[Speculation] Ingress new Quest system Q1 2023
- https://ingress.com/news/2023-q1-events/
- Earn your MZFPK Anomaly medal by completing the IQTech HexQuest
Was mentioned for the March Anomaly
From this one line of text
1) We have a potentially announced location for an Anomaly
2) There is a big feature coming to the Ingress Scanner Courtesy of IQTech. Quests/Tasks/Bounties
3) The Anomaly will also have local Hexathlons in other regions
Discuss?
3
Comments
I googled that "MZFK" thing, it appears in part 4 of Kryptos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos), and means "CLOCK".
Would be cool to have decoding anomaly for a change.
or it's just another format of hexathlons...
I really hope they don't bring quests or tasks into Ingress. I play all the other games and have enough to do, but Ingress is still my passion and gets the most time on it.
Ingress was marketed as a tool, a scanner to see the world beyond what we can normally see. Adding quests only gamifies it and disassociates the Scanner as a tool to an Agent, into another one of Niantic's gaming platforms. It takes the scanner from a tool for people to use and create a world as they see fit, into another mundane 'do X 5 times' list that you only complete due to FOMO. That keeps PoGo alive as it doesn't have much else to take it forward, so it captures the attention of people with lots of events that are simple tasks to perform. Don't be an advocate for Ingress be brought down to that level, Ingress is so much more.
If you want quests, there are plenty of player made apps/systems for that; Act of Defiance, Hackvent, Ingress WWC Agent Stats, etc.
Do you have any other ideas to engage agents at this point? Especially new ones? Have you looked at the calendar for Q1? Do you think there is a reason games with daily tasks involved do well on mobile devices? I mean, realistically, sojourner is V1 of tasks for Ingress.
For me, personally, fighting for the scores each cycle doesn’t make sense in a lot of areas, my own included and frankly, I’ve found little interest in chasing it. The other medals could be worked on, but at this point, hunting down uniques will require some amount of travel. I’m looking forward to some sort of task system and have been asking for one here in the forums for a couple of years now. I think they also need to add ticketed events that one can do on their own, at their leisure. A not so unique way to earn some dollars and engage agents…
I'm much in the boat.
Besides, New players kinda expect tasks in mobile games. It keeps them hooked.
When they see Ingress doesn't have them, some have told me directly, they aren't interested in a game that doesn't have tasks.
I'll reserve judgement depending on how tasks are implemented
To engage new players, well firstly Niantic need to actually promote Ingress, then the thing that keeps people in, is the community, So have Niantic work to provide communities with the tools and enhancement needed to build up and grow communities (e.g. better or actual engagement is a start!).
The Quarter 1 2023 calendar is a joke, extremely low effort from Niantic.
Do you think there is a reason games with daily tasks involved do well on mobile devices?
The games I do play don't have or need daily tasks. Perhaps they do well in manipulating people's perception to stay in the game, rather than provide an actual engagement for a user to have fun with. On that note, I do like the Machina faction and how it works - I just hope it is faster (a lot faster!) as it currently is very boring. Making Machina quicker and more prominent would make players do more, and it wouldn't need tasks.
I don't chase the cycle points either, there's not enough competition to make it an active component of the game - now fields stay up for days, it becomes boring when there is a lack of players. What I do chase, or work on, are the badges. For me, they are the tasks and goals for an agent to achieve. To get Onyx is a long term goal that requires commitment.
Looking at the profiles of the 4 people that disagreed, they each have barely 100m AP and have a lot of gold badges each. Which tells me they've played for a bit, but not enough to really delve into what is needed for every badge. Tasks may keep you doing minimal things, but if the other games are to go by (PoGo, HPWU) then the tasks (if implemented in Ingress) would be simple and only keep you in the game to perform those tasks, they wouldn't suddenly enrich the games to make them fun, it'll just be more mundane tasks to undertake - and if complaining about the game without going for the badge goals already, then you'll realise the mundane tasks won't keep you engaged or reinvigorate life into the game either, which will lead to more complaining for something else 'new' to bring engagement or reinvigoration.
On the topic of HPWU, I was active and played every day, doing the menial tasks became a bore more than engaging. So if tasks do get implemented, change them up regularly and make them fun. Doing the same thing over and over is tedious.
Lastly, I'll swing the question around, What tasks do you want to see that would make the game fun and that you can't do already?
My guess is the IQTech HexQuest will be some form of tasks, not just create 50 fields and get the badge, perhaps they will make those hexathlons and have 5-6 objectives or something maybe.
Most casuals find the game boring with no weekly or monthly tasks, just open the game hack your daily and be done with it... no wonder the game feels like its not evolving .....
I agree with oscar, i dont want tasks/quests to plaque the scanner.
I am ok if they are special tasks like events would tell me. Get x whatever, get badge or loot (visual guideline addition on top of events we usually do in past).
Just keep it monthly or less in terms of frequency.
This is what we had when Catan World Explorers was around, the available quests were found by opening the main menu
And up to 3 icons on the left of the map scree for the active quests.
This layout wasn't intrusive.
Perhaps a similar method will be in Ingress?
Am keen to hear what everyone else thinks
Catan had better quests/tasks cauz you can level up npc friendships with em alr as well as trading, on top of special seasonal tasks
I could live with tasks similar similar to pogo where you get a small amount of kit for doing something.
I can also already hear the complaints here if they implemented something like that 😂
I think tasks and quests will be good only if they somehow reward you with CMU for completing them. But I don't know if ill pay with good game atmosphere for small amout of CMU.
There’s a few ways they could do it.
It could be tasks limited to one day, like with the Harry Potter: Wizards Unite & Pokémon GO Community Days where you earn a new avatar, or points to a badge by completing the tasks.
There’s also the option in future of paid research, but I think that’ll be a while off, whilst they get Agents used to the system at all.
I think we will have “event” tasks at some point too, themed around whatever anomaly we have, so even if people can’t attend in person they can still feel like they have contributed.
Below example from The Witcher: Monster Slayer which has themed weeks (or did).
We may go the whole way and get all three. Daily tasks, weekly tasks and event tasks.
(Examples from The Witcher: Monster Slayer , Dragons: Rise of Berk and Pokémon Masters)
As seen by the variety of games, a task based system is in a large number of titles and helps to encourage daily play and drive up numbers of daily active users.
I don’t know what I would want the reward to be for Ingress. You can see in some of these that completing tasks will give you an item/badge and completing all will grant some premium currency.
I would say I don’t want the first set of tasks to give out anything too rare, and perhaps announce ahead of time what the rewards/tasks will be if they know that far ahead?