Recruitment Medal
So upon returning to Ingress I've gotten my gf and best friend playing with me. The rate that they're going, if the recruitment badge was still around, I'd have 2 ticks towards that medal.
I assume it was disabled due to the fact people were probably making multiple accounts just to work towards the medal. Will there be any chance to see this medal reworked in the future? I like it when I bring up Ingress in conversation as people are genuinely curious most of the time.
Word of mouth can definitely travel and get some newer players in, been seeing some newer agents too popping up in my activity feed lately too which is refreshing.
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This topic has been brought up several times but the only replies are "not in out near plans".
I'd like to see it back too.
Personally I think Recruiter in combination with the Verified badge in some form which (Im guessing now) had the intention "one player one account" to mitigate multiple account registration.
Another argument in favor is that Ingress really needs new players right now. Phasing Recruiter out probably made sense once the game was expanding on its own (or via cross-recruitment from other games), and you didn't really need active recruiters. (I am of course setting aside the implementation and maintenance issues, which were obviously part of the picture.) But at this point, we need to grow the player base. The Recruiter badge was a tool for that before, and could be again. It both incentivizes recruiting, and signals to the player base that this is something that should be encouraged. Folks tend to respond to both sorts of encouragement.
Of course, if one really wants that to be successful, the best way is probably to bring back REDACTED and make it available only to those with codes from current players. ;-) (In seriousness, though, that's how I got my badge: by handing out codes in the Last Days of REDACTED to new players who were interested in the game but didn't want to be stuck with Prime. Now we are all here in Osiris node, and REDACTED among the lost treasures of the 1218 universe. Alas, for the days now gone by....)
its hard grow the game any good as long as the google playstore rating is still only 3.5 last i checked...
Nevermind, looks like Niantic decided to recruit agents by themselves posting cyouts in Twitter.
I'd say someone is overpaid...
Recruiter was a VERY poorly thought out badge and should have 100% been shut down the way it was structured.
You had to tell someone to give you their email address, and then send them an email, and then they had to sign up with that email in order for you to get credit. The overwhelming majority of agents who had that badge in higher numbers either signed up bots or paid a service for recruiter points; some botmasters got onyx just 2-3 days after it came out.
You know how most people get into Ingress? They hear about it, go to the App Store or the Play Store, and download it. THE END.
How recruiter should have worked is simple. An agent starts playing, and they can enter in the agent name of the agent(s) who recruiter them, and submit it. The mentoring agent gets credit, and the new player never needs to give our their email address, etc.
This also handles for a situation where you tell a friend about the game, they start playing, and you've already missed your recruitment window because they signed up and started playing on their own. Or when 2 agents recruit their mutual friend into playing.
Or heck, do it like Go does. Pokemon GO recently introduced a referral program with referral codes that players can share and enter. Both parties get a few boni, and the new player (or a returning player that hasn't played for 90+ days) has 72 hours to enter the code, so no need to have it at hand right at the start.
Not sure if we need to be on the new servers for that, but I imagine the code for the client at least is already there.
@thesolo Meh. Sure, it could have been done better, but it was better than nothing. And having to give out one's email address is not world-ending: they generally aren't secret, and it's pretty trivial to create a new address if one is needed for special applications. I agree that the code system referred to by @InvestigateXM (or something of the sort) would be better, but demanding the perfect at the expense of the not-too-bad is a sure recipe for having nothing at all. (With Niantic, at least.)
It wasn't "not too bad", it was straight-up terrible. The tiering was bad, the system was bad, the email spam to your contacts list was bad. If anyone signed up without using an email referral, the opportunity to get a tick was gone forever.
The only people who ever earned the highest tiers on this badge were:
1) Botmasters, multi-accounters, and people who paid for bot network sign-ups.
2) People who took advantage of their profession to gain recruits, i.e. teachers making their students all sign up and play for a day as part of an exercise, or asking/paying their clients to make an account and quickly getting them to level 3 for the referral.
It did not happen organically, and it did not result in long-term additions to the player base, which is what Niantic wanted. It was an awful badge trying to prop up an even more awful system, and it rightfully belongs in the scrap heap.
Best part about the Recruiter badge? It wasn't retro active. So all of those invites we sent out back in the day, before the game was open, didn't count one bit. Even those who got the Eve badge didn't get the credit (granted the eve badge was just as bad as the recruiter was, most of the pictures people posted on G+ was images of the same device with a different IGN showing on it).
Well I liked the idea and the badge.
I recruited some friends to Ingress because I liked the game and wanted tick on the badge.
Some players have a sofa at home and some needs to go outside to play.
Some players live in a city and have thousands of portals in a 30 km radius and some live on the countryside and have 30 km to the next portal.
A field of a certain size gives various MU depending on where it is made.
So what if some players had advantages in the Recruiter badge,
this is the way Ingress work: we all have different circumstances and playfield for every badge.
Oh thank you, I forgot all about the fact that I have Eve and didn't get credit for 3 people when Recruiter came out. Now I'm even angrier. 😂