Should adding Friends to Ingress be a thing, and have any benefits?
Another divisive topic, why not?
If you’ve used Campfire for more than a few minutes, you will have seen the Pokémon GO folks deep into the Ingress chat, posting up codes and asking to be added to players friends lists.
There’s multiple benefits (https://niantic.helpshift.com/hc/en/6-pokemon-go/faq/2847-friend-list-friendship-levels-1614900279/) of adding Friends in that game, and of course anyone you add now is a “Niantic Friend”, meaning you’re technically “Friends” with this person in any Niantic games you can play under the same ID.
Pikmin Bloom, the newcomer, lets you send postcards to these people, and also join walking (nearly a bad typo there) challenges, and get rewarded for working together with friends.
Would you want to see some kind of Friends List/Friends Benefit in Ingress?
A few I can think of;
- Challenge with some of your faction - Destroy χ amount of enemy resonators, Do χ amount of links over a week for example & then get a few rare items as a reward. There’s also the obvious walking one, which could be distance or could be KCaps brewed.
- Small AP boost, putting a resonator/mod on a Portal where a friend has placed one grants 10 extra AP (could be more at events, but nothing huge, maybe increased during things like Peace Week?), to encourage working together.
- I’ll suggest it anyways even though it’ll get me a few disagrees, but “gifts”. Send some Crate type item to a Friend, regardless of faction. These items can be placed in a KCap and brewed into a new item. However, some items may be infected with Dark XM when received from the opposing faction and slow down your KCap progress. (Say if I’m ENL, and I brew using items obtained from some RES folks (which wouldn’t be identifiable to me, only to the game), my KCap now takes twice as long for this brew.). I’m sure there’s another way of handling sending stuff to other factions, but Pokémon GO doesn’t really differ in who gets what.
Just for completion, Pikmin Bloom Friends stuff (https://niantic.helpshift.com/hc/en/23-pikmin-bloom/faq/2874-information-shared-with-others/).
Comments
Thrice. Thrice, I corrected the autocorrect of “deep” back to “seep”, and back it went again. Dang it.
I reckon even make it a fairly significant amount of AP (when over L8), but make it cap out or drop down to a small amount, would encourage more community play. There would need to be a friend limit on this feature though.
We definitely need gifts/crates, this could also open up an alternative to the much requested "souvenir" key locker with a postcard variant, Intel Reports perhaps?
Here are my remarks of the benefits :
Challenge with some of your faction - Destroy χ amount of enemy resonators, Do χ amount of links over a week for example & then get a few rare items as a reward. There’s also the obvious walking one, which could be distance or could be KCaps brewed.
(Basically a cell stat challenge of some sort or Hexathlon in a more permanent basis - but I don't think you need a friend list to have this feature)
Small AP boost, putting a resonator/mod on a Portal where a friend has placed one grants 10 extra AP (could be more at events, but nothing huge, maybe increased during things like Peace Week?), to encourage working together.
(There is in game boost where upgrading and hacking portals from your own faction which will give additional hack output, I don't think I'll be attracted have agent friends just to earn an additional 10 AP. Also what perks should Niantic give for friends with the opposing faction?)
I’ll suggest it anyways even though it’ll get me a few disagrees, but “gifts”. Send some Crate type item to a Friend, regardless of faction. These items can be placed in a KCap and brewed into a new item. However, some items may be infected with Dark XM when received from the opposing faction and slow down your KCap progress. (Say if I’m ENL, and I brew using items obtained from some RES folks (which wouldn’t be identifiable to me, only to the game), my KCap now takes twice as long for this brew.). I’m sure there’s another way of handling sending stuff to other factions, but Pokémon GO doesn’t really differ in who gets what
(I will prefer things like key souvenirs, XM collectables (which can't be used in game) or postcards like from other niantic games where you can share/showcase areas you have visited))
Thanks for your views on it. I wasn’t sure how having friends in opposite factions could be handled. I mentioned a small amount of AP, as otherwise you’d have the “old guard” kicking off that Ingress is even more “easy mode” and “back in my day we didn’t have linking under fields” etc.
I like the idea of XM collectables but that feeds too near to NFTs for me, so I don’t want to encourage Niantic down that dark road. If it is stickers like in Pokémon GO, I’m good with that
Maybe, something like the postcards as you mention, but I’d like something else.
How much AP do you think would be good? Should it go up with Friendship Levels?
There is a cap on 400 Niantic Friends, but I don’t know if that’s what you mean.
These are the questions that I ask whenever thinking about a new feature:
I'm personally not a big fan of gifting. I find the gifting mechanism in PoGo to be largely uninteresting and quite gryndy (because the forum censors that word if it's spelled with an "i".) without much in the way of rewards. If Ingress wound up with some sort of friends mechanism I think it would be better if it was something more Ingressy rather than cloning the mechanisms in other games.
Interesting way to look at it. Some do abuse the Pokémon GO gifts for sure, for XP (you could just spin and send gifts and still level up in that game without doing any of the “core” gameplay).
I like the things I get from gifts and it allows some “virtual tourism” to see where my friends have been etc.
Im not against extra friend functionality as long as multiaccounting is taken into consideration here. Ie. Difficult to abuse.
Or even familiar abuse where partners can swap back n forth.
An AP bonus might apply say if a friend links within seconds of completing a deploy for instance.
Yeah tie it to friendship levels.
You get 150% AP bonus, or a static value depending on the action. You can only gain 10/20/30/40k bonus AP per week, depending on friendship levels. But the bonus amount drops to 105-110% or much lower static value after you hit the bonus AP cap.
And I mean the bonus should only apply to around 3-5 other agents or i could realistically add everyone in my city and get a buff. So I would have "regular" friends which I can send crates or whatever, but I then select "special" friends to get extra AP from.
Adding friends to a game wherein stalking physically and virtually like Ingress is a thing? What's the next source of AP? Let me guess, the more an agent gets stalked, the higher the AP scores? Not a fan of giving a crate of items to a new agent because it encourages spoonfeeding and exploiting the game through different means.