How would you feel about paid “special research”? Time limited or not?
PkmnTrainerJ
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The “Special Research from NIA/K/Klue/PAC” has been batted around a lot (mostly be me) as a way of getting people to play daily and having something else to do/aim for during play.
I really hope it’s considered and comes in Year 11 at the latest. It makes a lot more sense in the context of Agents working to see what’s wrong with the Portal Network etc.
It helps out in the other game whispers Pᴏᴋéᴍᴏɴ GO and allows for players to have more to do. Sometimes in that game you have a “ticket” to buy to get you extra research which comes with extra (sometimes exclusive, at least for a while) rewards. Typically these can be purchased and then completed whenever.
In the most recent one however, you can spend £1 or £4.49 on two separate special task lists but if you don’t complete them by a certain date then you don’t get the final rewards. Some players of the game feel a bit put out by this (then again, some of those players complain that you have to walk, in a game where exploration is one of the main things so 🤷) and I wondered how Agents would feel about it.
Comments
The vanity medals for 2500 CMU would be perfect for such Special Research. Instead of simply buying it for the profile, you actually have to do some tasks beforehand for it. Some people criticised that you could just get them without any effort, so those people would also be satisfied.
Having something paid expire without rewards doesn't sit right with me though. If Niantic doesn't want that people can hold the Research for forever, when it expires, it should still award the medal automatically. You therefore either have the choice of working through the tasks and getting the medal early, or you just wait until it expires, which would however take a while.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Ingress basically has its own built-in goals by virtue of competition and playfield control. Other games are basically doing the same repetitive tasks over and over for personal gain, and they seem to need more motivation to keep people playing. In Ingress they'd be significantly limited by the tasks they could assign... imagine living in an area that is fully controlled by your faction and being assigned the tasks of capturing ten portals. What are you going to do, flip and burn portals to get captures?
This is probably the biggest thing people forget when they compare Ingress with other games...
In Ingress, everything you do (apart from hacking) affects what other can do.
Giving tasks (and even the couple of challenges we get) is heavily dependant on what other around you do.
Or how about two tiers. One for the paid tier, and a higher tier for completing the research. My only issue is in game currency can't be used for paid research in pogo, so I wouldn't like that model in ingress.
Ivw flipped and burned level 8 portals belonging to my own faction to complete missions.
@grendelwulf If I came across a mission that required that I'd pick a different mission.
For the paid badges mentioned elsewhere... I won't buy them because I'm not interested in having any badges on my profile that I didn't earn. I would certainly consider them if they required some level of effort in addition to throwing some coin Niantic's direction.
The “Special Research from NIA/K/Klue/PAC” has been batted around a lot (mostly be me) as a way of getting people to play daily and having something else to do/aim for during play.
Has anyone from Niantic ever said anything about it?
CMU rewards in Ingress would flow very differently to Pokemon Go, because there, it's a teaser for things they expect you to buy, but in Ingress, there's a majority of the group actively attacking any hint that using real world cash would in some way confer an advantage, while also paying thousands a year for fuel, sat modems, overseas trips and the like.
Until the mindset of players is that Ingress is a game worth paying for, not a game they're entitled to things aren't going to change in the monetary sense, and Niantic making it easier to not pay will simply encourage that, and providing more options to "exclusive only if you pay" will trigger that outrage.
The only way this would work, is to have a bounty board system/quests
Which is fairly typical of games today
It is just one of myriad of features devs might add to Ingress, one day
You can earn badges by paying for them. Also flip and burn is the only option when a mission is part of a series.
The hardest part is the research would have to be actions that don't make agents have to do actions that affect their own team. I always think of actions you can do to progress with missions and even then there's a limit if you impose actions such as mods or upgrades. However, at the same time we have events that can either mitigate these actions.
This is perhaps the hardest part for Niantic because the easiest option would be improving your own stats like EOS Protocol. That's perhaps the only way "research" objectives would perhaps work.
I can't believe that Ingress Prime is even considering copying the special time research mechanics in PoGo. More paid chores to do for questionable rewards. #Desperate
I can't believe that Ingress Prime is even considering copying the special time research mechanics in PoGo
They're not. Players are suggesting it.
Do we think something like that will attract new agents or keep others around? That’s the question. I think Ingress would be foolish to not at least test it out. Keeping the game more or less the same as it’s always been is not a good way to keep the game alive. I know some of the OG agents cry tears anytime something new happens or change occurs, but it’s obvious Ingress needs some help as it’s limped along in the shadow of its glory years…
Honestly, unless the Ingress store is meant to be a lot more worthwhile and Agents stop complaining about the idea of funding the game they play for hours every week, this is more of the same "I don't want to pay for the game, give me a way to get the good stuff for free" which is endemic of the monetisation issue.