Community Day Battle Beacon Event Feedback
I attended the Community Day event in Alexandria, VA, and based on what I'm hearing from other places it sounds like we had a better-than-average experience. We had 19 (at least) battles, about a dozen Ingress agents, the Niantic reps were visible and friendly, and we had great weather to boot.
1) Please give us scoreboards. The victory emblems only last 1 hour and the event is 4 hours long, so it's hard to keep track on our own of how many we've won/lost/tied. Having a scoreboard would change the game in terms of being able to motivate more people to show up.
2) Please give us more notice. A few days was barely enough time to get the word out locally - and with it being the holiday season lots of people already had plans. More notice would allow more participation which would in turn make the event a lot more fun.
3) Please do at least 2 simultaneous or overlapping battles. The battle was way more fun when there were 2 simultaneous battles happening - this adds a strategy element that just isn't there when there's only 1 battle happening. That said, don't stretch us too thin. It's hard to do effective portal combat as a solo agent. Ideally the number of simultaneous battles would scale with agents in the zone.
4) It would be great for you to do more cities overall - but fewer cities that are close neighbors. Locally we had one event in downtown Washington, DC and one in Alexandria, VA. These sites are 10 minutes driving away from each other, about 8 km in a straight line. In this case the vast majority of agents chose Alexandria over DC because of parking costs (the particular part of DC chosen is especially outrageous - $45 parking for 3+ hours), though other spots in DC are much more reasonable and could have been just as desirable as Alexandria. But please don't force us to choose between two such close locations.
5) Do Battle Beacon days separate from other Niantic events. I get what you were doing with having an overall Niantic community day, and that makes sense from your perspective, but these battle beacon events shouldn't be tied to the same day other Niantic events are going on. Many Ingress agents play other Niantic titles, and constantly flipping back and forth between Pokemon Go, Pikmin, and Ingress is extremely difficult - even my latest model flagship phone (iPhone 13 Pro) could not keep all 3 active at the same time reliably. It was ok because nobody was taking the portal battles too seriously, but if we were going to treat it more like a mini-anomaly it would not have been good.
Overall I had a good time. There were some glitches and performance issues, but honestly it was more smooth than the last time I can recall having more than 5 agents in a single spot. I look forward to more of these.
Comments
Regarding 5), I don't think this was intended as a "Battle Beacon day", but just a bonus to the Niantic Community Day that the Ingress team probably coordinated without much input from the main Niantic team. Honestly though, you made me think that a dedicated Battle Beacon day in different cities globally may be a cool way to get the anomaly feeling back, without it needing to be too crowded as it's not a "real" anomaly with stakes.
Regarding 2), apparently this was intended in order to keep the number of people attending to a minimum. Any longer and you have the possibility of lots of people coming in from far away.
Was this originally advertised or promoted somewhere? We had an event in town, but pretty much no one was aware until it was basically over. Would have definitely gone out to join since it's walking distance.
I know it was announced on Niantic's website, and in the Niantic Social chat. Very few Ingress-related news outlets seemed to have mentioned it.
It was also mentioned on Niantic Twitter and at least one of the player news tickers (RGNN) covered it. I assume the reason it wasn’t covered on some of the others is because the events were US-only, and also because of the very short notice (it was first announced Wednesday evening on Twitter: (https://twitter.com/ingress/status/1471273230237265920)
I had the opportunity to attend the Washington, DC event just a few kilometers away. My key takeaways: