anchor with limited time window? You have to hack-mod, frack and glyph it to get sufficient keys. But if you can put them in a quantum, you don't need to.
For example, I submitted a portal on a deserted island. When the key came through, I put it in a capsule. That single key filled the capsule after a few months. Yes, on the day of an Op someone would have to go out there and capture it. But once done, we could rethrow that field over and over again, because of the capsuled keys.
Would it make things harder for big fields? Probably. But the people who make big fields used to have to deal with that. Choosing anchors you could get enough keys to was part of the challenge. There would definitely be wailing and gnashing of teef from the peanut gallery, but rolling back the Quantum duplication of keys would probably not cripple the game, while making couch fielding far harder.
Let Frackers continue to dupe hacks, simply because they're visible on the map. Using a fracker gives away in bold bright entries, that "we were here". So it's a trade off between secrecy and key gain. Something that's core to Ingress.
If there are portals then there are active location based game players. It can’t be a coincidence that almost every town where comes a big field ingress playing inside it ends.
I think the issue here is it's a little bit of a straw man. Stagnant play is a problem, but the method of 'twiddle knobs and see if it works' implies a world where you can find the best features through some sort of random walk. Maybe it's my own biases, but I work in a field where people who don't know a lot about the field are fond of suggesting silver bullets when in reality every solution is fraught with unintended consequences.
Just as a thought, I always try to apply this as a filter for new ideas:
What is the problem I am really trying to solve?
Who are the stakeholders impacted by my proposed change? What motivates those people?
What do stakeholders and experts think of the idea? In particular, what are the unintended consequences of the proposed change?
What are the 'thermodynamics' of this idea? If I drop a vase on the floor and it breaks, unwinding the change is hard. If I order one extra box of cereal from a delivery service every week, it's easy to unwind the change.
As a competitive, real-world game, Ingress has "thermodynamics" which can be a little hard to understand if you're not in it. People spend real time, real effort, and real money to play the game. If you obviate that work, people can get very upset. Ingress is also a game where succeeding often involves building communities and existing social structures. If your changes tend to rip those apart, "changing the meta" is not a happy experiment in A/B testing, it can be about sundering real friendships.
This is why people who have played the game for a wild will be clear about pointing out problems with proposed solutions -- it's pretty easy to mess things up, or change things and introduce a new set of problems.
I think I agree that if there is a problem here, this is closer to the source. These definitely do happen, and are effectively a way of converting something that required social coordination and team effort (large fields) into something you could just pour time into and get. They're also way less interesting as a gameplay type -- literally the same thing, over and over. The (best) fix here is still more agents playing nearby which would force a phase transition away from them, but I think it's at least not an ill-founded question to ask if there might be mechanical improvements for this.
My own thought (which I hasten to add is still just a thought) would be if a hypothesized field destroyer badge could be for MU-days rather than just MU. Or even just days. This would provide an incentive to target long-standing fields and kick start more activity.
The other fix is to lower the MU benefits from layers, which I also think would be healthy, but also very hard to get right in implementation detail (and still might fail because people like to grief).
For what it's worth, I didn't suggest you could throw a field under a field. My suggestion was to simply tweak the amount of MU that you get for a large field. The larger the field, the quicker the diminishing returns, so that there is no real MU advantage to throw big fields. While this certainly means you'd need to write new code, it would be adjusting existing values of the code, and so I would imagine not as complex as something like the new replicating capsules. You're changing calculations of existing rules, not even the rules themselves.
This is the deal: People threw large fields even when the MU values were way off. It's because large fields are fun and they literally put your name on the map. People literally do them *because they can*. You can go look at the first three weeks of Ingress history, and you will find large fields being made because they're cool.
They are not what wins septicycle's in today's environment. They're not even how you rack up the most individual MU; that's fairly boring local layers, which still cover areas where new players might start, but lack the things that make fielding something more than a time sink.
To approach this a bit more scientifically:
What portion of the Ingress world is under a large field?
What percentage of those fields have lasted for more than 2 checkpoints?
Once these regions have been identified, examine agent numbers before and after the large field set in. Is there a pattern?
Without the answers to those, you're just hand waving. As someone who looks with regularity at the fielding status at most States in the US, at first glance this does not appear to be the dominant state of affairs in most places. The places where it is are overwhelmingly lacking in team balance or the presence of agents at all. There are a handful of cities with a 'cultural' problem (one team is very abusive, one team is very passive, etc.), but that represents neither the majority or even the significant minority of cases.
I think that even if this was the primary problem, lowering MU for large fields would not fix it. Some ops are done for the MU and to win cycles, but the main reason they're done is because they're cool, fun, and utterly unique. Also they represent a big "take that" to the other side. If I had to change the MU algorithm, it would be to make to find some smart way to make layers worth less. I think this definitely is a hard thing to get right as a matter of balance and something that can be made systematic, but then again, I'm not looking for a silver bullet.
As a competitive, real-world game, Ingress has "thermodynamics" which can be a little hard to understand if you're not in it.
One of the issues here is that Ingress has different sets of thermodynamics in different areas-- there's no single set. There are some geographical areas where the existing rules work well and some where they don't work well at all. Ingress works well if you have a critical mass of active players and a reasonable balance between the factions. It can be a much less interesting game if you are the only player in an area or one faction completely dominates the area. In areas that are actually permafielded it can suck. (The examples in this discussion don't seem permafielded to me.)
If there are portals then there are active location based game players. It can’t be a coincidence that almost every town where comes a big field ingress playing inside it ends.
Again, I think you're reversing cause and effect.
If there are portals then there were active location-based game players there at some point. They may have been visitors. They may have stopped playing years ago. They may be PoGo players who have never taken up Ingress. I've spent years studying Ingress maps and I can say with near certainty that the fields you're calling permafields only stand because there are no active players under them. If there were players in the area those fields would not last very long.
@Hosette " I've spent years studying Ingress maps and I can say with near certainty that the fields you're calling permafields only stand because there are no active players under them. If there were players in the area those fields would not last very long."
Can you show a city with hundreds of empty portals, zero activity and no big field blocking gaming?
ok, I have to admit that different continents seem to have a different situation. In many American cities, there is no play at all. In Europe there is play, but if you have to put in the slightest effort to get to play, then there is no play.
On either continent, will the number of players not decrease if the lifespan of the fields were shortened? Or at least eliminate the possibility of charging them. Or if a field older than a week could be charged, but that would no longer prevent the bulding of new ones.
To me Ingress is about exercise. It is an exergame and then I appreciate Niantics first app was about travel. I travel yes for Ingress and my Mission Day badge is Oynx even though I am not sure how I afforded all the Airmiles flights and long Greyhound rides. I am still paying back credit cards. Yes, I guess Niantic never got a lot of that money. I am having fun. My goals change. Yes, I like being part of a BAF team but I also like being part of an anomaly bike team or Operation Clear Field team. I making missions these days. Drone are presenting new exploration partially on screen but based on real world maps. I am okay paying like 4US$ a month to play. There should be a free option thought to keep new players coming into the game. It is not just about triangles. It is largely about our social community.
You make the assumption that people can get into a car and go an hour into the middle of nowhere with good cellphone service, and plenty of portals to hit.
See things from the pov of someone who lives in a major metropolitan area and has to spend two hours on public transportation to get that same functionality.
Doable when things aren't normal, Gives cause to think twice and say nope when it's really bad. Where I am it is merely think twice before doing right now. Parts of California it's a hard no right now.
@JukkaJuu I suspect that I could come up with a similar list in Europe, though different population density patterns probably makes it harder. I started with the US because that's where I've spent most of my time watching the map over the years. Just for fun I found one, Tuzla population 120K: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=44.538298,18.676302&z=17&pll=44.538298,18.676302 In Africa it's not hard to find entire cities that have no portals because nobody has ever played there-- look at Kisangani, DRC for example.
I really do think you have the cause and effect wrong here. Areas typically get standing fields over them because there are no players under the fields to be annoyed by the occupied airspace. It's certainly possible that new players start under fields and then don't keep playing because of them but I don't think it's very common for a whole community to quit playing because of the types of fields you've described.
Nonsense. I've travelled to places plenty of times just to submit, because there weren't any. And just because there were players doesn't mean they're still there. And the point was you made a claim that is unsupported about why there aren't players. You're just saying "It is this" and then openly admitting you have no clue, while claiming that "things MUST change" because of what you're admitting you have no idea about.
Large swathes of cities like Los Angeles are grey, not because of big fields, but because people simply don't play any more, and many of the portal submissions that are new come from PoGo players. So a city filled with portals may have next to no Ingress players and thousands of PoGo players.
Grey portals =/= big fields. You're starting with a hypothesis then searching for evidence that supports it, instead of looking at reality and creating a hypothesis.
How many "Lighthouses, islands, mountain portals." are in a major metropolitan city? Context matters.
And I used to live in LA. I know exactly how easy it is to go to places where people don't live, for hard portals, and how rare hard portals are outside of where people don't live.
@Perringaiden "Large swathes of cities like Los Angeles are grey, not because of big fields, but because people simply don't play any more, and many of the portal submissions that are new come from PoGo players. So a city filled with portals may have next to no Ingress players and thousands of PoGo players."
So you’re trying to say that pogo is a better game than Ingress? Why?
I think it’s because it can accommodate more players, just beginners and tops, without anyone actively playing to interfere with the playing of others. In order for ingress to be fun with current mechanics, it needs just the right number of players who are just as good with each other, spend the same amount of time and money. If ingres becomes popular somewhere, then suddenly a team is formed that dominates the whole area and there is no meaningful content in the game for others. When others get bored, this team also stops and ghost towns are born for years. The losers don’t want to start again and the winners know that even winning continuously doesn’t do the game any good. Playing poorly is not motivating either.
Ingres needs to be changed or it will die. Changing Ingres, on the other hand, seems impossible for long-time players, although everyone sees players switching to other games. That’s why Niantic probably set out to make a whole new strategy game.
Its the nonstop events that pushes pokemon go forward all the time no matter if u play daily or once a week there is always something going on, look compared to ingress where are our fun events that award badges etc ?? we should get drone events that can do more atleast until the pandemic has settled down it will take atleast another year if not longer so until then what happens to ingress? hardly any players left...
Is it worth organizing any events for a few thousand players? They don’t attract new players and yet creating them costs something. No one starts a pogo because it has events. If someone has stopped a pogo then no one will return to it because of the events. Events are a nice addition to games, but they can't fix anything if the basic mechanics aren't tempting to play.
Yes - word of mouth advertising is a powerful thing, and let's be honest it's all this game has, since Niantic don't advertise it any other way.
A few thousand happy players telling their friends about the great fun they had a the event is a good recruitment tool - certainly better than bored players probably not telling their friends about a fairly stagnant game, which is the alternative.
well if want keep most of the playerbase active perhaps? i mean im sad eos badge was cancelled even if i understand why they did.... u said yourseld ingress needs change or it will die?
So you’re trying to say that pogo is a better game than Ingress? Why?
What nonsense are you spouting??
It is quantifiably true that there are far more Pokemon Go players than Ingress players. You can't argue that. Though apparently you can argue water is wet. Making false claims about my statements so you can argue against it is just proving you can't argue the actual point.
I think it’s because it can accommodate more players, just beginners and tops, without anyone actively playing to interfere with the playing of others. In order for ingress to be fun with current mechanics, it needs just the right number of players who are just as good with each other, spend the same amount of time and money. If ingres becomes popular somewhere, then suddenly a team is formed that dominates the whole area and there is no meaningful content in the game for others. When others get bored, this team also stops and ghost towns are born for years. The losers don’t want to start again and the winners know that even winning continuously doesn’t do the game any good. Playing poorly is not motivating either.
None of this is true, because your premise begins from the wrong axiom.
Ingress is not a collector game with a long nostalgic and diverse franchise. Pokemon Go is a completely different style of game, with a completely different goal, played by people looking for a completely different experience. They are only comparable in that they use the same portals.
Ingress has plenty of opportunities for improvement. That is undeniable, and many posts have been made with good ideas to change the game in ways that enhance the experience and make people more eager to play.
I'm not against changes. I'm against your fundamentally flawed idea backed up by personal beliefs that have been repeatedly disproven in this thread.
Events have always been the thing that causes surges in the playerbase. When we had regular events two out of every three months, the game thrived and grew.
The thing events do precisely is attract new players.
Imagine if Ingress had an AI that assigned missions. Like it would pick out a nearby portal of the opposite faction or neutral and give you a 60 minute count down to capture it for a reward of cubes or a 1 use Kinetic Capsule. AI tasks. They could also assign you to take Scout Controller or submit a new photo of a waypoint. You could even have a medal for completing so many.
@grendelwulf TBH, I would hate that-- it would be just like PoGO/HPWU with arbitrary hoop jumping tasks that don't really have a strategic gameplay value. I'm sure there are people who would thrive on them, though.
Both new RES players over a year ago gave up. No agents in town any more, over 200 portals. Other smaller towns under the permenent BAF bump the total # of grey portals over 1000 easily.
Closest ENL is 45 mins drive - he at least has been capping portals and letting them decay. Permenent BAF anchors from aSatallite portal (which was shut off during COVID lockdown), a mountain requiring 4 days hike and a set of portals closest to home of the agent keeping the BAF up. Any take down has resulted it in back up within hours. People just seem to want other agents to stop playing.
Anchors got spoofed 2 days ago due to a vindictive Canberra spoofer, but it'll be back up with the reset.
Comments
I think the semi permanent fields in urban/suburban areas are the issue. If the semipermanent field goes down, the people responsible for it, put it back up within 5 -10 hours and wipe every piece of obstacle out of the way in the process, assuming it does go down because the people responsible are notorious rechargers. It is these fields and attitudes that damage ingress at a notch lower than spoofers.
The really obnoxious lighthouse or facility you get arrested if you don't belong I'd put in a different class as the semipermanent urban/suburban fields that are defended with ferocity.
In those cases I'd like to see tech have the power to on/off portals that have limited public access (seasonal), or make them decay at exponentially faster rates than normal white/gray/silver portals,(15% a cp decay rate or faster?) and give them a gold color status.
These "Brigadoon" portals if they go away and fields are on them, rotten luck.
Some rewards for capture/takedown/hack of "high value" portals that make them higher value targets would be interesting. The hard part is play balance. What would be reasonable play balance to encourage action but not be too good?
@Mirthmaker
In a Covid free world that would happen. It's not. and it may be six months to a year before movement does happen.
I always wonder how much covid people think they'll encounter on a solitary hike up a mountain. Or down to an isolated lighthouse, or kayaking out to an island.
People need to get out of the mindset that movement is impossible, especially when Ingress is easily tailored to take you away from the beaten path where all the virus vectors are.
@JukkaJuu
I don't know, and we don't need to know.
Actually, that's precisely what you're claiming to know. So if you don't know why those portals are grey, it could be because there are no other agents in the area and never were. The fields could be completely irrelevant to why the portals are grey. Maybe it's just one player who started there after all the other players stopped, and he's making big fields because he can't be bothered going to every portal with no opposition.
You claim that people stop because they're permafielded and therefore fielding must change, then admit you have no idea if the fields affect anyone playing.
You've literally undermined your own argument.
Despite the source of the idea, it's actually not a bad idea.
One of the biggest problems with people rethrowing durable fields, before Quantums, was the difficulty of obtaining keys in large enough quantities, while hiding the fact that you were doing it.
Go to a hard anchor with limited time window? You have to hack-mod, frack and glyph it to get sufficient keys. But if you can put them in a quantum, you don't need to.
For example, I submitted a portal on a deserted island. When the key came through, I put it in a capsule. That single key filled the capsule after a few months. Yes, on the day of an Op someone would have to go out there and capture it. But once done, we could rethrow that field over and over again, because of the capsuled keys.
Would it make things harder for big fields? Probably. But the people who make big fields used to have to deal with that. Choosing anchors you could get enough keys to was part of the challenge. There would definitely be wailing and gnashing of teef from the peanut gallery, but rolling back the Quantum duplication of keys would probably not cripple the game, while making couch fielding far harder.
Let Frackers continue to dupe hacks, simply because they're visible on the map. Using a fracker gives away in bold bright entries, that "we were here". So it's a trade off between secrecy and key gain. Something that's core to Ingress.
I like the idea of disabling key duplication in quantums.
If there are portals then there are active location based game players. It can’t be a coincidence that almost every town where comes a big field ingress playing inside it ends.
I think the issue here is it's a little bit of a straw man. Stagnant play is a problem, but the method of 'twiddle knobs and see if it works' implies a world where you can find the best features through some sort of random walk. Maybe it's my own biases, but I work in a field where people who don't know a lot about the field are fond of suggesting silver bullets when in reality every solution is fraught with unintended consequences.
Just as a thought, I always try to apply this as a filter for new ideas:
As a competitive, real-world game, Ingress has "thermodynamics" which can be a little hard to understand if you're not in it. People spend real time, real effort, and real money to play the game. If you obviate that work, people can get very upset. Ingress is also a game where succeeding often involves building communities and existing social structures. If your changes tend to rip those apart, "changing the meta" is not a happy experiment in A/B testing, it can be about sundering real friendships.
This is why people who have played the game for a wild will be clear about pointing out problems with proposed solutions -- it's pretty easy to mess things up, or change things and introduce a new set of problems.
E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNQu_3VQYAE
I think I agree that if there is a problem here, this is closer to the source. These definitely do happen, and are effectively a way of converting something that required social coordination and team effort (large fields) into something you could just pour time into and get. They're also way less interesting as a gameplay type -- literally the same thing, over and over. The (best) fix here is still more agents playing nearby which would force a phase transition away from them, but I think it's at least not an ill-founded question to ask if there might be mechanical improvements for this.
My own thought (which I hasten to add is still just a thought) would be if a hypothesized field destroyer badge could be for MU-days rather than just MU. Or even just days. This would provide an incentive to target long-standing fields and kick start more activity.
The other fix is to lower the MU benefits from layers, which I also think would be healthy, but also very hard to get right in implementation detail (and still might fail because people like to grief).
For what it's worth, I didn't suggest you could throw a field under a field. My suggestion was to simply tweak the amount of MU that you get for a large field. The larger the field, the quicker the diminishing returns, so that there is no real MU advantage to throw big fields. While this certainly means you'd need to write new code, it would be adjusting existing values of the code, and so I would imagine not as complex as something like the new replicating capsules. You're changing calculations of existing rules, not even the rules themselves.
This is the deal: People threw large fields even when the MU values were way off. It's because large fields are fun and they literally put your name on the map. People literally do them *because they can*. You can go look at the first three weeks of Ingress history, and you will find large fields being made because they're cool.
They are not what wins septicycle's in today's environment. They're not even how you rack up the most individual MU; that's fairly boring local layers, which still cover areas where new players might start, but lack the things that make fielding something more than a time sink.
To approach this a bit more scientifically:
Without the answers to those, you're just hand waving. As someone who looks with regularity at the fielding status at most States in the US, at first glance this does not appear to be the dominant state of affairs in most places. The places where it is are overwhelmingly lacking in team balance or the presence of agents at all. There are a handful of cities with a 'cultural' problem (one team is very abusive, one team is very passive, etc.), but that represents neither the majority or even the significant minority of cases.
I think that even if this was the primary problem, lowering MU for large fields would not fix it. Some ops are done for the MU and to win cycles, but the main reason they're done is because they're cool, fun, and utterly unique. Also they represent a big "take that" to the other side. If I had to change the MU algorithm, it would be to make to find some smart way to make layers worth less. I think this definitely is a hard thing to get right as a matter of balance and something that can be made systematic, but then again, I'm not looking for a silver bullet.
@d0gboy writes:
As a competitive, real-world game, Ingress has "thermodynamics" which can be a little hard to understand if you're not in it.
One of the issues here is that Ingress has different sets of thermodynamics in different areas-- there's no single set. There are some geographical areas where the existing rules work well and some where they don't work well at all. Ingress works well if you have a critical mass of active players and a reasonable balance between the factions. It can be a much less interesting game if you are the only player in an area or one faction completely dominates the area. In areas that are actually permafielded it can suck. (The examples in this discussion don't seem permafielded to me.)
@JukkaJuu writes:
If there are portals then there are active location based game players. It can’t be a coincidence that almost every town where comes a big field ingress playing inside it ends.
Again, I think you're reversing cause and effect.
If there are portals then there were active location-based game players there at some point. They may have been visitors. They may have stopped playing years ago. They may be PoGo players who have never taken up Ingress. I've spent years studying Ingress maps and I can say with near certainty that the fields you're calling permafields only stand because there are no active players under them. If there were players in the area those fields would not last very long.
@Hosette " I've spent years studying Ingress maps and I can say with near certainty that the fields you're calling permafields only stand because there are no active players under them. If there were players in the area those fields would not last very long."
Can you show a city with hundreds of empty portals, zero activity and no big field blocking gaming?
@JukkaJuu Why yes, yes I can.
Newton Kansas: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=38.048362,-97.345265&z=17&pll=38.048362,-97.345265
Pine Bluff Arkansas: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=34.22712,-92.003759&z=17&pll=34.22712,-92.003759
Hannibal Missouri: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=39.710663,-91.357009&z=17&pll=39.710663,-91.357009
Poplar Bluff Missouri: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=36.759651,-90.394046&z=17&pll=36.759651,-90.394046
Texarkana Arkansas: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=33.424952,-94.043096&z=17&pll=33.424952,-94.043096
Abilene Texas (population 122K): https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=32.449502,-99.73282&z=17&pll=32.449502,-99.73282
Lake Charles Louisiana: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=30.229442,-93.216729&z=17&pll=30.229442,-93.216729
Valdosta Georgia: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=30.836392,-83.281918&z=17&pll=30.836392,-83.281918
Prince Albert Saskatchewan: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=53.203412,-105.753241&z=17&pll=53.203412,-105.753241
Ponce Puerto Rico (population 143K): https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=18.011319,-66.613171&z=17&pll=18.011319,-66.613171
Chetumal Mexico (population 150K, over 750 grey portals): https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=18.512159,-88.298695&z=17&pll=18.512159,-88.298695
Durango Mexico (population 655K, over 1300 grey portals): https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=24.024438,-104.670086&z=17&pll=24.024438,-104.670086
Several of those look like they had a visitor or two but are almost completely grey and show no signs of regular local activity.
ok, I have to admit that different continents seem to have a different situation. In many American cities, there is no play at all. In Europe there is play, but if you have to put in the slightest effort to get to play, then there is no play.
On either continent, will the number of players not decrease if the lifespan of the fields were shortened? Or at least eliminate the possibility of charging them. Or if a field older than a week could be charged, but that would no longer prevent the bulding of new ones.
To me Ingress is about exercise. It is an exergame and then I appreciate Niantics first app was about travel. I travel yes for Ingress and my Mission Day badge is Oynx even though I am not sure how I afforded all the Airmiles flights and long Greyhound rides. I am still paying back credit cards. Yes, I guess Niantic never got a lot of that money. I am having fun. My goals change. Yes, I like being part of a BAF team but I also like being part of an anomaly bike team or Operation Clear Field team. I making missions these days. Drone are presenting new exploration partially on screen but based on real world maps. I am okay paying like 4US$ a month to play. There should be a free option thought to keep new players coming into the game. It is not just about triangles. It is largely about our social community.
You make the assumption that people can get into a car and go an hour into the middle of nowhere with good cellphone service, and plenty of portals to hit.
See things from the pov of someone who lives in a major metropolitan area and has to spend two hours on public transportation to get that same functionality.
Doable when things aren't normal, Gives cause to think twice and say nope when it's really bad. Where I am it is merely think twice before doing right now. Parts of California it's a hard no right now.
@JukkaJuu I suspect that I could come up with a similar list in Europe, though different population density patterns probably makes it harder. I started with the US because that's where I've spent most of my time watching the map over the years. Just for fun I found one, Tuzla population 120K: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=44.538298,18.676302&z=17&pll=44.538298,18.676302 In Africa it's not hard to find entire cities that have no portals because nobody has ever played there-- look at Kisangani, DRC for example.
I really do think you have the cause and effect wrong here. Areas typically get standing fields over them because there are no players under the fields to be annoyed by the occupied airspace. It's certainly possible that new players start under fields and then don't keep playing because of them but I don't think it's very common for a whole community to quit playing because of the types of fields you've described.
Nonsense. I've travelled to places plenty of times just to submit, because there weren't any. And just because there were players doesn't mean they're still there. And the point was you made a claim that is unsupported about why there aren't players. You're just saying "It is this" and then openly admitting you have no clue, while claiming that "things MUST change" because of what you're admitting you have no idea about.
Large swathes of cities like Los Angeles are grey, not because of big fields, but because people simply don't play any more, and many of the portal submissions that are new come from PoGo players. So a city filled with portals may have next to no Ingress players and thousands of PoGo players.
Grey portals =/= big fields. You're starting with a hypothesis then searching for evidence that supports it, instead of looking at reality and creating a hypothesis.
How many "Lighthouses, islands, mountain portals." are in a major metropolitan city? Context matters.
And I used to live in LA. I know exactly how easy it is to go to places where people don't live, for hard portals, and how rare hard portals are outside of where people don't live.
@Perringaiden "Large swathes of cities like Los Angeles are grey, not because of big fields, but because people simply don't play any more, and many of the portal submissions that are new come from PoGo players. So a city filled with portals may have next to no Ingress players and thousands of PoGo players."
So you’re trying to say that pogo is a better game than Ingress? Why?
I think it’s because it can accommodate more players, just beginners and tops, without anyone actively playing to interfere with the playing of others. In order for ingress to be fun with current mechanics, it needs just the right number of players who are just as good with each other, spend the same amount of time and money. If ingres becomes popular somewhere, then suddenly a team is formed that dominates the whole area and there is no meaningful content in the game for others. When others get bored, this team also stops and ghost towns are born for years. The losers don’t want to start again and the winners know that even winning continuously doesn’t do the game any good. Playing poorly is not motivating either.
Ingres needs to be changed or it will die. Changing Ingres, on the other hand, seems impossible for long-time players, although everyone sees players switching to other games. That’s why Niantic probably set out to make a whole new strategy game.
Its the nonstop events that pushes pokemon go forward all the time no matter if u play daily or once a week there is always something going on, look compared to ingress where are our fun events that award badges etc ?? we should get drone events that can do more atleast until the pandemic has settled down it will take atleast another year if not longer so until then what happens to ingress? hardly any players left...
Is it worth organizing any events for a few thousand players? They don’t attract new players and yet creating them costs something. No one starts a pogo because it has events. If someone has stopped a pogo then no one will return to it because of the events. Events are a nice addition to games, but they can't fix anything if the basic mechanics aren't tempting to play.
Yes - word of mouth advertising is a powerful thing, and let's be honest it's all this game has, since Niantic don't advertise it any other way.
A few thousand happy players telling their friends about the great fun they had a the event is a good recruitment tool - certainly better than bored players probably not telling their friends about a fairly stagnant game, which is the alternative.
well if want keep most of the playerbase active perhaps? i mean im sad eos badge was cancelled even if i understand why they did.... u said yourseld ingress needs change or it will die?
@JukkaJuu
So you’re trying to say that pogo is a better game than Ingress? Why?
What nonsense are you spouting??
It is quantifiably true that there are far more Pokemon Go players than Ingress players. You can't argue that. Though apparently you can argue water is wet. Making false claims about my statements so you can argue against it is just proving you can't argue the actual point.
I think it’s because it can accommodate more players, just beginners and tops, without anyone actively playing to interfere with the playing of others. In order for ingress to be fun with current mechanics, it needs just the right number of players who are just as good with each other, spend the same amount of time and money. If ingres becomes popular somewhere, then suddenly a team is formed that dominates the whole area and there is no meaningful content in the game for others. When others get bored, this team also stops and ghost towns are born for years. The losers don’t want to start again and the winners know that even winning continuously doesn’t do the game any good. Playing poorly is not motivating either.
None of this is true, because your premise begins from the wrong axiom.
Ingress is not a collector game with a long nostalgic and diverse franchise. Pokemon Go is a completely different style of game, with a completely different goal, played by people looking for a completely different experience. They are only comparable in that they use the same portals.
Ingress has plenty of opportunities for improvement. That is undeniable, and many posts have been made with good ideas to change the game in ways that enhance the experience and make people more eager to play.
I'm not against changes. I'm against your fundamentally flawed idea backed up by personal beliefs that have been repeatedly disproven in this thread.
Events have always been the thing that causes surges in the playerbase. When we had regular events two out of every three months, the game thrived and grew.
The thing events do precisely is attract new players.
Cool down, this is just a mobile game, these are born and die every day.
Imagine if Ingress had an AI that assigned missions. Like it would pick out a nearby portal of the opposite faction or neutral and give you a 60 minute count down to capture it for a reward of cubes or a 1 use Kinetic Capsule. AI tasks. They could also assign you to take Scout Controller or submit a new photo of a waypoint. You could even have a medal for completing so many.
@grendelwulf TBH, I would hate that-- it would be just like PoGO/HPWU with arbitrary hoop jumping tasks that don't really have a strategic gameplay value. I'm sure there are people who would thrive on them, though.
Goulburn, Australia.
Both new RES players over a year ago gave up. No agents in town any more, over 200 portals. Other smaller towns under the permenent BAF bump the total # of grey portals over 1000 easily.
Closest ENL is 45 mins drive - he at least has been capping portals and letting them decay. Permenent BAF anchors from aSatallite portal (which was shut off during COVID lockdown), a mountain requiring 4 days hike and a set of portals closest to home of the agent keeping the BAF up. Any take down has resulted it in back up within hours. People just seem to want other agents to stop playing.
Anchors got spoofed 2 days ago due to a vindictive Canberra spoofer, but it'll be back up with the reset.