A toxic reaction to any innovation in the game or Ingress snobbery.
I am trying to investigate an interesting phenomenon of Ingress snobbery.
Snobs who consider themselves involved in a better society, who know how it should be, have always liked to show others how to live. They ruined many good things in different areas of human existence. as an example, how many wonderful varieties of wine the world did not see, because some other eminent wine critic did not like the color or aftertaste (based solely on personal subjective preferences). and how many other things were rejected that would undoubtedly be useful to humanity?
Undoubtedly, such people who do not allow alternatives are present everywhere.
But in Ingress, snobbery has a special, pronounced form.
As soon as someone starts talking about changes in the game, a whole mountain of radically-minded agents immediately flies in, and a statement begins in the spirit of "No thanks, we don't need this" "alas, only a person with a sick mind could suggest this" "what a nightmare" "preinetic lays down this must not play the game "...
Why is it that even when the developers talk about the changes, there is always a bunch of sobs that seeks to tarnish any of their undertakings?
Developers created prime - Collapse, what have you done with the game!
Added new cursors? We didn't ask for that, why are you spoiling the game, you nasty rats?
Introducing drones into the game? - Remove this muck from the game!
They made a subscription - What are you crazy about there?
Added kinetic capsules? - again someone felt unwell.
Everything new that is offered on the forum attacks the most aggressive part of the community, which, with the persistence of an experienced schizophrenic, promotes the idea that any innovation will ruin the game. Because of this, any innovation is attacked by a lot of criticism ...
So what are we going to do, ladies and gentlemen? Will we leave it as it is or will we try to improve the game? There is a problem and it must be solved!
By the way, I won't be surprised if opponents of everything new come here again and slap me a bunch of dislikes.
Comments
I agree and disagree.
Prime - well that's been hashed over and water under the bridge now. You could write books.
New cursors. I don't mind them, complaining about them seems bad.
Drones - Could potentially cause massive damage if they are not handled well.
Subscription - I see few complaints. A few teething issues, generally positive reaction?
Kinetics - Moar please!
I think, like anything, changes will engender controversy. I think for the most part, the main backlash has been along the lines of lack of consultation with the player base, or, "Why have you done X when Y is so much more important".
We also do, have a number of people, who basically are yearning for "Ye Golden Olden Days" of massive player numbers, redacted type scanner and heave all this Poke riff raff into the Abyss.
These people are living in the past.
I do agree that the events held, where cooperation was encouraged between factions, were too much. A little of this is OK, we have IFS, but a teensy bit more on occasion? (Once a year?) But most events should be faction v faction.
I personally, hope that changes are made, with consultation with the player base and the game evolves, there is a ton of potential, we just have to enable Niantic to let it move forward. Knee **** reactions certainly need to be tempered with consideration and concern for the future.
Making a Redacted skin interface a priority when your house is on fire is certainly a waste of resources at THIS time.
I call them nostalgia dinosaurs. They live in the past, think that their time was better on everything, Niantic is evil, etc.
I agree. I have seen this behavior often. Progress is important and necessary. All innovations are designed so that you can use them, but you don't have to. There are so many ideas that often go under because these arrogant, self-proclaimed ingress kings prevent a lot.
You got a disagree because of the paragraph about wines. The fact that you can buy good wine and expect it to be good is because there are critics holding winemakers to account.
I like a lot of the innovations that have come with Ingress Prime, but Niantic have definitely been ham fisted in their approach and have not listened to their core customers. They forced Prime on us, broken and full of "improvements" nobody asked for or wanted, which alienated a large part of their loyal following. "Loyal"? I could better say "fanatical" for many of the players I knew who no longer play.
I agree that Prime is now better than the original scanner in many respects (although the graphics and text are still a problem, particularly for people with visual impairments). However, poor customer relations have created a bad feeling among many players.
Of course there are players who don't like change and will decry every new thing in a game that they like. But in the case of Ingress this has been amplified by the feeling that Niantic lost touch with the player base, so now every thing Niantic does is wrong and if they do something right it was an accident. I'm not saying I agree with these players, but I understand why they feel this way and a large part of the blame can be laid at Niantic's door.
Looking back at my post above, on reflection I feel it only shares part of what I wanted to say. When I say that Niantic were "ham fisted" and that a lot of the blame for the way players feel is down to them, I am mostly referring to history and when Prime was pushed out. It's interesting that we had a community manager in those days!
Recently I feel like we are getting much more interaction and response from people like @NianticBrian and @ofer2 In addition, we have just been given a way to view uniques, which was my most desired improvement to the game. It was a nice touch that @NianticBrian went and responed to several of the feature request threads asking for this.
So my overall view is that there are many disgruntled current and former players, and this is largely down to Prime and how it was released. In recent times Niantic staff have shown a willingness to listen and respond, which is a positive step. Some of these disgruntled players will never return, some may be won over eventually, but hopefully the positive direction will make the game more attractive to new players.
EDIT: one more example of Niantic listening is the change to the numbers for the Scout Controller badge. I was among the people who moaned and complained about the numbers required for onyx ("Scout Controller Badge tier requirements ridiculously high" was my thread), and they did two things: they brought the numbers down a bit and they added volatile portals which give extra points. Each change was small, but together they bring the medal down from "just about impossible" to "really tough but attainable". The fact that portals scout controlled are now marked on intel will make it logistically simpler as well.
Honestly, because there are a lot of ideas people throw out, and 90% of them are bad or not well thought out.
But there are also good ones which people look at, can't find controversy in, and say nothing then move on. If you want to find good ideas and bump them up, look for the ones where no-one said negative things about them. They're out there.
We also do, have a number of people, who basically are yearning for "Ye Golden Olden Days" of massive player numbers, redacted type scanner and heave all this Poke riff raff into the Abyss.
I yearn for "Ye Golden New Days" where the player base recovers, while using Prime, walking their VR gear in multiple purchased Kinetic Capsules, with their +500, +1000 or +2000 item tiered subscriptions, while fighting Redfection and racking up their sweet Submission Credits for all the approved portals they're submitting, as they head to an XFac BBQ in the park.
I agree here. The lack of consultation, poor client and broken 'promises' generated most of the ill will.
Things surrounding communication have always been poor and the Prime release was the straw that broke the camels back for a lot of players. Many critical parameters were 'demanded' by players and not implemented for whatever reason.
At least now, we have a usable scanner, with some great new features. It still needs work and is abysmal in sunlight but it is MUCH better than at release time.
The best news recently is the subscriptions and the new XM Ambassador program should hopefully improve the two way conversation.
While Niantic hasn't been perfect and has made multiple Ingress decisions I don't agree with, they don't deserve the treatment they get from the community. Can they improve? Most definitely. They should be a lot better than how they have been for a while now. But they do not deserve to be bashed so much on the Internet for everything they do. It's really an Internet phenomenon which extends beyond Niantic and Ingress. Talking trash and insulting people or an organization is much easier on the Internet when you don't have to face someone while you do it. The major problem which Niantic might be facing is, proper feedback is lost among these purely negative, garbage comments. It just makes their job so much harder and if we as the community want to help them provide a good service for the game we love, we should refrain from that type of commenting.
People comment because it’s something they’re passionate about. They also don’t forget. They also realize this is a two way street. I’ve only been playing Ingress for 3’ish years and I’m frustrated with the lack of communication, I can only imagine for someone who has stuck it out for all 8. I hope they can hire someone soon to help with that communication, I also hope they can take a better look at what they’re actually communicating about. I’m not interested in non-answers, vague responses or straight up sweeping stuff under the rug and hoping we’ll forget. Because I’ve seen quite a bit of that in these 3 years as well.
It's interesting looking at Brian's like/disagree ratio on different posts. When controversial features or events are announced (looking at you, Eos Protocol), his announcement posts have plenty of downvotes. Most often, when he (or ofer2) make clarifying posts, the like ratio is crazy high! Sure, this shows the high number of "Knee-j3rk Nancies" but it also shows how hungry people are for communication from the Ingress team.
I feel like a middle schooler saying this, but I agree with so many of the previous comments. The angry mob seemed to really grow as communication shut down after dear Krug stepped out. Many people (including myself) grew bitter as communication slowed, but hope grew with every forum post by Brian or ofer2, though they were way too few and far between. The Ingress team has really painted themselves into a corner over the last year, but hopefully the paint has dried and they're looking to step out after the recent feature launches *and their communication around them*.
I'm not sure the mob has been "snobbish", I just feel we haven't been given much of a reason to trust the Ingress team until recently.
Yes, some people are hugely invested in the game. (Either via time spent, money/equipment etc).
For instance, I think Hong Kong Res used to have a dedicated operations office, manned 24/7. People have spent $1000s on BGAN, antennas, fuel etc.
It's a lot less now, but I think part of the stink was caused by real fear from people that the social/friend network, indeed, their whole way of life could be ripped away from them.
I went through a bad period for about a year. I threw myself into the game mostly as a distraction to the worries I had in real life. It really helped me. I could not affect the bad things happening but at least Ingress took my mind off it at least for periods of time and relieved stress. (Luckily bad thing went away).
It's not a toxic reaction to any innovation. It's a toxic reaction to dumb innovations. Like the ones you mostly propose, for example (and this statement is backed up by arguments in every such topic...or was, until people got bored).
Can you state any examples?
There are plenty of people who are passionate about Ingress and don't become toxic every time there is something new in the game which they don't like or want. I did mention that Niantic has not been great at managing the game or at communicating with the gamers lately. It can be very frustrating to deal with that, yes. But if we want a better game, we need to communicate our feedback better too. If we don't, we are not making the game better but adding to any problems which already exist.
I just have one line to describe that line of thinking. "I think something might be stupid, so let me do something which is definitely stupid in return".
Sure.
Here is a typical example of snobbery. The person collected several of my topics and, without specific justification, called everything proposed stupid, and did not even manage to explain why it was stupid. More and more often I see extremely radical people on this forum for whom even the slightest rearrangement of buttons in the menu can cause a nervous attack close to a panic state.
How many people shouted - Why do we need drones ??? Take away this abomination. Or, for example - Beacons are Pokemon mechanics, remove this piece of something! Tell me how to work in this mode for developers? Is Brian pleased to read that every innovation is smeared with verbal excrement?
The community is interested in changes. It wants to update the game and innovations in it. And I can't understand why in every chat one can hear "eh ... the game is not developing, there is no new content" and at the same time there are constant activists on the forum, whose agents do not want anything new.
I have a question for you. What did you suggest as innovations for the development of the game?
Yeah, just I thought you're mistaking the purpose of this discussion. It's not only about new suggestion or ideas, but actual changes in the game, like drones, subscription, prime, bb, etc, toxicity from old-school players complaining that 'Niantic is evil and ruining the game with upgrades".
The community can propose some weird ideas in a discussion, but that doesn't mean it will be added to the game. The community is a place for discussion, instead of just saying I don't like it and hitting the disagree button, maybe you should try to argue a little bit, with better arguments rather than just "it's ruining the game, back in my that it was better, we didn't need this, etc"
There was one time I witnessed an agent telling that back then we're the real game, because they didn't had capsules and glyph for more, they had to drop the keys in the ground to farm, as if this was a good thing, an that the new players got everything baby spooned in the mouth...
I don't have to. I suggest you to look at over 30 bug reports of mine instead.
@GreenVam
to be honest, you're making an interesting point, but your examples do not help to prove it. Except for Prime, the features you listed were not radical, added some fun to the game, and had positive feedback, more or less
Prime - the old engine was discontinued, agents did understand that. Prime came out with bugs (like, gray portals were hard to notice - which was fixed later; or the COMM messages feed resets all the time - not fixed, still #1 bug). It also did not work on old phones. It's way better now, but it deserved the criticism.
New cursors - I can see agents using these here and there, no uproar
Drones - as long as they do not break the game (no keys from hacks, etc.) - no one is really against it. I know many people who enjoy drones. (Personally, I would like drones to use fireworks, maybe this will come one day)
Subscription, kinetic capsules - agents asked for that, honestly can't see where did you find "what a nightmare" reaction
Now, you somehow missed new features which faced *real* criticism:
Portal scans - this feature slows down the pace of the game. It makes agents look dumb. You cannot see how the results are used. It was improved over time, it might be useful "later", yet still not clear how it is a good innovation. Speaking in "snobbery" terms - if it becomes part of the actual gameplay (like Brian mentioned in one of comments, think of a hidden cache, you need to sneak behind the portal with your camera to grab an item) - do you want it to be part of ingress?
"Niantic social" - it exposed agent names and such, and agents were concerned about privacy. This feature was taken down and half-fixed (still exposes player level, still no way to turn it off).
Beacons - this one is interesting. People can't gather because of covid, so it cannot be used as intended. Wait and see.
So, want to dig deeper into snobbery - use portal scans as an example)
Just a correction, for our location anyway - Most locals did understand the Redacted engine was gone and we were forced- they just didn't like the new client and thought they had been ignored in their complaints. Plus the bugs.
The problem is not that we have something in the game or that we don't. The problem is different. Many people have lost the atmosphere they used to have. With the addition of a piece of bread, a cool car, a bunch of funny beacons supporting various ideological movements or memes ...
Imagine James Bond ****.ing magic bubbles riding a pink unicorn? The situation is the same here. Drones are not finished, and there are a lot of game mechanics too, but inside there are many things that should not be in serious secret agent games.
Niantic is taking lessons learned in some of its other titles and trying to incorporate them in some way into Ingress. It's not always pretty but its innovate or stagnate. This resistance (ha) to change isn't going to help in the long run. The game has changed and will continue to do so. Redacted is gone, and we can only reminisce about the "good old days". Not everyone is going to agree and many will continue to lament its passing, but I personally am open to new changes and excited to see where things go. The new portal filter update has me excited to get out again and explore, now that I can plan it out better.
Some people will always find a way to be toxic about anything. Best to ignore it.