Ingress: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

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  • Actually, quite a few mentions from @ofer2 and @NianticBrian have been made on this forum about talking to old players who stopped, or talking to players about what makes them play less.

    That's why they introduced Battle Beacons and are working on other gameplay concepts. While I think the BB implementation missed the mark as a substitute for anomalies (anything short of player organized cluster battles would), they are working towards those goals.

    And I'm pretty sure Niantic has, or could get if they wanted it, the metrics on how many people open up the client under a field, and then close it again without playing.

    So yes, they could change the most core mechanic in the game to satisfy the needs of a small subsection, at the cost of the rest of the players, but I'm not sure they want to do that, especially at a point where they are short on budget and need to keep every player they can.

    In the balance of effects that playing under a field would garner, it really seems like you'd lose far more people in disgust, than regain people who've already quit.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @JukkaJuu Why not connect with other teammates in the broader area and coordinate on a strategy? Recruit new players to join you? It seems like if you could coordinate with some teammates who are just outside of the fields then you could figure out how to take the field down and throw blockers to make it harder to put up.

  • All active players belonged to the same team as the big field. Some passerby has taken over a few portals here in the last few months, there don’t seem to be any other players anymore. I don’t think anyone playing here has a boat except those who have done that field. And I don’t know how to connect with members of my own team. No one in Comms discussed anything in the fall. Then I last tried to play.

    I asked the local pogo discord group, I know there are a lot of former ingress players out there, but they are all on this field builder team. They did not know how long the field will be charged. None of them have played for at least six months.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @JukkaJuu So it sounds like a trip out to the soft anchors in (from memory) the east might be sufficient to **** the field.

  • JukkaJuuJukkaJuu ✭✭✭
    edited December 2020

    At each corner of the field, there is at least one portal on the island.

    Anyway, using the day to break up someone’s field that can be rebuilt quickly doesn’t seem meaningful. I could also buy Portal's destroying services from Ebay, but paying for something that may not even belong to the game's creators doesn't seem right either.

    So lets the winners continue to win until they get bored and the rest of us play while waiting for something else. On the positive side, even a winning team cannot play now 😂

  • gazzas89gazzas89 ✭✭✭✭✭

    You would still be denying them points if you set that fields bei g set up under existing fields were worth a 3rd of what they should be, but it would mean people who want to field and cant get to these bigger fields can still play, everyone wins

  • jm56789jm56789 ✭✭
    edited December 2020

    Any chance you could break this aggregate down a bit, please? Locally, it seemed to me that there were few people cranking up activity to take advantage of the EOS benefits, more players returning for the anniversary badge for a week or two, and then a bit more of casual play on the average. As a player at higher risk in a higher risk location, I didn't partake much, compared to my usual response to challenge badges.

    Saying "we" could have done the full challenge safely misses the lack of localization to real world conditions - which "we", who, where, when?

    No, I for one am thankful that NIA forestalled the challenge aspect. I appreciate your response to a sensible request, Niantic.

  • starwortstarwort ✭✭✭✭✭

    Changing the fielding rules will annoy the veteran players and make no difference to new players. That's not how you improve the game and get more players.

    There are lots of aspects to the game beyond fielding: builder/destroyer, hacker, explorer/pioneer; getting exercise by walking around your neighbourhood or travelling to see something interesting.

  • starwortstarwort ✭✭✭✭✭

    Unfortunately, Niantic lost the ratings battle when they decided to rewrite the game from scratch using programmers who (seemingly) didn't know anything about the game, with a completely different UI and using a platform that isn't really suited to this particular game; took two years to develop an alpha-quality product, and tried to ride on their existing high rating by making the new version an upgrade to the old one. Many, many players 1-starred Ingress as a direct result of this and then quit the game and we're not going to get those ratings back.

    Now I've used Ingress Prime since a couple of weeks after its initial release (basically as soon as Redacted became an option); it's not as bad as the 1-starrers would have you think, and it's come a long way since those early days and is useable and perfectly adequate to play the game (although I still despair about the alphabetic key sorting option). But it took 3-4 years to get here.

  • when they decided to rewrite the game from scratch

    This was not a decision, it was a forced requirement when RoboVM was deprecated, and Apple and Google were leaning on them to remove an unsupported product.

    using programmers who (seemingly) didn't know anything about the game

    Many of the developers stayed with Google when Niantic split away, and so they would have tasked PoGo experienced developers for it. I do know however that quite a few of the developers have begun playing in earnest.

    with a completely different UI and using a platform that isn't really suited to this particular game

    The old UI had it's clunkiness too. And the platform that's being used, is a billion dollar producing platform on the world's most successful location-based mobile game.

    The biggest failure of Niantic, was leaving this work for 5 years and a long distance from the people who built the original. I agree with the failures in design and direction from a series of product managers since 2015, but they had very little choice whether to make Prime with what they had and the people they had, and Unity is one of the best choices for this.

  • starwortstarwort ✭✭✭✭✭

    Yes I'm aware about RoboVM, and to be honest I've no idea what mobile platforms there are out there. But I'd argue that they didn't have to go for a from-scratch approach; they could have based the new code on the old code. If they didn't have anyone left who understood the old code then someone would have had to study it... but that might still have been quicker than what actually happened. (EOL for RoboVM was announced in April 2016 and actually happened in April 2017; Ingress Prime was released in November 2018, still a long way from parity with the old scanner.)

    The thing about Unity is... OK, the game works, and it's even reasonably responsive on a high-end phone, but it's a 3D platform for a 2D game. Start-up times absolutely suck, and all the text-input boxes are a travesty. Prime performance is a bit of a dog compared with Ingress 1.x, and that wasn't stellar itself.

  • But I'd argue that they didn't have to go for a from-scratch approach; they could have based the new code on the old code

    Literally a completely different software development language. The thing they did replicate is the logic of how the game plays.

    The thing about Unity is... OK, the game works, and it's even reasonably responsive on a high-end phone, but it's a 3D platform for a 2D game.

    Rather than back and forth, I'll point out that Unity is used by almost every 'isometric' game you see today. Unity is a 3D capable platform, but it's also quite useful as a 2D game. But...

    Ingress has always been a 3D rendered game. Classic Ingress was 3D. It was more rudimentary, yes, because the entire classic client was hand cranked before something like Unity existed. Ingress 1.x ran 'like a dog' on low end phones in 2013. "But the Animations" isn't a new Prime issue. It's always been an issue in Ingress. Making a link used to be the most annoying delay you couldn't wait for in the game. But we're 8 years on, and by the time Classic was retired, the "low end phones" were 10x more capable than the phones it originally was presented on.

    Let's be honest. Classic Ingress looked like what it was. A demonstrator with simplistic functionality to provide a proof of concept and an engineer-designed interface that 'worked' but wasn't 'easy'. They improved on the original over time, replacing things like the carousel, and providing multi-key select etc. But it wasn't well organized from the ground up because it was being developed before they knew the end goal. Prime, for all it's flaws, has some major interface improvements such as the key management and capsule load/unload. It's also introduced it's own pain points, but that's software development. Nothing is perfect in the first 30 versions.

    But more than that, Unity was the choice they made for Pokemon Go as well. The Prime client shares MANY pieces of code with Pokemon Go. No-one can argue that. And that was always the goal. Harry Potter shares much of its code, though Portkey has written a lot. Catan shares many parts of its code too. The Prime client was originally written as a system for Niantic to trial new features and code before putting it into their AAA titles. That's been somewhat reduced by their decision to not use the Niantic Real World Platform servers that form the basis of PoGo, WU and Catan at least. But that was the development goal.

    It's also a worthy goal. Having reusable code and tech on each platform means that you can far more easily implement a cohesive UI that can be rolled out to each game. Kinetic Capsules in Ingress were an implementation of the Incubators in PoGo. So much so, that it was implemented by two interns, whose main job was to tweak it to work the way Ingress wanted. Essentially a 'near free' feature.

    So using Unity is a good thing. Primarily because when PoGo players complain about performance, they get paid improvements (sometimes) and those same improvements go into Ingress for free. When Catan needs a new capability unique to it, and is paid for, Ingress has the same functionality as an option available to them for a new feature.

    Prime is not perfect. But neither is Pokemon Go, the worlds highest grossing AR game. They are never going to rewrite the Prime client again (until 3.0 precedes Pokemon Go 2.0). Instead of decrying the use of Unity, if you want to see improvements, you need to get specific. Instead of saying "Make it be Redacted!" you need to make threads on the Report a Bug category, saying "This specific aspect doesn't work like I expected. I'd have expected it to do this". Get upvotes. Make Niantic see that it's important to the community. They can't work with "Throw it all out, it sucks", or "Rewrite your loss making game on a completely different platform to the rest of the company".

    If you want to make useful change, you have to give up the "Ditch Unity" refrain, because it's a point of "Never going to happen".

  • For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unity_games

    And this is just the 'notable' ones.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @starwort I don't know what you do for a living, but I've been in the software industry for over three decades.

    There is an old saying among software engineers-- "build one to throw away." The first cut at software often has many issues because we learn things as we go along. We find inefficiencies. We patch things in a hurry rather than addressing the underlying architectural issues that caused the problem in the first place. We incur technical debt. After a while the code becomes difficult to maintain and extremely difficult to extend.

    So did they have to go for a from-scratch approach? Yeah, they probably did as investment in future development.

  • starwortstarwort ✭✭✭✭✭

    Just for the record, I am saying neither "Make it Redacted" or "Ditch Unity". I'm just saying this is part of the story why Ingress has three stars on the play store and is unlikely to improve much. Choices were made - maybe they were forced choices, maybe they weren't - but a significant proportion of the player base gave up in disgust as a result. A development timescale of less than three years to parity with Redacted would surely have helped.

    The phone on which I played Ingress 1.x was a flagship phone of 2014, so yes it was a bit dated by the time Ingress Prime came out, but startup time of Ingress Prime was well over two minutes - and the first several releases of Prime crashed after 20-40 minutes' play so restarts were frequent. Whatever the reason, the user experience in those early days was terrible. I personally persevered through it, but many did not.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @starwort We're not that far apart in our opinions-- there are many legitimate criticisms to be made about Prime. I personally have significant issues with some of the design decisions that they made, and it seems to really enjoy chugging battery power even on my 2020 flagship phone. After spending as much time as they did on development and in beta the general release should have been more ready for prime time (ahem) than it was. I'm still waiting for the promised feature parity for things that I used to use on a regular basis, and for which there is no workaround in Prime.

    To be fair, Prime also has some solid improvements such as better bulk recycling and readily available power cubes.

    I was really just addressing the question of whether they had to start from scratch. The answer to that is unquestionably yes.

  • I'm just saying this is part of the story why Ingress has three stars on the play store and is unlikely to improve much.

    It might not be you, but given that a fair swathe of the renewed 1-star reviews are "Bring back Redacted", people are continuing to drag the game down simply because they don't want Prime itself.

    One is regularly renewed because the compass in Classic was better, despite the compass in Classic being broken on more than half the phones people used...

  • KonnTowerKonnTower ✭✭✭✭✭

    It would go a long way to helping get some players back by focusing on optimizing low-spec modes of ingress which open up playability to older devices and significantly reduce battery consumption. I believe Niantic's response on calling for a low-spec or "performance mode" which disables any extra animations and perhaps enables 2D instead of 3D rendering... Was they eventually want to, but it's not high on their list of priorities.

  • edited January 2021

    Please be careful with changes of big field scoring. I live in an urban area. When a really big field is set up, we coordinate about 100 agents who clean and link within minutes, so the field is up just in time for the checkpoint. We always expect opposition which is a very tense experience. You really feel responsibility if you need to have your zone free of links right on time.

    There would be no motivation to do anything like this if the reward would not be a spectacular score.

    It may be a good idea, though, to base the score on friendly portals under the field (friedly portal counts more than neutral counts more than enemy). The metric is still very similar to MU but encourages everyone to capture portals, even while they cannot link.

    (NB: Capturing portals under permafields is what allows others to throw blockers when the field falls, so you should actually do that today as well.)

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