What should niantic do to make ingress a "forever" game
Pixelbytes
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in General
Just a food for thought discussion. As we know it, niantic is determined to push ingress for many years to come.
However we do know niantic has lots of work on their hands.
So what does the community thinks niantic should do to make ingress better?
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I'm fully aware and appreciate that (game) development is hard and has challenges that we as players cannot see.
That being said, I can't fully understand why there are next to no events outside of the regular monthly ones. The current Level 8 Week event has brought out a lot of people again and has seemingly raised the mood of agents. I'm pretty sure with more events, Ingress will be more lively.
Again, there may be factors that we as players can't see, but it doesn't feel like modifying some values for a week each month is that hard. (And if a dev from Niantic sees this and this isn't the case, sorry and good luck 🙈)
Engage with their own community to start.
You don't need to apologize to them for asking them to be better.
They should be apologizing to us for abandoning the community.
In my opinion, I feel that the @NianticBrian and @NianticThia had planned to roll out the Agent Ops Task System, thereby enabling a lot more events. But plans went sideways, and outside of the Anomalies and monthly events nothing else had even been contemplated.
Along with Ethan being let go, who wad the one who organised the schedule of events.
This is where we are at.
I am hopeful that Agent Ops Task System will provide the needed system that the Ingress can use to push out more events and promote Ingress to new players who may be more interested playing PvE over PvP
I want the faction beacons back in the store! I don't want to pay 10K CMU to get my faction beacon.
I don't know what this topic is trying to get at
For everyone wanting communication on here, what will that accomplish? The same people will complain about what Niantic stated even after clarification. You want a dedicated forum person? Another person that will have to do the same thing of playing telephone to get communications from one department to another?
For a forever game, that's up to Niantic. It's their IP.
Game will no doubt be on auto pilot in its current form now I don't expect any changes, twice a year anomoly and play against a bot for badges.
So basically the past has returned?
I think machina is them trying to make a forever game because as people stop playing there's less and less competition. At least with machina there's some active competition. This way new players will see activity and continue to play. But it's definitely changing the game. It's nothing like it used to be. We have to adapt to the new game. Some will like it, some won't.
They could start playing their own game, see how it feels like.
Not fire lead developers?
They could stop beating around the brush and come up with better PoI databases to remove the dredge that is restricted access portals.
Goes against brians promise last year of more events lol idont see that really this year so much for his word meaning anything
1. The game needs a simple and understandable agent code of conduct. It should spell out the interaction of agents and niantics. Principles for the transfer of information, including secret information transmitted to agents of the faction. Also, the code should spell out the rules for interaction between agents and the main offenses for which an agent can be banned from the game. I'm tired of explaining to beginners what not to do in the game. Let there be an official instruction from Nia!
2. We need a New Faction Ideology. The old ideology, for shapers or against shapers no longer works. We need a clear description of the faction that would be official and would correspond to the plot.
3. We need a community manager who would read this forum and communicate with the players. And it is desirable that this community manager himself be a player in our game.
4. We must keep up with the times. All modern games have major updates with a mountain of content at least once a year, so why shouldn't our game get such a rule?
5. We need a scanner redesign. The old scanner was much more functional than this, 80s style neon misunderstanding.
It is true there are a group of bad players that treat others terribly in every region. That's never changed. It's a human flaw that Niantic cannot address. I tell people to just call the authorities when they are being followed and not engage with them. But most people just stop playing because it's just not worth the hassle. I get it. Other games have less visibility because they don't have a comm system so they can play without being chased down and yelled at. Comm gives away location and it's both important to the game and detrimental at the same time. The game doesn't exist without it and with it enables those players to run others off. This is the reason most players walk away from the game and why I believe it will not become a forever game. When everyone quits there's no reason to keep supporting it. The bad agents ruin it for everyone.
Yeah, this basically.
We had a good flow going for events last year and then it just seemed to fall off a cliff, and go back to just IFS, SS and an anomaly each month.
There also needs to be a hook. Some way of getting new people playing and keeping their interest. A reason to get other people to play that you know too.
Features that got started (FitRep, AgentOps etc.) need to be finished up and then be celebrated.
Having an anomaly each season is great but what does it mean for those who can’t attend? I’m thinking about in their other game where they have Seasons, and different bonuses or focuses in those seasons. We could have a Season where you get boosted Capsule drops from hacks, sell a Capsule badge in the Store, have a forum post asking “What’s in your capsules?”, and then change next Season to Shields or something.
Having an anomaly each season is great but what does it mean for those who can’t attend?
To be honest, it used to be nothing. Remote recharging is nice but I feel like something could be added that is more than connected cells. Whatever they were trying with Agent Ops had a bad distribution for points it seemed. I mean regardless of points, the percentage of offsite versus onsite is going to be the decision maker. Anomalies had leaderboards, the same could be applied to offsite.
Hex Ops was nice as an inbetween. Second Sunday I'm just dead with it being missions (the missions api needs love). x2 Tuesday it's still hot for my area as much as I want to use it to an advantage (115 heat index last week).
There has to be more there. Machina Mondays? I can hate machina and Mondays in unison! 🤷♂️
Taken from my thread here: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/comment/188680#Comment_188680
Instead of new player focus, instead engage stagnant agents with Ingress seasons instead of using years as the metric. Season 1, season 2, season 3, etc. Take a look at League of Legends or any competitive ranked PvP video game for examples. E-Sports has a pretty solid way of keeping players engaged, Niantic just isn't doing it quite right.
At the beginning of each season, all agents get reset to level 1 and no stat medals, forcing some level of regular play to climb back through levels and obtain bronze/silver/gold/onyx action badges for the season(no, each season badge/AP requirements wouldn't be the same as today's long AP/badge grind, it would be balanced out). You can still have all-time badges/levels to track, but these would be secondary and not directly visible in the main page of a player's in-game card.
Season anomalies - There are different tiers of event participation(badges):
Bronze = global objective participation.
Silver = remote recharge rooms/cell-scoring participation.
Gold = in-person participation.
Bonus onyx/recursion style flair borders for any of the bronze/silver/gold medals you earn = Your faction won the anomaly event overall.
GORUCK: Offer cash prizes for teams/individuals competing in GORUCK and provide an additional medal border for their efforts. Use GORUCK as your E-Sports videos on-site at anomalies, defeating physical challenges to provide their digital teammates with bonus intel/benefits. You might be able to rope the fitness crowd into the game by doing this? I believe this was explored as an option during the Osiris series, but we should really be putting anomalies on twitch and other streaming/video platforms to drive social media. Niantic should host both factions in a facility and show both the faction planning/op rooms in a "mission command" type backdrop.
Higher levels of anomaly participation such as recharge/in-person should require an agent acquires both a certain number of season action badges AND/OR (open to debate) a certain number of attended player-based or Niantic-based community events (either in-person or remote) during the season. This would allow a sort of social currency to be developed and constantly replenished. Players hosting successful events regularly should then be rewarded by Niantic when it comes to titles like Vanguard, XM Ambassadors, faction point-of-contacts, free CORE subscriptions, etc. and be given additional consideration/fast-traacking for support tickets related to community problems. This would also help to build a sort of social scoring into each player's personal profile which could be utilized as a sort of vouch system, helping combat spoofing and other sorts of bad actors we all deal with.
Going back to talking strictly about agent stats, I would want to see player cards change in-game. Players could still have some tracking of all-time stats on their own and we would keep an all-time level and recursion status pegged to the existing 40mil AP standard, but agent effort viewed in player profile badges in the game should primarily reflect recent actions, not a blanket all-time tracker. There are quite a few agents out there who max out and then "rest on their laurels", sitting by the fireside controlling chats and talking about how good it was back in the day. When I click on a player card, I want to see this:
Top of agent card: Name, current level, and a small section where they pick a few badges/achievements to feature that are their favorites. Good place for bragging.
Section 1: show the last 3 seasons' worth of medals (bronze/silver/gold/onyx), max level obtained in the seasons, and each season's AP. I should quickly be able to figure out how active a player has been, what stats they get the most of, and if they have gaps in their play history (last 3 seasons). Provide a "see more" button to lookup a player which opens a web link to their profile, which has additional stats for all seasons, all-time stats, more in-depth loadout of stats (maybe like agent-stats?). Let people compare themselves to other players in graphs and standard distribution charts but don't bother putting all this into the game client. This top section would mean you could eliminate or hide the mess of stat tracking at the bottom of our profiles, or maybe make it a separate screen/web only. Maybe lock the advanced statistics tracking lookups to core subscribers only? (Let them pay for the extra database queries!)
Section 2: Bona-fides: Chronological badges of anomaly events followed by chronological badges of special events. Additionally, we should put FS/SS event participation in here in a meaningful way.
Section 3: Bio-card badges: Make it so every bio card is collectable, not retired. Make it so only certain bio cards are available for purchase during certain times of the year, and/or after someone has completed a significant milestone in their player development(all-time badges). It should be financially and logistically tenable for new players to obtain all bio cards in 3 years worth of time-in-grade, without forcing them to shovel out an exorbitant amount of cash. If you want, maybe make it so players who bought older/multiple bio cards of each character could choose which one to display as their primary when their player card is seen by others. Take a look at how League of Legends has playable characters, but each character has customizable skins that look different that players can pick.
Section 4: non-bio card badges: Holidays, fun badges, silly badges, etc.
Section 5: Mission badges
Except there is alot less activity with machina? You've made your point that you like machina but many people really don't and should be heard.
"Again, there may be factors that we as players can't see, but it doesn't feel like modifying some values for a week each month is that hard. (And if a dev from Niantic sees this and this isn't the case, sorry and good luck 🙈)"
How about for an hour each Tuesday? 🙃